Fingers crossed

I'm always keeping an eye out for plants being offered through the local Freegle/Freecycle network and last week I had a lucky find - someone wanted to get rid of a pear tree. Unfortunately, by the time I spotted the offer, the tree had already been dug up for a day - and we couldn't fetch till the next. So in this unseasonable weather, it was out of the ground (and presumably not being watered) for 3 days.
Sadly at the moment it isn't looking too well, with most of its leaves all brown and dry. I don't expect any new foliage will grow now so all we can do is water it and hope for the best.

Free additions

A couple of additions to the garden this week. No, I've not been raiding the 'reduced' shelf at the garden centre! These were totally free as it's the time of year for splitting huge clumps of perennials and finding new homes for the spare bits.
First a friend called round with a hosta. Compared to the ones on offer in garden centres, this is huge! We have such a lot of problems with slugs and snails that I think I'll keep it in the pot, raised slightly on bricks and hide slug pellets underneath.








Then I saw day lily roots being offered on Freecycle - and only a short way down the road, on the way to the allotment. This was huge clump of roots that I didn't think to photograph till I'd planted most of them! This is maybe a third of them. I've spread them out in different places around the garden so hopefully one spot at least will suit them.

More redesigning and loads of free bricks

With my plans for re-structuring the garden, we'd expected to have to buy more slabs or bricks - so when 'lots of bricks' were offered on Freecycle, we asked for them. There were rather a lot!

And some nice shaped cobbles for edging or circular features.

The task then was to decide how best to use them - and to clear them from the patio. This is step 1 - a small paved area by the repositioned bench. It's not quite finished off because a rhubarb root is in the way and I don't want to move it at this time of year.

 We now need to make a path through the flowers to the lawn instead of walking through and crushing them.

Step 2 - finding out how many bricks will be needed to replace the path to the greenhouse which was made of old broken slabs.

checking the width of the new path

Step 3 - and at last the fundamental design of the new garden falling in to place - I'm using some of the remainder of the bricks to mark out two arcs either side of the main path. Inside the arcs will be small annual flowers and plots for growing veg seedlings. Outside are larger or perennial plants -on one side foxgloves and a wigwam of mangetout peas, and on the other the rhubarb.