Stumpfest '22

I didn't touch the garden other than cutting the grass until December, by this point the weeds had died back which meant getting in to get them out was a lot easier. I was also on my Christmas break so what else was I going to do with an unseasonably warm Christmas! The garden had a couple of mature green & gold shrubs, they reminded me of euonymus but I'm not sure what they were. I decided that these had to go, they aren't really to my taste as I prefer a herbaceous perennial garden, and I also knew that without removing them I wouldn't be able to get to the source of the brambles that were growing through them. This is what it looked like before, you can see the brambles growing through the shrub, all of the dried growth was from the nettles, you can see just how tall they got here, the fence is 5 foot high!

I started tackling this on my own and struggled, the nettles especially were huge clumps with massive tap roots, I dragged my partner out to help a few days later and he also really struggled with the nettle clumps, although we did manage to remove a couple of stumps - you can't see here but there were a few shrubs that had been long since cut down. This was all we had to show for a days effort.

It very much looks like we just cut down some of the nettles!! Luckily for us a friend that lives nearby offered to come and help, we had helped him with his garden just before Christmas, so we set a date in January for him to come and help us tackle the stumps.

We called that day, Stumpfest '22. Our friend was an absolute machine and helped us steam through the rest of the stumps in the back border, we got way more done in one day than I expected and it was brilliant!! By the end of that day we were looking more like...

It doesn't even look like the same garden!! We initially kept what I believed to be a Weigela florida 'Variegata' as I grew that in my last garden and liked it a lot, but I removed it a few days later when I started marking out some positions, as it was where I wanted to plant something else! You can see one of the piles of brambles, there was also a huge pile of bits of shrub. These were some of the stumps we removed from the back border. 

The method that worked for us was digging away the soil around the stumps, cutting any thick roots with a pruning saw then getting a fork or spade underneath and leveraging around until they lifted out. Sounds simple but it was hard work!!

How on earth were all of those in that one border, completely concealed by nettles, brambles and bindweed?! It blows my mind. This is the view looking down the border, it almost looks like it was always that clear!

That is where we were after Stumpfest '22, the state of the garden had really been getting me down, making some progress and removing some of the junk, weeds, and unwanted plants made me feel so much happier!

Have a great day!