Bank Holiday Garden Project

This Bank Holiday, we decided that we would stay home in London and do some work on the garden. As I've mentioned in a previous post, we wanted to alter the garden, so that I can eventually give up my allotment and be able to grow the vegetables we need here at home.

The main reason for this is that after 10 years of allotmenteering I've begun to find traipsing to the allotment quite burdensome.  Don't get me wrong, I've loved having an allotment and realise that I've been very priviledged to rent one in London, but for the amount that I grow there, I could be growing it at home and not have to go far.  It's just time to move on and let someone else have a chance at a plot.

As LB is now a teenager, she rarely goes into the garden, so keeping it grassed seems pointless and is getting more difficult as the dog is now the main user of this space. She runs up and down wearing out the grass in the winter, leaving it looking like this as spring rolls around.

OH is fed up of re-turfing and re-seeding it, so we decided we would just get rid of it. Instead of the grassed area, I decided that I would like one or two large raised beds, into which I can plant salad crops or potatoes and other veg.  We want to make them quite deep so that the dog won't keep jumping into them or running across them and we intend to put chippings down over the rest of the ground, so that she can run around the beds.

I did originally want to get rid of the flower borders, but on one side I have some mature bushes that I like and that take very little maintenance, and on the other  a cherry tree and a couple of other plants that I want to keep and hence we need to just create a very slim border here.  Both borders, however, need an edge creating to stop the spread of the chippings.

As the Bank Holiday weekend was forecast to be a good one, and LB was busy revising for some exams at school, we decided to dedicate it to the garden and set about researching timber prices.  The best place by far was Selco, the trade builders merchants, to which OH has a card. So, on Saturday afternoon, (slow start I know, but it is the Bank Holiday!) he headed up there to buy the timber and posts needed to get started on the project.

In the meantime, I got down to pruning some of the bushes in the wider border to make more room for the beds to be installed. Unfortunately, I had woken up with a sore crick in my neck, which rendered me virtually useless for most of the day, but this job at least did get done, which was a start.

Here's a picture of the garden, before we got started.

I hadn't done any work in this part of the garden since last summer, so it was looking pretty unkempt, but hopefully we'll be able to knock it into some sort of shape by the time Tuesday rolls around.

Today, my neck is feeling much better, the wood has been cut to size and treated and we are ready to start building the beds. I'll keep you posted with progress.