Our new garden project

When we moved into our new house nearly five months ago one of our priorities was to make the back garden look good.  Having a lovely garden is important to us. The garden in our previous house had been my pride and joy and we loved spending time there so we wanted to make this new garden into a space where we could sit and relax, and enjoy.  We still felt that we had enough energy in us to be able to create another garden, although we didn't want as big a garden as our last house had. Over the years we've created two gardens and two allotments so we're not afraid of hard work. Although we're much older now, so we didn't want to tackle anything too adventurous.

The new garden was a blank canvas, just a lawn. We thought it would be easy to dig out some borders and plant them up. A couple of seating areas for different times of the day would be nice, morning coffee in the sunshine on the paved area near the house and later in the day, sitting with a glass of wine over the other side of the garden in the late evening sunshine. I'd love a pergola with climbing plants,  a water feature and of course a shed.  

We thought about our budget which wasn't going to be very much. Being in our late sixties, early seventies we don't want a garden which is going to take years to develop, we want to enjoy it now. It's a bit like those garden makeover programmes on TV which provide instant gardens. The only instant colour and interest was from plants in pots which I had brought  from our old garden. I placed them around the garden where I thought they might eventually get planted and put some on the flagged area to add a bit of colour.

We soon found out that the garden has lots of problem areas. The  garden slopes down south west to the bottom and we noticed a number of  humps in the lawn, we wondered what those were. When we started work on digging out borders we found heavy clay soil. When it rains (and it has done a lot of raining this summer) the garden does not drain well. There were puddles down at the bottom of the garden and the lawn was very squelchy.

We've dealt with clay soil before in our first garden, so we had an idea of what to do. Digging a land drain and trying to break down the soil by incorporating plenty of bulky organic material was important and maybe building raised beds.  I have been making lists of plants which will grow in wet, heavy soils. There are lots of plans going around in my head and I need to put them down on paper.
This garden project is not going to be as easy as we first thought.

Lots of mud, a wobbly tree and a disgruntled pigeon

marsh marigold

Our new wildlife pond is starting to look good. I have planted a marsh marigold an iris and a white forget me not. I just love the marsh marigold, it seems to have more flowers  every time we visit the plot and it's such a lovely bright, cheerful yellow.  We can't plant up the boggy area around the pond  yet as there are lots of weeds to be cleared away and it's quite a messy job which will take some time too. It's a job which has to take second place to other allotment work.  So in the meantime I have been looking around my garden to see what  moisture loving plants I have which can be divided, potted up and then planted when we have finished clearing and preparing the ground.  I have astilbe, hostas, rodgersia, teasels and more irises.
I have to resist the temptation to go to the garden centre and buy more, I must wait until I can see properly how much planting space there is. I really can't wait to get started on the bog garden and get our wildlife area sorted.

the pond planted up 

Richard has been clearing the old pond and redirecting the drainage pipes so that they go alongside the fence, that's another very messy, muddy job. We now have a muddy hole where the pond used to be which needs filling in. When this area is sorted we want to gravel it and put up a greenhouse or small polytunnel.

the old pond is now a muddy hole

We encountered problems over the weekend with the high winds.  With all the weeding and digging we have obviously disturbed the roots of a conifer tree which is next to the fence bordering ours and the next plot and noticed that the root ball was lifting every time there was a big gust of wind.  The only thing stopping the tree from falling over was the fence.  Another job now is to cut the tree down, but to add to our problems, when Richard started cutting out some of the branches, he discovered a pigeon sitting on a nest at the top of the tree looking down at him! We hope the pigeon isn't too upset, although we're not sure if it really was the pigeon's nest or whether it was just sitting there for a rest or maybe it was eyeing up the purple sprouting brocolli plants in the bed adjacent to the pond. They've already been attacked by pigeons. The nest doesn't look big enough for a pigeon so we are going to watch for a while before any more tree cutting is done.

 the wobbly conifer partly cut down

Cold

Well it was really, really cold, but we still went to the allotment. Richard wanted to put some drainpipes into his dug out drains on plot8, Helen and I wanted to do other things.

 I still have restricted movement in my wrist so wasn't able to do very much. I just watched and acted as director of operations. Helen put some staging in the ploytunnel on plot 10b and sowed some carrots in a tub to grow in there.  She also dug up the gooseberries and blackcurrants and put them in a new border which we had prepared along the front of the plot. We had originally planted these bushes in the autumn in another border, but felt that there wasn't enough depth of soil. They should be quite happy in their new border. Helen dug over the old bed after we had moved the fruit bushes.  It will be fine to grow veg in.

We also went over to plot 8 to see how work was progressing with the drains. We investigated the pond and to our delight we found frog spawn!  Hoping that means lots of frogs to eat the slugs.

 

Draining plot 8

We made a start on plot 8 our new allotment last weekend. We didn't really know where to start, there is so much rubbish and it has been very neglected. We sorted through broken plant pots and seed trays, managing to salvage some big pots which would do for growing potatoes in. We started to make a pile of bricks, there seem to be hundreds of them all over the plot, but they will be useful. There are lots of other stones and rubble lying around which again will be useful, especially as we are needing rubble to lay the foundations of the paths on plot 10b. The very flimsy raised beds still had the  remains of dead plants in them, which we cleared.  They seem to be not very deep, lined with membrane and filled with compost, but we can use them this summer as overflow beds for plants from plot 10b. We noticed that there were two small beds with strawberries in so we will leave those, give them some TLC and see if they produce any fruit. The whole plot seems to have had membrane, bits of carpet and wood thrown down in an attempt to suppress the weeds.  I don't think it has been dug over in years.

Down one side of the plot, part of the boundary fence has a conifer hedge, which we could tell had not been cut in a long time and our neighbours confirmed this.  They keep their side well maintained. Richard made a start on cutting it back. Although he has cut into the wood which means it will not grow again on our side, we have probably gained a few feet of extra space.

 

As  we worked with our clearing up Helen's husband David got a fire going on our other plot to burn the debris and hedge cuttings. We still finished up with a big pile of rubbish which couldn't be burnt.

All the work  was made more difficult because of the water running down the plot. Some areas are very muddy, making it very slippy. So Richard has also been tackling the drainage problem. He has dug out a drain from the top of the plot where the water source starts. This is channelled down to the pond and then out to the bottom of the plot onto the lane.  He intends to put some drain pipes into the dug out areas to make proper drains.  This is the most important job at the moment on the plot. We can see some improvement already as the path and steps into the plot has now dried out and we can enter without worry of falling over in the mud.

As we spend more time clearing up our new plot we are forming a plan in our mind of how to lay it out.
We've a lot of work ahead of us though.