Weekend gardening

Even though we are well into October it still feels very mild outside. Last week I even had our bifold doors fully open, although I am expecting that to be the last time for this year! Our garden remains full of flowers. We have some beautiful red and yellow canna lilies that have been in bloom since I planted them in early May, and I also have some lovely pink dahlias and purple salvias that both really took off over the summer. I'm so pleased with how I have been able to fill my garden with colour.

A few weeks ago I drove past the garden centre and spotted a banner outside saying that the bulbs were in, so we took a trip over and stocked up. I've never bought bulbs before and I got a little carried away! I bought large bags of simple tulips and daffodils, and then I added some fancier varieties. Luckily we do have plenty of beds that still need filling, but I hadn't really thought through the logistics. I've made a start but it's going to take me a couple of weeks to find the time to get them all planted!

Our front garden is looking rather messy as we still haven't decided what we are going to plant along the front border. We took down a large, overgrown hedge and I intended to replace it with something similar, but the longer we've lived without a hedge the more I appreciate not having to maintain it. I'm thinking a row of some kind of low lying shrubs, something to create a border but not be too difficult to keep cut back. In the meantime the bed is just filling up with weeds that I go and pull out every few weeks.

We are also having a lot of weeds growing in the new pebbles at the front. I was hoping that the membrane underneath would hold them off for a couple of years at least, but I think they are just growing on top of it. So we borrowed a weed burning tool from my Mum to see if that would be any good at getting rid of them!

I was very wary because I'm a bit scared of fire, and when I tried using it with my Mum in the summer in her garden it was very dry and we had a couple of occasions where the grass caught fire. So it's definitely a two person job - one on standby with a watering can! It's really satisfying to use, and it's much easier on the back and hands than stooping down to pull the weeds out, so we might look to get one at some point.

I know that the next job will be picking up leaves - there are three large trees that drop leaves into our garden and it's always quite an effort to keep it all tidy. I'm also interested to see what happens to all my lovely plants when it starts to get really cold - I hope that at least some of them survive the winter!