Retirement gardening. I’ve written before in these retirement blogs how I expected my retirement to constitute the following activities – long haul travel, golf, photography and probably gardening. For the first time in the eight years that we have been retired I was able recently to write about our plans to fly to America.
Golf and photography have barely raised their collective heads. But now, because it’s that time of year, gardening is just starting to enter our thoughts and plans. We’ve bought a few flowering plants for the Heanor house from where we have just returned and I have to say the back garden there looks quite nice. But then it’s a small space and doesn’t take a lot of smartening up. I wish I had the photos to prove it but I forgot to take any. Silly me.
Which leaves me with writing about gardening in our main house (which is not huge) and here I can take some ‘before’ photographic proof of the beginning of our modest changes. The ‘after’ photos will have to wait for a later blog. First task is to bring back the table and chairs from their winter resting grounds by the garage (see below).
I have to smile because even when it’s in its ‘proper’ place we probably only sit out there once during the summer. We’re just too lazy to take all the food and drink out there. Not good I know. This year the table when placed won’t be under the pergola because that’s somewhat collapsed. And certainly the lighting which might make it a pleasant night time spot on the few days of an English summer that makes this feasible, has similarly ceased to function. We also need to drag the small table and chairs out of the garage and locate them somewhere else we don’t sit. Again see below.
We’ve got two bigger chairs an Adirondack and a Rietveld which need wrestling out of the garage. These two chairs, which I made and repaired, during lockdown do get a bit of use but even if they didn’t we think they look nice although slightly decrepit in the case of the Adirondack.
Also the space out the back looks bigger because the arch over which the honeysuckle straggled, collapsed of old age so that has gone. We plan to replace it so hopefully the next set of photos will show this. Also optimistically the honeysuckle which we chopped right back will grow again.
So apart from the faff of moving table and chairs those jobs need attending to in some way. But then there’s still the pleasure of sitting in the conservatory and looking out at the garden. This is more our style really.
For this to be a complete pleasure we need the plants to flower, those that do of course. Hostas, my favourite plant, only have a token flower but they have the advantage of springing up year after year with minimal attention, just a little fertiliser from time to time. I wish I could say the slugs paid them minimal attention. Unfortunately not so, Hostas are martyrs to slugs and I think I read that slug pellets were being banned. I’m not sure how we’ll keep the slobbering hordes at bay without the pellets. Any suggestions.
At the moment, as you can probably see, we’ve got a combination of daffodils, tulips (see below) and Hellibores, (see photo at beginning) that marvellous plant, to give us early colour out there. Soon it will be bedding plant time. We usually buy a mixture of lobelia, petunias, sweet peas and last year, grown from seed, nasturtiums about which Mrs Summerhouse was particularly pleased. Every year and I mean every year, we buy replacement geraniums. Try as we might we never seem able to keep this plant over the winter.
We also have quite a few perennial shrubs that come up every year without any attention. Like the Pieris in the photo. My kind of plant. I’m trying to get 6 dogwood plants we bought to establish but not with huge success. And they were expensive. So laying out money is no guarantee of success.
So much work yet to be done to get the garden even from inside, looking anything like. Two years ago we might have been pleased to have these tasks to carry out during lockdown. This year, a more normal retirement year (if such a thing exists) these tasks seem just things that need doing rather than the kind of pleasant retirement job that retired people reportedly enjoy. Not me I’m afraid, I just like the garden to look nice without spending shed loads of money or expending huge amounts of effort. Is that unreasonable?
Retirement gardening summary
So there we are retirement hasn’t turned out quite as I might have predicted say ten years ago. I thought I pretty much had it all worked out before I retired and surprise, surprise it hasn’t been that way at all. Go figure.