Does anyone know anything about gardening?

This is an excellent idea!

I've just bent an old copper pipe in a circle. But unsure it'll do anything.

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love this. the guarderita

You could espalier it against the fence.

I saw somewhere that stems that are horizontal flower more than vertical.

My grass is looking OK at the moment but I’ve noticed that some of the grass is lying flat and growing long, but it’s not getting cut.

Is there such thing as a grass comb that I could attach to my mower. Google says no

Power rakes are a thing, the tined rather than bladed scarifies are the same sort of thing.

I'd scalp it and bladed scarify myself.

Our rear lawn is back to 6inches of matted grass 2 weeks after cutting due to the rain so I'll be doing that this weekend subject to weather and hope that works for the summer

It does need scarifying, but it’s looking really nice at the moment

Have you tried changing the direction?

I'm sure I read somewhere that you should do one mow up/down and then a second pass at a right angle.

Generally don't have any time for that sort of thing. But every now and then I try mowing at diagonal.

I have a bosch rotak 32 lawnmower which broke outside of the warranty. I've replaced it with a Stihl lawnmower as all my other tools are in the same family as this. Does anyone want it? The battery works fine and I've not tried much to fix it but I cba to deal with selling it. pickup in E17

I mowed it on a low setting then raked it all directions. The amount of lawn it was missing was crazy.

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Our cats just found this little guy trespassing in our garden. I'm pretty sure it's not wild, so now we've got to do a round of the neighbours asking if anyone is missing a friend :D

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How big were your seedlings before you planted them out (if that's how you did it - I once just had a squash grow because a squirrel / bird dropped some seeds)?

I've a bunch of seedlings that are starting to take up room. (some are sunflowers, but I have no idea which...).

Do you secretly hope you don't find the owner? Because I think I would secretly hope I couldn't find the owner.

I haven't planted them out yet. We've had builders in destroying the garden and only got the space back a few weeks ago, and I got giddy and planted up all the seeds I could find with no regard to where they're going. I might put one or two squash seedlings in the top of the compost bin but I certainly don't need a third.

in the top of the compost bin

That's an inspired idea. I reckon I could get away with 2 at the top of the compost - it's full now, so it's not as if they'll be disturbed, and it might stop the foxes / squirrels / magpies from digging it up.

Also - as a general question to the thread - ^^^ which are the squash, and which are the sunflower.

Our bin is in a relatively shady spot, although we face south and there's nowhere totally shady, so it's not the best place for them. But it's more for fun than food really. And the bin is surrounded by an empty patch at the moment so it may as well get covered with a big old squash.

Middle front with single stem and skinnier leaves is sunflower. Front left it's a squash, rounder proportion leaf, slightly hairy. Looks like lots of squashes not many sunflowers.

Hard to take good photos, but this is the progress from the Weed Olympics into borders planted up, wildlife sink with froggos visiting, the "never mow May" corner and then "lawn".

Part of which gets mowed, the rest is on a wildflower lawn schedule.

The fences, cha...that's a whenever I feel like it job. Will need to ask the rear neighbours if I can cut back the ivy a bit before it takes down the fence.

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Ivy!

We are lucky to have a few big trees at the end of the garden, a fairly big apple, a 60/70 foot tall, er, can't remember and another one that mainly hangs over next door. All of them, and the ground surrounding them, and the fence below are covered in Ivy, which is a lovely habitat and I am happy to keep as it is so green, but I am a bit concerned it will come to affect the trees. I understand there is to some extent a relationship between the Ivy and the trees that means they are both Ok, it just seems like a LOT of Ivy and I don't really want a tree to fall down (especially the big boy!). Now is not the time of year to get rid, but I wonder what I should be thinking about removing? I will need to replace the rear fence which is completely subsumed by it at some point, but what to do with the rest?

Some pictures below.

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It will eventually kill the trees.

The woodland trust doesn’t agree - Ivy doesn’t harm trees and provides habitat for lots of other things.

https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/plants/wild-flowers/ivy/

^ I've heard the same on GQT. It only kills trees that already have issues / are dying.

But it does obscure the tree in that it makes spotting diseased and damaged trees harder/impossible which is a problem if the tree could come down on something/someone….

Is that a London plane?

The evergreen nature of native Ivys mean they retain their leaves through our Winter.
Deciduous trees, like your overgrown apple, lose their leaves to avoid the effects of Winter storms.
Ivy can act like a sail on its host tree, and sometimes cause the host tree to be blown down when the storm has particularly strong gusts or is from the non-prevailing direction.