Does anyone know anything about gardening?

Given that Box can grow into large topiary specimens,
yet can give (very) low hedges,
it suggests that Yew, repeatedly trimmed, will impoverish the soil,
and stay within your height requirements.

Have you considered lavender? It can knit together and make a hedgelike barrier and there's the bonus of scent.

I'm replacing a small box hedge that I had in containers with lavender. The box died of that there blight. Or cattypillers or whatever.

My lawn is mostly pretty damp clay London stuff. I've read that you can try to improve drainage by digging grit and organics into it. I can't do that (as it's my lawn, and it's covered in grass and moss...).

I thought about getting one of those big augers that you use for 'drilling' fence post holes, and filling the resultant holes up with grit (topped off with soil / grass seed) to get a few big drainage holes that would hopefully reach through the clay into better draining stuff. Does this sound plausible / useful?

https://www.lawnsmith.co.uk/lawn-care-videos/aerate-rake-scarify/spike-core-aerate.htm

No need to dig, get one of these and a bag of sand. Grass grows ok on clay, just keep mowing.

Thanks - I've tried one of those aerators that would pull out cores of soil. It didn't really work - it got clogged up after a couple of insertions and the soil was really hard to clean out of the tines. If you left it till the garden wasn't so damp, then it was too hard to push in.

I'm not sure that it was poking deep enough to get the water to train through the clay.

You would need to line your augered holes with a geotextile to prevent the gaps between your grit particles filling up with fine soil particles.
Are you 'West'?
I have a 5-inch auger you can borrow.
(Augering stone-free London Clay is a weirdly satisfying activity.
You bring up inch thick 'pancakes' of yellow/orange clay).

Thanks - that's very kind of you. I won't take you up, as I'm thinking this will be an annual thing (for a while at least) to get more organics in there once I've got a few well placed gravel holes this year, so I'll pick up one and store it behind the shed!

I pulled so many bricks out of it a couple of years back when roto-vating that hopefully it's largely stone free now - guess we'll see...

I hadn't thought about lining, but that's a good idea for the drainage holes.

I got mine from Toolstation,
but,
I didn't pay £25 and this is only 4".
Organic material: shredded woody material left somehwere dry soon develops a mass of mycellium. Whether this mycellium thrives subsoil I do not know, but trenching my raised beds and partly filling them with fungally enriched woodchip seems to boost yields of fruit & veg.

Thanks for the neem tip, between that and murdering the nearest ant colony my apple tree is bouncing back. Whatever hasn’t been taken down by the neem is being devoured by the swarms of ladybird larvae.

Pressure washed the patio. Do I need to use a sealer on it? I'm loathed to spend £50 odd if i don't have to...

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I've never put any on ours, just blasted it every other year or so. Imagine it depends on the stone though

Looking tidy

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Idyllic... ❤️

Lovely!

Go away for a week.

Come home to long long grass and withered patches pots.

Grrr.

J really must sort out an irrigation system.

Where did you get your watering system from. I'm getting a poly tunnel at the weekend. I'm thinking of a 1000L water tank collecting rain water and a timer then a system like yours to automate the process.

It was an eBay thing, can fish the link out. 100m porous pipe kit. How will you generate the pressure from your IBC? I reckon you need 0.5 bar minimum (mines limited to 0.7 off mains)

I haven't given it a huge amount of thought, however I was going to have the tank raised on pallets to create some pressure. Or failing that some sort of 12v pump on a timer.

If the tiles are old they tend to become porous, over winter they tend to hold water and freeze causing spontaneous cracking. On standard concrete slabs.
Sealing would help..if it's got to that stage or anywhere near.

you might get away with a small elevation head with porous trickling constantly. It wouldn’t drive a sprinkler head though.

True that.

I was thing about 3ft elevation possibly more depending on my new polytunnel. I need to figure out a way of collecting the water

Great Dixter was just on channel 5. Their large geometric topiary was planted the year Titanic sank:

massive earplugs

“ear”