Gardening Diaries- Early May/Rose Planting, Topiary Trimming - A Night Time Tour of my Secret Garden

Hello everybody, welcome back to my channel. It's really nice to see you again. I'm sorry I haven't been here for a couple of weeks, there's been a lot going on. I've had a lot of gardening to do in between the rainstorms and it really has rained a lot. So I thought what I'm going to do in my videos from now on, not all of them but I'm going to do some special ones, but for the majority of them I thought I'm going to call it the gardening diaries because I was trying to work out how I could make a theme for each video and it's been quite difficult. Do I need to do this? Do I need to do a tour? Do I need to do a certain topic? I thought well actually I do a lot of things all the time. So what I thought I'd do is call it gardening diaries and at the beginning of each gardening diary there'll be a picture of the diary you've seen at the beginning of this one. And that will be the format of it and I'll show you what I've been doing during the week or two weeks, depends how long I get between filming videos and that. So we'll see how it goes. I'm going to put different things into it, it's a variety of stuff. And then I thought I'd also make some special videos now and again because you know there's certain times of the year things look really nice. So we've had the tulips recently which have been beautiful. So I'm making a video of that and I've also made a video about the bluebells around here because there's a lovely wood about five miles away and it's absolutely carpet of blue. It's absolutely stunning and beautiful and I don't think it happens all over the world that does it. So if you're in different countries to England you probably really enjoy seeing that and I know I would enjoy seeing something different from your countries too. So I hope you'll enjoy this video. There's clips of me doing this and that and rosary planting as well which I filmed earlier. There's also views around the garden, garden on the night time. What else have I been doing? Yeah I've been doing some topiary, clipping the tree outside the door here and I've got my little ivy topiary, I've been cutting that as well. Yeah so I really hope you enjoy watching and I thank you so much for subscribing, being my friends all around the world. It's lovely to hear your comments and read them. So I hope you'll be able to share this with your friends and I really hope you'll enjoy watching. So thank you again and happy gardening. Here I am about to top down the rose which has been in the garden for about 10 or 15 years. It's a rose called James Galway, a climber. Pink fluffy flowers but not much scent. Really beautiful but unfortunately this situation was causing it to develop rust and every summer it would drop all of its leaves and look really bare and sad. So here I am digging out a hole for the new rose. The old one's gone to live at the old manor house. Unfortunately when you put a rose where a rose was before there's a disease called rosary plant disease and it's a real problem because if I was to plant this rose straight into the soil again where the one was before it would not establish and I've done it before and it didn't work. So what we do is we use a cardboard box and in that box we put fresh soil, compost, manure to help the rose establish and this way it's not in contact with existing soil and by the time the cardboard box has rotted the plant will be established and it will continue to thrive and do really well. And I had this before with the another rose in the garden which sat there for two or three years and just did nothing. So I dug it up, replanted it and now it's absolutely doing really well. It's full of flowers and life. Here I am with a new rose. This one's called Rambling Rosie and it came from David Austin Roses. It was a bare-rooted plant and they're often quite a lot cheaper if you get bare-rooted but they're only available in winter and spring. It comes in a potato starch bag which you can compost which is really good and just checking to see the roots are healthy and all the buds are ready to burst into life. So now the rose is going into its box. I'm going to put some fresh sterile soil around it which has been bought from the garden centre and I've also got some well-rotted manure from the old manor house and I'm just mixing them together and this will give it a really really good start. Well as you can see the rose has gone in and we're left with an ugly fence and I didn't know what to do for quite a while and I thought, I know, I'll get some willow trellis and stick it on there with some screws and things. So I'm fastening it on here and I'm making some marks and I've put some lats across as well. That just supports it so it doesn't fall down and it kind of gives it a bit more interest and so just putting the bottom one on there and just make sure it's level, the spirit level, so it kind of looks okay. It's not too crucial though and when that's all on the fence will be screened and the rose will have something to climb on and in front of the trellis you won't be able to see very well but there are some wires going across the whole length of the fence and that will also support the rose but when the willow starts to fail, which it will do in due time, the rose will be able to cling onto that as well and it'll be well established. And so here we have it, the trellis is all fixed in place, the horizontals are fixed in place and it's all ready to go. I just thought to myself, it looks a little bit stark doesn't it, the brightness of the wood, I thought well maybe you could do something about it. So I went to the garage and looked and there's an old tin of black paint, now this is wood paint just for this purpose, I thought well I'll just go over the top of these horizontals so it can blend in a little bit better and it'll look more natural. Unfortunately I forgot that I should really painted the upright in the middle there but it was covered in algae for a year or two so I thought well I'll leave that one and it won't take long for the rose to grow up and can you just see to the left there, I've tied the plant in as well this anomalies which is a climber and that kind of softens it up a bit. Anyway when this is done it'll look really nice and tidy and neat and much better than it did before, I'm sure you'll agree and the rose will have a really good start. And we're all finished now, I think you'll agree it looks really nice and the rose will have a really good start now and look beautiful climbing up the fence. Here I am trimming the Chamysa Paris, it's the conifer, I grew this from a cutting when I was a child and it was in the pot for a long long time and so one day I thought well I can't leave it any longer so I planted it in the ground and it grew as it is now. It's been quite a long time getting to this size and I keep it trimmed two or three times a year, usually a bit later than this but to be honest this spring has been so wet everything's grown so fast so I think it looks really nice when it's done and it gives a bit of fun to the garden and a lot of structure in the winter and actually when it snows it kind of sits on it and makes it really really beautiful. So for this kind of work I like to use hand shears, these are smaller than the usual sort and they're much lighter and I just bought them a couple of weeks ago for the very purpose of doing this because I don't really get on with electronic ones, you know with batteries, they find a little bit clumbersome and you can't quite get the angles as close as you can with a pair of shears. So and here we are very very quickly finishing off the trimming of the tree, just tidying it up and taking all little bits and pieces that have been chopped. Now these are going to get swept away and put into the compost bin and made good use of. So another really important job in the garden is to deadhead, the purpose of deadheading is to stop the plant from setting seed which takes a lot of its strength and so rather than setting seed the energy is staying in the plant itself in the bulb and that will go towards producing good Churchill, they have been really affected by the rain and you can see they're absolutely saturated so what I do with some of my plants is go around the little cane and I gently tap them, this removes the water and takes the heaviness away and gradually as they dry this begins to again but sometimes they just need a little bit more help so I've decided with these ones I was going to put some little canes in and give them a bit of extra support. And now they're tied in they look so much more happier, I'm really pleased with the results of this, it's a small job to do but it makes a really good impact and while they're still flowering we can really enjoy them at their best. You can see the grass has grown really well, it's really really lush and green as I thought well I'll give it a tidy up and a cut and I do this about once or twice a week and it really makes the garden look pretty and if you can't do anything else make sure your grass looks nice then at least it sets everything off to the best advantage. Well I think that's all the jobs done for today so let's get on and enjoy a night time tour.