2010 October | Home Improvement Ideas

Garden Planning Guide – Assessing the Garden Plants

A garden that has been well cared for throughout its life will coast very happily into middle age. Everyone longs for one of those. On the other hand, a garden that has had only poor care and little long-term thought will present a very different picture, of crowding and disease.

Before you make your plans for the garden, you need to analyze the prospects for the plants in the garden as it stands. Take a look first at which plants are thriving and, which are suffering. A hard look at the way different plants are performing will often highlight the garden’s most urgent problems.

Which plants are performing badly?
A common problem is the lack of light from neglected trees, causing a weary, starved-looking shrub and herbaceous story beneath. Unless you want to move to woodland-floor gardening only, some hard decisions will have to be made about which trees and shrubs to take out.

With their removal, you will be able to open up and enrich new areas of vacant soil. Here, the competition from surface roots will be less fierce and much more suitable for new planting. In increased light most evergreens and conifers will become dense again and, after pruning. Shrubs will no longer be leggy and drawn, and herbaceous plants will flower properly afresh.

In more open gardens the problem may be the sheer volume of unchecked growth made by shrubs and an invasion of weeds. By pruning long-lived shrubs and removing or replacing overgrown short-term shrubs you will open the road to recovery. Mechanical and chemical weed control will start the slower progress to a garden free of weeds.

Which plants are doing too well?
Sometimes a garden fills up with vigorous, exotic weeds that at first glance might be thought to be an intentional planting. Leycesteria, buddleia, brooms, cotoneaster, hypericums, and berberis all have a habit of seeding or suckering around and quickly making sizeable plants. Watch out for opportunists such as these smothering more valuable plants.

Do not be afraid to pull them out extensively if they are serving no useful purpose, Overgrown lawns are not a problem. Simply have them cut down and then keep them cut. Serious weed problems such as dock and thistle can be dealt with in good time, after more pressing matters have been handled.

What is the average age of your plants?
Take a hard look at the various elements of planting in your garden trees, shrubs, climbers, and so on to decide how far they are into their cycle of growth and decline. Often, what looks like one phase of a garden’s planting turns out to be planting from two or three periods, sometimes decades apart and with layers of seedling growth on top.

Look at the shrub layer
Assess the state of the shrubs, too. On average, most shrubs have a lifespan of 10 to 60 years. However, size does not necessarily equate with old age. It may well be that after cutting them to the ground, you could, by regular seasonal pruning, get those hydrangeas, mock orange, and weigelas back to 6 feet instead of 10 feet, and get back your view.

Before you redesign the inner part of your garden, consider whether the privacy and shelter it offers depend on the shrubs at its borders that are ready to fall over from old age. Are those shrub ones that will regenerate from hard pruning, such as hybrid rhododendrons and laurels? Or are they species that refuse to respond, like brooms and cypresses?

Self-sown shrubs and trees can grow at an astonishing speed, outstripping older neighbors in the border after only four or five years. Even in well-tended gardens, seedling shrubs and trees like elder, ash, sycamore, and holly slides themselves in, eclipsing more precious plants. Look hard at them all.

It may be that the precious Daphne or variegated holly is past redemption. In such a case, the self-sown buddleias or elder may be the ones to keep for the present. It would be a mean gardener to call any plant that hides an unattractive vista a weed, especially if it flowers as generously as an elder.

Think about what will happen overtime: Do I want a hideous view, or do I want temporary cover to get something better established?

Stripping Wooden Furniture – Home DIY

Stripping old furniture is one of the more messy aspects of renovation, but the satisfaction of revealing the natural grain of the wood hidden for decades beneath layers of dirty paint or darkened varnish makes all the effort worthwhile.

Old wooden furniture often suffers many indignities by the name of fashion; simple pieces may have been covered in thick layers of paint, badly applied varnish or topped with plastic laminate in an endeavor to ‘modernize’ them.

With the original wood covered in such finishes it may be difficult to believe that the furniture is worth salvaging, but with a little work most pieces can be restored. The finish must be stripped, whether you plan to varnish, paint, wax or polish the piece later.

Before you start.

Before you begin to sand and scrape, take a long hard look at your furniture. It is important to establish exactly what the finish is and to get an idea of the sort of wood underneath as these will affect the method of stripping you choose.

Most old pieces of furniture were finished with wax, oil, stain, varnish or French polish. However, no two pieces are alike, and you may find you have a table or chair which has accumulated several layers of paint. Wax is best cleaned off with a cloth covered with a white spirit, and old stain has to be sanded away. Paint and varnish will need ‘Stripping with a hot air gun or chemical stripper.

Veneered furniture

Never assume that your table is made from solid wood. If you start to strip a heavily painted table or chest of drawers using any of the methods mentioned above you may discover a thin delicate veneer coming away with the paint scrapings. A veneered table must be identified as such before you begin.

If it is impossible to tell through the finish, scrape away a small section of the paint on an inconspicuous part of the table with a craft knife so you can study the wood underneath. The only sure way to remove the old layers of paint and varnish without destroying the veneer is to sand them off gradually by hand. Even then, you may find the veneer is damaged.

Fixtures and fittings

If your piece of furniture has metal handles or hinges or ceramic knobs, it is essential to remove them before you begin, as they can be affected by chemical or hot air strippers. Take out any drawers and treat them separately. Old chests of drawers may be fitted with wooden knobs ¡ª these can be stripped along with the rest of the surface.

If your furniture has an old waxed or varnished finish that is basically sound, you can use a reviving fluid to clean and enhance the patina. Mix a solution of four parts white spirit to one part linseed oil and apply to the surface with a cloth. For carved and turned sections, apply the fluid with a soft paint brush and polish off with a cloth. This will remove the layers of dirt without destroying the old finish.

Stripping different surfaces Stained and waxed furniture.

Furniture with a stained or waxed finish must be cleaned back to the bare wood in order to give a good, fresh finish. The best way to remove old colored wood is to sand it away.

Use a sanding block and a selection of graded sandpaper, starting with a medium grade and finishing with a fine grade. Always sand with the grain of the wood to avoid unnecessary scratches. For large surfaces, it is worth using an electric orbital sander, but always finish by hand. Once you have reached the natural wood, polish with fine grade wire wool to give the grain a silky finish. Wax can be removed with the white spirit.

Painted and varnished furniture.

Step 1.

Use either a hot air gun or chemical strippers to strip furniture with a painted or varnished finish. Electric hot air guns are a safer version of the blowtorch (which can be tricky to use and tends to scorch the wood). They heat to a high temperature, blistering and softening the paint and varnish in their airstream until it can be scraped off with a shave hook or flat scraper.

Step 2.

Never direct the airstream at one particular spot for too long, as this can cause slight scorching that will discolor the wood below. (Discoloration is not a problem if you plan to paint over the stripped wood.)

Step 3.

With soft woods such as pine, there is also a danger of gouging the surface when removing the paint. Use a wide scraper held at a shallow angle to lift the paint. Chemical strippers create a chemical reaction which softens the paint. There are three kinds ¡ª liquid, gel and paste.

Step 4.

The liquid and gel can be applied to the surface with an old paint brush and scraped off about 30 minutes later, once the paint has been softened. The surface must then be neutralized with white spirit or water (according to manufacturer’s instructions) to remove all traces of the stripper. Several applications may be necessary to remove a thick build-up of paint.

Step 5.

Paste strippers usually come in powder form and must be mixed with water before they can be applied. After about 30 minutes the paste coating can be scored with a blunt knife and peeled away along with the old paint or varnish. These strippers are particularly suitable for carved or turned pieces.

If stripping indoors, ensure the room is well ventilated, protect your floor covering with several layers of newspaper and keep children and animals out of the way. Wear rubber gloves while you work as the chemicals can burn your skin, and dispose of the paint or varnish scrapings carefully.

Once the furniture is completely stripped, sand thoroughly and finish by rubbing down with a fine grade wire wool.