The year 2020 is set to be memorable for far too many reasons. At the moment I will only stick to comments about plant and garden viruses but note we ‘caught a cold’ on the wet winter.

Jobs New to My Garden

• I have had  new roof felting and tiles on my bungalow that has some garden on all four sides of the house. The job yesterday was to go around the beds and edges to collect the bits left or blown on to the garden from the, mainly tidy, roofers. I was surprised at the amount of brash, jib and detritus that had collected under plants and all around the garden, not all the roofers doing. I will repeat the clear up exercise as part of an annual spring clean.
• The second new garden job was also roofing related or more specifically scaffolding. Despite being a bungalow the house is built into a slope and the eaves are as high in places as a tall two story house. At pinch points around the house the scaffold poles had to be grounded on parts of the lawn ( a wet lawn as you can imagine). Where the grass was covered by a steel plate as support the yellowing of the grass returned to normal after a couple of weeks. The problem was where the exit from the scaffold was on to one patch of grass that became compacted and very muddy. I have spiked and forked the area and over-sown with some grass seed in the hope it will recover but muddyness is in the lap of the rainmakers.
• Strulch was at the heart of my next new gardening job in what I now call ‘restrulching’. Last year I used a lot of Strulch to top off my ornamental plant pots particularly those that contained a new collection of patio roses. This was a success reducing maintenance and improving appearance. Now after pruning the roses I wanted to feed and top dress them. Where the old strulching was deep enough there was a mat of material that would survive at least another year but I broke it up to add blood fish and bone fertiliser then reapplied fresh Strulch.