Bottom surface maintenance « Tsubo-en Zen-garden diary

Truffles in Tsubo-en (Hymenogaster-olivoceus)

The trigger "How to deal with Ginshanada soil settlement" was house painting during May/June 2015. During this period I also toke care of the whole of the gravel area and the surrounding borders. It is here where I found some truffles. This (false) truffles is a genus of fungi of the type Hymenogaster olivaceus [...]

Front-garden gravel-area restoration

At the time we initially constructed our garden we used a couple of hundred square meters of weed control fabric (barrier cloth) as a basis for the gravel area's, in particular the Ginshanada. When that was almost finished we walked into just a minor shortage of barrier cloth, to finish the gravel area to [...]

Sagina subulata as moss substitute

Sagina, called ‘pearlworts’ or ‘Irish-Moss’ (Dutch ‘Vetmuur’) can very well serve as a substitute for moss in a Japanese garden. Unfortunately we have a bad experience with it. In my post ‘Groundcover maintenance’ I wrote about the fact that Sagina is one of our most feared and persistent weeds in the ground-covers, or actually […]

Groundcover maintenance and mosses unwanted

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Most of the unwanted mosses grow well or actually far too well, throughout the year, including the winter-period.Early in the year we have a close look to decide on what maintenance activity is required. This can be a raking-job, pulling or pinching or a chemical treatment. Whatever method used it is all very cumbersome. In […]

Tidy-up the Ginshanada ocean or gravel-sea

After the winter period the gravel area’s need a rigorous tidy-up. Rather then duplicating these activities I will point you to last years activity. Some of the aspects we need to take care of are : Algae an mosses growing on and in the gravel. This may involve just […]

The Ginshanada and Island edges, a coastline

The Ginshanada or ‘silver sand open sea’ coastline is in most places the intersection of the gravel area with the Tsukiyama “land-area” that can be found in the front-garden and in the main-garden compartment (also see: my post ‘Tsukiyama, the edges in the front-garden’) and the coastline of islands, like the […]

Sprinkler-system maintenance, underground sprinklers

On average twice a year I clean the filters in the underground irrigation sprinklers, four of them. Perhaps double of that number of times I cut away the groundcover around the sprinklers. In addition the filter on the water-inlet hose gets cleaned once, in the beginning of the year, prior to switching on the garden-pump […]

The plague named Blackbirds

Blackbirds are really, really fond of our garden. And so we used to be fond of Blackbirds. This photo only shows one of the damages the birds do to our garden. Beautiful moss taken out of the joints between the flatstones of our “hidden terrace”. No moss is save in the garden and most […]

Hidden surface-edges

Edges, we have a lot of them in our garden. Most of them are surface-edges. In a number of earlier posts we showed the visible edges and the frequent maintenance that those require. Apart from visible edges we have plenty of surface edges that are situated out of sight, invisible to an average spectator […]

Maintaining the pathway edges

The Cotula groundcover would easily overgrow the tobi-ishi step stones. It may take a while before the path has disappeared but far before that point the characteristic beauty will have gone. The first photo shows the path as we like to see it after the edges where just cut. This is an activity without […]