As the binmen had emptied my Brown Bin, I had room to do more pruning. This time, I tackled the huge bush right beside the patio, that takes up a good third of the available space, and a good chunk of lawn. So I hacked about 1/3 to 1/2 of it away. It’s an odd plant, with about three different types of leaf. It actually looks like there’s more than one species in there, but it all appears to be one bush. I think it needs a bit more done, for aesthetics, but that’s for another day.

The roses appear to have survived my barbarism; there’s little bits of new growth. Time will tell.

I’ve freed up a lot of space on my patio now; it is now actually a useful space. I just have to clean up the plastic furniture, and I might have a place to sit in the sun…

The last thing I want to do is clean out the little planters, and put something in there. Something simple like maybe some annuals – just a simple splash of colour. See, now I’m beginning to sound like an actual gardener…

Well, it rained, it rained, and then it rained some more. The lawn, and everything else, seemed to like this. So I cut it all down again.

I forgot to take “before” pictures this time (d’oh!); there was a lot of green, but much of it was leafy weeds. But after I mowed, there was no evidence of them. Muahahahaha! And if I can’t see them, they don’t count as weeds. So there.

The patio area is actually looking not bad – still a fair amount of work to do, and I’ll have to prune things fairly viciously in order to clear enough area to actually sit at the table. But I figure if I laugh maniacally enough while I do it, it will actually be fun.

What I perhaps should have done is bought some grass seed and done what is apparently called “over seeding”, where you get so much grass coming out of the ground that the weeds don’t stand a chance. But it seemed a bit complex, and also a little late in the year to start regrowing a lawn. Perhaps next year… The landlord’s going to have to settle for a brown-but-flat lawn, it seems.

I did use PathClear on the patio bit, as I’m not particularly wanting to keep what’s growing between the paving slabs – although possibly my healthiest grass is to be found there.

The photos I’ve uploaded (click on the above photo to view) show how little things changed between feeding the lawn on Thursday, and Mow II today. We’ve not had much rain, so maybe that’s to blame. I think I’ll water it daily (if there’s no rain) for a little bit; it only takes 2 cans full to do the lawn (big can, small garden).

I first had to go to the hardware shop, as my strimmer had run out of strim. Several quite sturdy long-stemmed things had taken up residence, and mower-power wasn’t going to be enough to deal with them.

While there, I had a look at various noxious chemicals that are supposed to help one with one’s lawn, somehow magically killing weeds yet leaving the grass untouched. I didn’t get any of them, though, as they all had dire warnings about not using any clippings for mulching or composting, or even putting them into the Council “garden waste” bins. On the one hand, I vaguely like the idea of going “organic”, at least on my lawn; on the other, I need to have it looking as good as I can in just two weeks. I’ve got a couple of days to decide though, as you’re meant to apply it three days after mowing.

All in all, I did two passes with the mower, bringing in the strimmer for the tougher vegetation when required. The strimmer was a pain though; the string kept breaking off and not replenishing itself automatically like it’s supposed to. Possibly I reloaded the thing wrong, but it was still irritating having to stop and start all the time. I got there in the end, even if I did entirely fill up the Council gardening bin in the process…

Anyhoo, I thought I’d document the process with some before and after shots, taken on my camera phone. That was easy enough, but getting the photos off my phone and onto the computer and thus onto flickr.com was beyond ridiculous. Motorola, the makers of my phone, do have a connection kit. However, it’s always been flaky about whether or not it will deign not notice the phone, despite being connected with a proper Motorola USB cable. This time it decided to pretend it knew the phone was connected, until I actually went to the file manager to transfer files. Only then would it start going on about “processing failed” and “no connection” and “Phone? What phone?”

I do so love technology.

In the end, I found out it had an update option, so I started updating the software – all that really seemed to do was trigger more updates, which in turn triggered more updates, and further updates… I think I’ve gone up two versions and finally, after a reboot and a recharge and reinstalling the modem drivers and getting the software to find the modem from scratch again, I got the nice new spiffy version 4 Multimedia Studio to actually give up the photos.

Stones and blood ain’t in it.

Anyway, after all that, I got them all up on a flickr.com photoset, so you can enjoy the fruits of my hard labour.