DFB's Greenthumb Project

[DFB FGXR6]

It's the calm before the storm at the nursery now. As the days are getting colder and people are allowed to move around the country again, customer flow has dropped off a bit. And with a massive delivery of new trees arriving for the winter bare-root season within the next couple of weeks, we are making the most of the lighter customer flow to get on with some maintenance jobs around the place.

This pocket down the back was primarily designed to showcase a line of water features we once sold. Set amongst the water features is a fernery full of palms, ferns and other shade loving plants. The area is split in half with a running creek bed and three small foot bridges to allow customer access.

The trouble with "gardens" within a garden center is that maintaining stock for sale, attending to customers and keeping the whole place presentable takes priority. When I first started there 19 years ago, there were four gardens dotted around the place. The way we overhead water means that these gardens got far too much water and really struggled to flourish. Weeds on the other hand love those conditions. One by one, I have been responsible for the removal of those gardens, they never looked good and took valuable staff away from maintaining products that actually helped pay for our wages. It took a lot of gentle, calculated suggestions to gain approval to remove those gardens, but I got there in the end!

The fernery is the only remaining garden now. Even so, it still needs far more attention than we allow for. This bottom end of the creek bed has been bugging me for years. The plants that were planted either side of the water completely took over. It was a mess, and guess who drew the sort straw to remove all of the horrible, stinky Acorus Gramineus strand by strand. That was many years ago now but I still shudder at the though of that task. After the gutting, I put down weed mat and shoveled white stones to cover up the multitude of sins. We then attempted to deflect the attention away from it by displaying plants and trees in front of it.

With spare time on my hands this week, I started placing re-claimed rocks along the length of the creek bed before topping the rest with stones to help it all blend in. No before pics, I didn't think to at the time, this was a little job that turned into a bit of a project. Each rock and stone was placed "just so", that would surprise anyone here though.





The stone toppings should help to keep weeds down too, they are probably layered two inches thick!

Best bit apart from it looking VASTLY better than what we were trying to hide, was getting praise from a boss who never gives positive feedback unprompted.