It's proven to be very hard to keep up with the garden, three children and even harder to write about it. But I am rather determined to change this.
Last year sadly Mr MC&W father passed away, in his memory we all chose to plant a Jasmine in our gardens, his mum, brother and ourselves. With everything we had going on our poor Jasmine had become rather neglected.
Today I managed to get ZAP happily on a picnic blanket and the boys charging round on the trampoline. This gave me some time to tackle the area around the Jasmine.
As you can see it was really quite a mess, surrounded by weeds and had barely any light getting to it. It took a lot of work to dig and pull out the weeds and rather too many nettle stings up my arms.
When it came to getting close to the Jasmine I decided it better to use a small hand trowel as I did not want to disturbed the roots as the poor plant has had a tough old time already.
I also cut quite a bit of my beautiful rambling rector back to allow more sunshine to get in from above.
I need to get some manure dug into the soil as you can see my footprints became a real feature of the area. Our soil is thick clay and every area of the garden needs serious attention to improve the soil. I am looking around for the best soil improvers.
As you can see from the photos the top looks OK and the bottom there are real signs of growth but the middle looks very woody and to be honest a little dead.
I shall report if we have managed to get the Jasmine a little healthier. Though the flowers are beautiful and smell wonder already.
I think you have done the right things. More light and less competition from weeds will definitely help. Perhaps it would also benefit from a feed of liquid fertiliser? I use liquid "Growmore" general-purpose fertiliser, which seems pretty good for most things.
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