Moving bamboo

About eight years ago, when Toadlet was still at primary school, she wanted me to buy some plants at a school sale. One was a kind of spurge and one was a small pot of bamboo. I decided to make a kind of half basket for the steep bank up from the back terrace. The soil is thin there and is full of bits of old paint from before our time. I lined the basket with some leftover pond fleece and filled it with home-made compost. I planted the bamboo and the spurge in there. In this picture, taken in May 2014, you can see that the spurge did quite well. It has a lovely brightness about it, seeds profusely and spreads. There's some red campion behind it and also the bamboo, still small. It's actually quite hard to see in the photo but it is there. This is my one and only basket weaving effort and it stood the test of time. Until today.

I got Toad to help me dig the bamboo out. It had got somewhat taller and more robust-looking over the years and blocked a bit of the view up the garden. There were side shoots too. It needs more space to spread.

Here is where we dug. Yes, those are bricks at the back. Apparently there used to be a shed or garage of some sort on  what had been made into a flat concrete ledge. There isn't very much flat ground on the Boggy Brae. We used to park the Rattletrap on what we presume had been the floor of the garage. We found what Toad said was an old spark plug, some bits of broken glass, and another hard rusted and crusted bit of metal that was unidentifiable.

old spark plug and some broken glass

After that I wheelbarrowed the bamboo down to the Boggy Bottom of the garden, on the Scrawny the Tree side, and dug a hole. I dug out a couple of bricks here too. I think we'd start to worry if we didn't find bricks or bits of bricks every time we dug anywhere! Anyway, that hole is deeper than it looks and the bamboo went in just fine. I carefully avoided treading on the iris that has planted itself there.

Bamboo in its new place

From the Boggy Bottom it was nice to look up to wild cherry trees that are flowering away just now.

Toad is going to sell that Topaz dinghy. This is why I've changed from Boat Bog to Boggy Bottom. When that boat is sold, we'll be boatless.