The Charming Nook

Hello and welcome back to my blog! It has been a busy past two weeks here with new plants arriving, a blast of frosty and snowy weather and then storm Bert… (Yes, there was damage).

Due to the mixture of weather, I missed out on blogging last week and also took some time out. I am currently taking some time off work, so I have plenty of time on my hands to start (and try to complete) some overdue projects in the garden; I just need the weather to cooperate and the energy to get things done!

Today’s post is therefore a slightly longer one and shows you a snap shot of a few things I have been getting up to in the garden. There are a variety of other projects I will share soon.

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A blanket of snow

The middle of November brought with it a rather unexpected brief blast of frosty weather and snow:

Literally a day or two before the snow arrived, I had a large delivery of hedges and trees I ordered some time ago that finally arrived all the way from the North! This is for a big project that I will share soon…

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New climbing roses arrived

Just before the snow arrived, I also received four new climbing roses that I purchased as bare roots from David Austin weeks ago.

I was really impressed with the completely compostable packaging used throughout:

I chose the following roses:

• James Galway x2 (soft pink with ruffled petals, similar to a peony)
• Iceberg x1 (white/creamy prolific blooms with a beautiful fragrance)
• The Generous Gardener x1 (a beautiful soft peachy pink rose that I plan to plant where I can admire it from our living room window)

James Galway

The two James Galway roses will be planted on the remaining two arches in The Wild Borders. I already have a James Galway rose planted up one arch in the borders:

My best friend gifted me that first rose for my birthday last year, so I wanted to create a trio of the same rose on the arches for impact and continuity.

Iceberg

I will be removing the yellow rose in The Wild Borders and I will be planting the Iceberg rose in its place:

I will give the yellow rose a hard prune, pot it up and gift it to my best friend if she wants it, as she loves a warm colour palette. It doesn’t current work well with my desired colour palette where it is.

I will remove a large amount of soil where the yellow climbing rose was planted and I will replace it with earth from another area of the garden, mixing with some compost. This will prevent rose sickness; the basic gist of that meaning that you must not plant roses where roses have been previously growing, because they release a poison into the soil which impacts and stunts other roses grown in that same soil.

The Generous Gardener

The final rose, The Generous Gardener is going to be trained to grow up the wall on the right side of The Wild Borders, where the honeysuckle is currently growing like a hedge:

This will mimic the same style as the left side border with the three roses grown up each wall section:

Before I can do any planting, the right side border needs completely clearing of crocosmia and honeysuckle, which is a project I will be making a start on soon, weather permitting!

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As I mentioned earlier, I ordered bare root roses, so these needed potting up. Ideally, I had planned to plant the bare root roses out straightaway in the borders, but the weather and other events scuppered those plans. I therefore settled for sheltering indoors away from the cold weather and planting up the roses in pots.

I had ordered mycorrhizal fungi to plant with the new hedges and trees I purchased for the project mentioned earlier and I unexpectedly received a little package of bare root supplement with that delivery.

I left my bare root roses to soak for a number of hours in a bucket of water and then followed the directions on the supplement packet, adding that to the water.

What resulted from that was a very strange concoction, similar to wallpaper paste:

I then potted up each rose and they lived in our bathroom for a few days due to the nightly frosts. I was being overly cautious to protect the roses whilst they were freshly planted and in pots:

The roses are now outside in their pots in a sheltered position near to the house. I will need to get on with clearing their new planting positions so I can get them planted. They are all showing signs of new growth and have taken very well.

I waited until the frosts had passed and I then dumped the rest of the mycorrhizal fungi on the compost heap.

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Finally: the destruction of storm Bert…

As if I didn’t have enough to manage already, storm Bert then arrived and truly blasted the house and the garden.

That was a very unsettled night when the Mr went to visit his family and the house was battered with the wind and the rain for hours.

There was a power cut in the night and I was kept awake past 3am worrying that the windows were going to blow through due to wind being so fierce. When I finally fell asleep, I was woken on and off for hours, until the storm finally passed and everything fell quiet…

I was exhausted and ended up sleeping until late in into the morning and when I finally ventured outside, I discovered that my greenhouse had been damaged 😦

By some stroke of luck, the panels that had blown out had stayed in the garden, fairly undamaged and the majority of my young greenhouse plants had somehow held on all the way through the storm, with only a handful of pots falling down.

I spent the rest of that day reinstalling the panels to prevent further damage occuring, but I knew that I needed to carry out reinforcement repairs asap in case another storm arrived.

So I have taken the best part of the last week or so sealing up gaps with all-weather sealant and taping all joints with Gorilla all-weather tape.

The above will help with securing the panels in place, but it doesn’t solve the issue of them flexing in the first place. I will therefore be adding on some reinforcements inside to brace the panels against flexing in the wind for the future.

I have also read that dryer ventilation panels help the wind safely escape if it does find its way in. The risk to the greenhouse if wind gets in and cannot escape is that apparently the pressure can build and build until it breaks/bursts the frame itself.

Fortunately, the Mr and I bolted the greenhouse down to the concrete base very securely, so the frame itself stood strong and was undamaged. I am hoping that I can reinforce the structure enough to protect it in future storms! I may also have to consider planting a wind break to try to provide some shelter to the greenhouse… Food for thought. At the moment, my scrappy compost heap is offering some shelter at least.

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That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed finding out what I have been getting up to.

It has been a very busy few weeks here and the weather is causing some issues, but there are other people who have been much more negatively impacted, so I have been lucky to be able to repair the damage here.

I am hoping to make some major strides over the next few weeks to make Spring 2025 in the garden less labour intensive. Stay tuned to see more. Happy gardening!