Does anyone know anything about gardening?

Building walls is comparatively easy, so long as you can follow a string line and build a right angle. When I started out I just assumed that if a fat builder with the social graces of a dead dog and a similar odour could do it, so could I.

@ColinTheBald

A concrete slab ignores all the requirements of Sustainable (Urban) Drainage Systems, SuDS.

Curious about this too.

Ultimately for our front I'd like a mix of paving and recessed square cut outs with a mini non-grass lawn and thymes. But as we're on a slope on a slope I'd worry about water run off.

A little light reading.
'Drainage' when increasing the built environment no longer works.
Simply connecting a new building and its impervious surrounds to the storm water drainage system simply floods someone else downstream.
Rain, when it does rain, is becoming increasingly intense, and altered patterns of weather mean we are experiencing periods of rainfall never previously recorded.
This Spring we had three successive storms, Ciara, Dennis & Jorge. Each on their own would have been extraordinary. 3 on successive weekends was previously inconceivable.

The built environment needs pervious surfaces to allow rain water to sink, (hopefully), deep through the soil into the clay, and in the south east into the underlying chalk aquifer.

I don't know about your local authority, but here in LB Hillingdon you cannot have a paved (front) garden that discharges rain water into the highway.
How many front gardens are still being paved over and how many Enforcement Notices are being applied is a question that is yet to be answered.

Fascinating stuff, I am probably the only person who will actually read it. I can see the sense in urban areas which are pretty much all impervious surfaces. In my mainly rural area 99% of anything I pave drains into a surrounding garden of which the paving forms less than, say, 5%. In the few cases where drainage is needed I either use soakaways or fanned permeable pipes into surrounding woodland or fields. In one case where flooding was an issue around a house built on clay in a valley bottom I constructed an automatically pumped system into a series of reed ponds. In 20 years I have only twice sent water into the main groundwater drains. I do have my doubts about the permeable membrane/ resin and gravel joints system as surely this would be overwhelmed by any heavy or persistent rain, but I suppose something is better than nothing.

Yes, it would be helpful if the concept of SuDS actually incorporated minimum permeability figures. Round here, outer north west London, flooding in June 2016, Nov 2019, the best pavers offer is a thin line of Aco-Drain at the threshhold to the pavement.
The local authority, who uses a term contractor to 'do' all the dropped kerbs,
routinely just 'tarmacs' the driveway across the pavement.
Its all an uphill struggle.
Many more people now wished they lived uphill.

We're high, but not quite at the top. At the moment the slight rise from our crazy paving helps water to continue along the pavement and down to the curb. But it is a concern for any future work as fucking it up would send a shit tonne of run off water down next to our house.

This was the other thought behind planted cutouts in the paving as it would also act as a sort of sink hole. When we redo the terrace in our back garden I'm quite keen to add a half meter square hole a meter deep filled with gravel and a water loving plant in the wettest corner to make sure no water comes near the house. Again we get quite a bit of run off from the uphill gardens.

Judging by other peoples' drives I think there is a mix of jdgaf and sensible use of ecobase + gravel. But no real enforcement.

An awful lot depends on what soil you are on. If it's clay you'll just have an overflowing pond in a wet winter. A starting point would be to work out the area of paving and multiply by 50mm (a day of extremely heavy rain) to work out the volume of water you could be dealing with.

Soil type?

A mixture of the normal London clay soil you'd expect and the sort of modeling clay you used at school.

Sounds like the hole would need to be deeper still. Can you buy dwarf weeping willows I wonder..?

The skill is in building them quickly, I think. My dad fancies himself as a bit of a bricklayer, but his father did it for a living and he could lay bricks about four times faster.

You can buy what are claimed to be dwarf weeping willows, but I wouldn't if you value your foundations. They're also sods for surface rooting and popping up all over the garden if a section of root gets severed.

Exactly that! I can lay 250 bricks a day accurately(ish), my brickie doesn't break a sweat on 500.

Lavender? Not blueblue obvs, but blueish.

Sweet! 👏

Having just converted @mashton's fox-dug Somme area into something useable, I reflect on the fact that 20% of my job is competence, the remaining 80% is diplomacy in giving the client what they need and want, as opposed to what they actually ask for.

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I also learned two things: @mashton is a thoroughly good guy and you should never allow your kids to name the guinea pigs....

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Not quite in the spirit of the thread but whilst we decide what we're doing with the garden I'm planning on replacing the incredibly shit fake grass with some better fake grass. It's pretty small, 3.9m x 3.9m, but the decent stuff seems surprisingly pricey. Anyone any suggestions for cheap but decent stuff (£10/sqm max) with cheap delivery? I found some 4m square offcuts but delivery was £80 so passed on that.

Also, how to stop foxes and cats shitting in the garden (mainly the borders)? Seems to be the fox in particular that heads there every night (probably because the property was vacant for a year).

Think I already know the answer, but is there anyway of planting a sunflower that's been snapped off by this savage wind.

Routing hormone?

Genuinely quite sad about it. Loads of flowers on their way too.

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We've lost two similarly sized sunflowers, and our biggest tomato plant just snapped in half too :(

Not sure it can be saved tbh.

Sunflowers don't transplant as far as I know. I took the kids up to the allotment on sunday with genuine apprenhension to see the sunflowers after the 40+ mph gusts last friday. Amazingly , despite being the best part of 9 ft tall they were all still just about ok. One was bent over so much we lopped the head off and took it home to put in a vase.

Yeah. This one is going in a vase. Just need to work out where to cut.

Already had a few tomatoes get broken over the weekend.

My previously nice high bed is a marriad of sticks and canes. Going to get a load of proper news ones for new year. Also wondering about getting some rebar as well. My old gazebo that my main tomoato crop is on has kept those ones safe.

If they're close to opening just chop the heads and enjoy them as cut flowers at home in a jar with water.

Yeah. This one is going in a vase. Just need to work out where to cut.

Oops reading to end of thread fail by me above.

Strip the stem, dry the stalk for a year, then varnish it and Hey Presto! A walking stick.

Toms can be. Splint it and it could recover.
I've had this happen many times due to sheer weight of my beasties. :)

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