Regular readers will know from my last blog I had an away game last week with some gentle lopping and topping in Graeme Walkers garden. This week it was time to catch up with the log jam of work in my own garden. Even better, Saturday was a nice day in which to get stuck in and I had the help and supervision of two keen and interested local ‘posties’! (How many of you know the folk law connections?)

I first ventured to the end of the garden to bury the large logs I mentioned dragging there in a recent blog. This didn’t take long and no sooner had I back-filled the holes when one of my little supervising friends appeared. Unfortunately, I was not armed with a camera at the time.



I planted up around the logs with single whips of native dogwood, field maple and crab apple. I also added some non-natives in the form of a shrub willow – Salix eleagnus, a Cornelian cherry otherwise known as Cornus mass and a Snowy mespilus or Amelanchier canadensis. No sooner had I finished than the supervisor came to inspect, perching on one of the shrubs to pass judgement. This time I had my camera to hand.



Except for the Amelanchier and crab apple, I cut each of the other shrubs down low to encourage them to bush and then turned my attentions further up the garden to build my log screen. I had just begun to dig the holes and my second, slightly shier supervisor arrived, while I could hear the first warbling at the end of the garden!

 

This task was a little trickier. Some bright spark (can’t think who?) had buried some rubble beneath the matting on top of which I had laid my bark mulch. A neighbour arrived to offer some morale support and a welcome cuppa. As they were not there to defend themselves, I blamed her partner over the rubble! Suitably refreshed I was able to get on with the task in hand. The rubble will come in handy next year when I build my brown roof and for my pending Wildlife stack.

I dug a trench out bit by bit, wrestling the logs into place to form a nice curve, back filling as I went. I cut a gentle slope through them with the chainsaw, and planted the area up with a mature shrub hibiscus donated by a colleague, plus a clematis, artemesia and ornamental primulas.



While I had the saw in hand, I went and stressed the logs I had buried earlier to help kick start their rotting.

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  • Your buried wood looks great. I did a similar thing with a tree stump earlier in the summer, within a week I had a beautiful Long-horned beetle (Strangalia maculata) laying her eggs under the bark and in the splits. It’s so gratifying to be rewarded for a little hard graft.

  • Hi Graeme

    No idea where the territory boundary is - I suspect it maybe somewhere near the pond/drought garden, but I'm not down the garden long enough in this weather to see! Of course with all this snow, they may decide to build themselves a boundary wall which would make it more obvious! :o) All the best, John

  • Hi John, any idea where the demarcation between the two territories is located? Presumably it's only obvious to a Robin and not a straight line. Our two have a sort of demilitarised zone around the bird feeder, which would be ok in principle, if I didn't keep moving the pole to prevent wearing out a patch in the lawn. VBW, Graeme