Diary entry 2) Introduction to The Cherry Walk

The Cherry Walk will appear quite a bit on this blog. It's where, as a course, we do a lot of our practical work and assessments. It used to be a set of meandering paths through a wooded area with large informal flower beds. However, over time it had become neglected and overgrown with weeds and scraggy shrubs and old tree stumps. Our tutor David had, in the summer, decided to lay claim to the area and bring it back to life. The college were more than happy for someone to work on the area and bring some beauty back. the structure was there, beautifully shaped beds and paths, all under the canopy of various trees, predominantly prunus's (cherry trees).

So, on the 23rd September 2014 we were introduced to the Cherry Walk. Over the summer the college technicians had sprayed weed killer several times. We saw this mass of dead and dying plant matter and not a lot of hope!

Our first task was to clear the 'trash' (the dead material) with rakes to get down to the soil.

The beds had been so neglected for so long that they were incredibly compacted and poor quality. We then needed to dig the area to break up the soil structure, encourage water, air and worms in to rejuvenate it. We split into teams and, using mainly border spades began digging in pairs from the middle of the border, out.

This was back breaking work, even for a team of around ten people. September was a beautiful month, full of sunshine but this meant the ground (clay soil) had been baked hard for a long period of time making digging a lot of work. It took us three days of digging to cover the whole area. We then left it a week or so, by then October was bringing a little light rain, to allow the soil to take up a little water and give the chance for worms to move in and start working for us!

We then began to top dress the soil with farmyard manure. This was readily available by the barrow- load straight from the colleges' resident horses and cows. Again, this took several days of work. We used scaffold boards as planks, careful not to compact the ground we'd worked hard to dig. As the manure was loaded, generously and evenly, onto the beds we gently mixed it into the soil using forks. The aim was to allow the nutrients to enrich the soil over the winter, allowing the worms and the weather (rain and frosts) to break down the material and, by Spring, have a wonderful, rich soil with a light 'fryable' (that nice crubly texture you see in nice borders and gardens) texture for planting into.

Just before we left the borders to their own devices for the winter, we did plant some bulbs in large patches.
this was a lovely reward for a couple of months' labour!

These included (I've forgotton some!) :

Iris reticulata

Galanthus ( snowdrops)

Hyacinthoides non-scripta (bluebells)

Cyclamen

Daffodils

Lilium martagon (Martagon Lily)

Once, the bulbs were planted at the right depth (just check the planting instructions) we labelled the area so we would know what we planted, and then ringed the planted areas with stakes so that, in the spring when we were planting/ weeding etc we could avoid disturbing the bulbs.