Fruits of Recycling

[Luc Gilgemyn]

Nice work David !
It must feel great to have a brand new patch like that ready to be planted up
Dont forget to show us the result next year !

[David Nicholson]

Thank you Luc.

[Armin]

I also used my summer holidays to change a part of my garden. I've expanded my terrace by a wooden construction to meet our space requirements.
Unfortunately I had to sacrify the old "habitat" and some area from my crocus lawn .

I reused previous collected sand stones and new ones from a house demolition to build the new, larger wall. I refilled the free space with the old loamy soil as fundament and added a new mixture of sand and compost on top (20-40cm).

Pictures show status before and after the renovation and the bulb harvest.

We wondered how many bulbs have grown/spread on only 3.5m². My wife helped me with the utmost care to dig out the bulbs within almost a half day of hard work. The loamy soil was partly hard like a stone!
I hope the new soil will much better please the crocus corms which remained generally quite tiny.

Finally, last Sunday I could close part one of the project, finished after ~1.5 weeks of work, sweat and hefty back paines! But the result pleased us - there is much more room now for bulbs expansion

Part two will be started in early winter to remove some weed scrub and replanting of roses.

[David Nicholson]

Looks very nice Armin. I'm not showing your pictures to my wife in case she gets ideas about decking.

[David Shaw]

I like the idea of David's in forming pockets for individual bulbs.
When we were in Kirkwall a couple of weeks ago we visited the garden behind the Orkney Museum (sorry, I cann't remember the actual name of the house). This house used to belong to a Mr Traill from the early 1800s who was very likely part of the family of Clementina Traill, wife of George Forrest.
The point of this story is that in the garden we found a construction much like Davids but significantly larger, domed up to about three feet high and with many, many pockets. Perfect, I thought, for displaying individual alpines in their own soil mixes and aspects. We spoke to the gardener who told us that th structure had been built about 20/25 years ago - but never planted up. What a shame. I could just imagine the Traills, who were collectors in their own rights, using it to grow their own collections 200 years ago.