Creating a Blank Canvas

Creating a Blank Canvas

I have been working hard on Room Three of The Palace Garden, although there isn’t much to show for it at this point.  Just a patch of weed free earth.   Having said that, getting to a weed free state has taking a long time and a lot of effort.  As with all the rooms In The Palace it began as a wild neglected weedy mess, with the sand held in place with mostly kikuyu grass, lupin bushes and Muehlenbeckia.  When I began clearing the land for Room One I over optimistically believed I could clear it by hand. 

I managed about a metre square before realising it  was a bigger job than I could do, so I called in a friendly neighbour with a tractor to scrape the surface clear of all greenery and levelling it out, giving me a blank canvas to work with.  However, the nature of Kikuyu grass is the rhizomes lie deep within the ground and left in place will bounce back and pick up where it left off in its attempt to take over the land.   In the right place it isn’t all bad – its role in erosion prevention can’t be beat and it makes a great lawn in a coastal spot. 

Picking out the rhizomes is a fairly easy process as the tractor generally loosens up the sand and all I have to do is reach in and pull them out.  The first stage is to methodically go over the entire garden.  I set up a grid system, and worked my way across the cleared land, reaching in with a handheld garden fork to about 30 cm deep combing the soil to look for any rhizomes lurking beneath the surface.  It isn’t hard work, and with my handy helpers sharing the load, it was a gentle sitting down job with plenty of congenial chit chat and the time disappeared quickly and clean and clear land emerged behind us.

This method isn’t entirely foolproof as little green flags soon emerge from the soil to taunt “you missed me!”  So once a week for at least 6 weeks the garden was checked for these shoots, and they were evicted.  Some were missed because in the levelling process they weren’t scraped off, they were buried.  These ones are the hardest to remove, as the best approach is to dig down to find them.  Fortunately, sand is much easier to dig than a heavy clay soil.

I also sent my wee helper up to the garden once a week with the hoe to take care of any opportunistic self-seeded grasses, lupins and other weeds.  This has been quite encouraging.  The first week there was a ton to green kikuyu flags and a light green fuzz of fine grasses taking advantage of the removal of the thuggish grass that ordinarily stands in its way.  Each week there was less and less green showing up and I am now at the point where I am happy to say we are there with a weed free blank canvas.

I’m not sure if this is the way a professional would clear the land, but it works for me and allows me time to get to know the space, to spend time in it and feel what it is like to be in its presence and envision the finished garden.   At this point, the vision in my head is constantly changing to suit what I can see around me.

After all the effort of clearing the land, it wasn’t perfectly level, although to be honest it will never be perfectly level, but our combing and digging created lumps and bumps.  To sort this out I built a rectangle frame with long screws poking out the bottom, with rope attached so I could drag it about the site, hoping to smooth it over.  It was a good idea but just wasn’t really flattening things out.  Hubby the Un-Gardener came to my rescue with the idea of making it heavier.  I had a load of bricks with holes through the middle and we added more screws to the top so we could slot half a dozen bricks on top, making it much heavier.  Too heavy for me to drag about, so Hubby the Un-Gardener stepped up and did the dragging and it worked perfectly.

And now I am ready to move on to the next stage – doing the measuring and working out if I actually have room for everything I want to put in there…  This is where the dreams collide with reality and the plan begins to form.

Come again soon – there is so much going on right now as I try to work smarter not harder.

Sarah the Gardener  : o)