Quince Bed

A weekend of hard work has meant that we now have a new flower bed. We planted the quince in June last year, and covered as much of the rest of its future bed with plastic, weighed down with branches. There's a photo from earlier this year, in April, when we dug the bed in front of this one, for sweet peas.

Sweet pea bed, with quince bed behind (© Ian 2013)

Yesterday, we removed all the branches (replacing that pile behind the orange bag in the photo above, which has now been chipped: it's a Sisyphean task!), and lifted the plastic. It's mostly done its work: the grass under the plastic was dead and largely decomposed. We hadn't put plastic all the way up to the quince—I can't remember, now, whether we ran out of plastic, or didn't want to stop water reaching the quince.

Either way, some turf remained. The mattock head once again proved invaluable, and I cut off the turf and started digging over the bed yesterday. I got about a third of the way through, having started after chopping a load of firewood, and left the rest for today.

It took six hours of work today, while Liz weeded and tidied, but I've now dug over the whole bed, removing about five barrow-loads of stones, and a five foot metal pole (no idea what it once was).

The long border is looking greatly improved from Liz's tidying, as are the two beds along the septic tank, and the whole kitchen garden.

Having readied the bed, we then planted out most of the heucheras that we've had waiting (about eighteen of them); two of the purple stemmed sarcococca; the physocarpus ('Lady in Red'), elder ('Black Lace'), and oak-leaved hydrangea from Ludlow market; calamagrostis (C. x acutiflora 'Overdam'), deschampsia, molinia, and achillea from RHS Tatton Park; and thirteen of the stipa we grew from seed last year.

Many of these will probably be split, in a year, and/or moved around, to build up the planting in the copse beds below it, and the colour wheel above it, but for now they make a pretty range of colours.

New planting in the Quince Bed (© Ian 2013)