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Garden Journal 2008

Another year, more plans, more garden expansions, more spending on new shrubs - and more journal pages in which to celebrate! When will my garden be finished? Hopefully, never... Well, certainly not in the year 2008!

January 2008... Thu 3rd Jan 2008: Happy New Year for 2008. Wow! A brand new gardening year - and the traditional time for some serious New Year's Resolutions. Here goes.
Jan 2008 Week 1 - More... Sun 6th Jan 2008: So far, so good for the New Year! I've been busy and happy in the garden every day, nothing is too dry or stressed, and my weeds are moderately under control. I have lots of modest plans - the perfect size for summer gardening days.
Jan 2008 Week 2... Tue 8th Jan 2008: It's already the second week of January and my garden is surviving hot summer temperatures and little rainfall - thanks to the big irrigation system. Without water there'd be nothing to enjoy!
Jan 2008 Week 2 - More... Sun 13th Jan 2008: The summer Moosey garden shines. What a colourful place it is to sit in, with a good book and a cat for company. And what lovely vistas one sees, lounging on chairs inside, peering through the house windows at such a beautifully watered, nurtured garden!
Jan 2008 Week 3... Fri 18th Jan 2008: It's a big day, in which the Head Gardener thinks back to her very first summer in the Moosey garden - and three ridiculously special hebes, the first mass-planting... How keen and green I was back then!
Jan 2008 Week 3 - More... Sun 20th Jan 2008: After a relatively light week in the summer garden I'm looking forward to a traditional hard working weekend. There is great excitement - the Moosey waterwheel goes into the water race this afternoon.
Jan 2008 Week 4... Tue 22nd Jan 2008: Oh dear. It feels too hot to garden, and we need rain. Most of the paddocks are pale blonde in colour, while the relatively lucky Moosey garden has to be irrigated every third night.
Jan 2008 Week 4 - More... Sat 26th Jan 2008: January is a funny month for flowers in my garden - I feel that I've had little input in the garden's 'look'. Dahlias pop up here, there, and everywhere, none planned or planted by me. Patches of lilac phlox still do battle with my hand digger - I don't want them!
Jan 2008 End of Week 4... Thu 31st Jan 2008: I now have a huge ongoing gardening responsibility, one which will test my intelligence and analytical skills. The waterwheel is working fully, and water now flows into the top of my wriggling stream - and down, down, down through the Wattle Woods.
Feb 2008 Week 1... Sun 3rd Feb 2008: The start of a new gardening month always feels different to me, though my garden doesn't know that anything's changed. I've read too many calendars and diaries with that ominous phrase 'Things to do in February'... Aargh!
Feb 2008 Week 1 - More... Thu 7th Feb 2008: Summer sunshine and scrappy, tired flowers - it's an inbetween time in my garden, and every day more gum tree bark blows down onto beds and lawns. Why do I put up with my gum trees? So unsuitable, yet I love them...
Feb 2008 Week 2... Sat 9th Feb 2008: I am busy watering with buckets and hoses, and suddenly I've started shifting plants around. In the heat of summer - I know, I know - it's obviously the silly season.
Feb 2008 Week 2 - More... Tue 12th Feb 2008: A new summer's day, a new sensible list - new plans, new plants to buy, new ideas... What shall I do first in my garden today? There's no wind - lovely!
Feb 2008 Week 3... Fri 15th Feb 2008: Happy Valentines Day to my garden, large sprawling object of my ever-present affection and deeply obsessive love. And devotion - apart from yesterday, when I took the whole day off to go walking.
Feb 2008 Week 3 - More... Mon 18th Feb 2008: Aargh! It's been raining now for two and a half days - real rain which is collecting in driveway puddles and causing many of my plants to flop over. Typical Canterbury weather - after weeks of semi-drought, we are getting all the rain at once.
Feb 2008 Week 3 - Yet More... Thu 21st Feb 2008: Yet more? Hmm... I am doing so much work in the garden this week that I need three pages to talk about it? The Moosey Garden must be in a magnificent state...
Feb 2008 Week 4... Mon 25th Feb 2008: After two impressive, intrepid cycling and walking days I am back as a full-time gardener. I have huge plans in my head, but I'll need to get my energy back. Hmm... Older-lady gardener loses mojo...
Feb 2008 Week 4 - More... Thu 28th Feb 2008: It is a leap year, isn't it? So there's an extra February day to - ahem - leap into the garden. I've got so many new projects on the go that I don't eally want this month to end.
March 2008 Week 1... Sun 2nd Mar 2008: Ha! A pinch and a punch for the first of the month, the first of the 'nearly-autumn' months, when the weather is supposed to settle and the wind is supposed to blow away. Welcome, March. Please remember that you can still be summery!
March 2008 Week 1 - More... Thu 6th Mar 2008: The Moosey animals are exhibiting silly signs of March Madness. As a lone gardener, the danger is that I spend a lot of time with them - will this mad mood be catching?
March 2008 Week 2 - Away... Sun 9th Mar 2008: I'm back from four days holiday on the West Coast, staying up the Mokihinui River. I've been walking, reading, eating, and taking lots of green photographs. The mood relaxed, the tempo andante...
March 2008 Week 2 - Home... Thu 13th Mar 2008: Isn't one of the best parts of a holiday coming back home! I love my garden, and I have the hugest plans for its expansion. Oops - how about sticking to general maintenance and burning all the gum tree rubbish?
March 2008 Week 3... Sun 16th Mar 2008: I'm trying to finish the new stone garden wall by the end of the weekend, but I'm fast running out of river stones and home-made organic matter to fill in behind it. Hmm... Perhaps a visit to a garden landscape supplier would be in order?
March 2008 Week 3 - More... Wed 19th Mar 2008: Ha! I think the stone wall is finished. The fortified soil behind it will still sink a bit, but I'm tempted to do the planting right now. I'm impatient for that 'supposed-to-be-there' look that all decent stone walls have.
March 2008 Easter 1... Sun 23rd Mar 2008: Terribly exciting news - my mail order bulbs and grasses have arrived - with a long enough delay to have thoroughly forgotten what I ordered. Hee hee! And tomorrow the best of all Easter Nursery sales starts. It's the best because it usually has the best bargains...
March 2008 Easter 2... Tue 25th Mar 2008: Hmm... I've done some great gardening this Easter. For the first time in ages I've put new plants immediately in the garden, having planned beforehand where they're going. Ha! This could be the start of a new, sensible trend...
March 2008 Week 4... Fri 28th Mar 2008: March is marching on, as it does. Every day is shorter and every morning is a wee bit nippier. But I am at peace with the garden - having no wind really helps! And I love the start of autumn, with just a few leaves turning golden and red in colour.
End of March 2008... Mon 31st Mar 2008: It's the last weekend in March - the madness of the Easter plant sales is over, and I'm left with just a few stragglers in pots waiting for their place in the garden.
April Week 1 2008... Fri 4th Apr 2008: A is for April, and Asters, and Autumn, and Adventure. Sitting snug on my new garden bench, reading too many travel books, I have a few low-key adventure plans. That's as well as gardening!
April Week 1 2008 - More... Sun 6th Apr 2008: I've finally got my oomph back, after quite a few lazy days spent reading books and dodging all garden work. Mind you, I've only just finished building the new stone wall, which took hours - and 637 stones...
April Week 2 2008... Wed 9th Apr 2008: Three days before I go 'walking on the wild side' - to Cape Campbell, on the East Coast of the South Island, New Zealand. I will probably come back wanting a tussock garden and a lighthouse...
April Week 3 2008... Mon 14th Apr 2008: I'm back home after a short holiday hiking on the East Coast of Marlborough, surrounded by smooching cats. Good morning to purring Percy, my beautiful ginger tabby youngster. Rusty the dog waits patiently for some good dog-action...
April Week 3 2008 - More... Fri 18th Apr 2008: It's even more autumnal today, with rain and darker skies, and the first cold southerly of the season due to arrive at the end of the week. Eek! I must get mulching, and weeding, and trimming, and raking...
April Week 3 - Yet More... Sun 20th Apr 2008: Yesterday I found the most beautiful autumn leaf ever seen by woman, or gardener, or woman-gardener. It lay in the driveway, an autumn jewel covered in little dew drops. Beautiful!
April Week 4... Wed 23rd Apr 2008: So far April has been full of great weather and wonderful adventures. After being away hiking, it's only taken me a week to get most of the garden looking good again. Hmm... Better not look too closely!
April Week 4 - More... Sat 26th Apr 2008: My autumn energy continues. Each day I've been working away like a woman possessed, enjoying a positive and contended autumn gardening mood. I think it's all to do with the sun.
April Week 4 - Yet More... Wed 30th Apr 2008: Before I do any gardening today I have to send some yellow rose photographs to a friend. Oddly I don't take very many pictures of Graham Thomas, my best yellow rose. He's finished his second flush of flowering, so I've missed my chance.
May Week 1... Sat 3rd May 2008: Ha! A brand new gardening month, a brand new page - and with winter just around the corner, time to turn over a brand new leaf? More like rake up a thousand old ones - the autumn leaves are falling fast. And still some of my roses are blooming better than ever.
May Week 1 - More... Tue 6th May 2008: Right. No excuses about cold wind or wet rain. An intrepid four-seasons gardener simply puts on thermal underwear, shorts over the long-johns, hat and gloves - and then out he or she goes!
May Week 2... Sat 10th May 2008: I've just planted about five hundred mixed daffodils - some up the driveway, most along the road-side fence. Oh boy - my back is stiff from bending, and there's dust all over me and my clothes. Five hundred more to go...
May Week 2 - More... Mon 12th May 2008: Happy Mothers Day to meeeee - and to all other mothers out there, both species and hybrids, in New Zealand and elsewhere, in late spring or late autumn, of the gardening and non-gardening variety.
May Week 2 - Yet More... Tue 13th May 2008: We've had the first of the proper frosts - it's a bit cold for early morning gardening. Digging, for example, is difficult before 11 a.m., and it's better not to walk all over the frosty white lawns.
May Week 3... Sat 17th May 2008: Eek! It's so scary for a relaxed, pottering gardener to realise that the month of May is half-finished. But then the Moosey garden is always half-finished. And what about my May outdoors adventure?
May Week 3 - More... Sun 18th May 2008: Gardeners are always full of great ideas on an early, frosty, late autumn morning. Hee hee. Like doing major earthworks, or shifting shrubs and roses around...