Making a garden, one step at a time

The last couple of weeks have been all about the back garden here. Ripping everything out of the garden to be precise.

I took the picture above just after we had started working on the garden. It occurred to me that I should document the madness! ;-)

The garden was really overgrown when we moved in last summer, but we only cut things back a bit. Doing any real weeding in the flower bed was made difficult by the metal fence around it. And we knew that we wanted to rip everything out anyway, so no point in trying to make it pretty.

Oh and the broken bits of fence? Been there since one of the Christmas storms. ;-)

Ok, we're getting somewhere! That bin was completely full and we still had to make two trips to the local dump with the rest!

Several large stubborn roots were dug out and we found big stones and animal statues in among the plants. We even found a plastic plant pot that was dug down into the ground so all you could see was the rim. Weird, huh?

Once we'd cleared the weeds/plants, we could start on the thing we were really keen to get done: get rid of that metal fence. Which was quite a bit task!

The fence was welded to the supports so we had to cut them off. At first using a hack saw, but then our neighbour lent us his angle grinder which made it a lot quicker!

But the fun wasn't over yet, oh no. Because it turned out that not only were the supports dug over two feet below ground, they were also set in cement! Luckily, they'd been there so long that once we dug down deep enough, it was possible to twist them loose. But, jeez, we really thought we'd have to cut the supports and leave the bottom bits in the ground.

Of course, when I say 'we' I really mean 'Tony' because he did most of the hard work. But I did my part too, making sure he had plenty of cups of tea and admiring his hard work profusely. ;-)

So this is our garden. It's quite far from what I imagined when we talked about getting a house. There has not been much lounging in the garden in a flowy summer dress with a drink in my hand...

Atleast we have a parasol so we can sit out there in the shade and read a book or do a bit of embroidery.

There is a way to go yet before we have a pretty garden. The top few inches of soil will have to come out because it's so full of wood chips and roots and weeds and stones. More trips to the dump! Hopefully in the autumn we will start planting a few bits.

I have to admit it feels kinda dispiriting at the moment, looking at the garden. But hopefully in a year's time this will all be a distant memory when looking at our pretty garden.. :-)

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