Tidying the Garden for Winter

Last weekend, we decided to do some work in the garden. The weather wasn't really co-operating, but we decided to go ahead regardless on Saturday afternoon.

We hadn't really done much work in the garden for a while. OH finished the decking outside the back door sometime in late summer and we'd done very little since. The summer was just so busy trying to find a flat for LB, working, etc., I hardly got chance to go out there and it was a real mess whilst the decking was being laid.

Anyway, here's a couple of pictures of what the garden looked like before we started:

 

There were lots of leaves to pick up and bag up to make leaf mould and lots of wood left over from the decking project stacked up. There was also quite a lot of pruning to be done.

I took the decked area close to the house and OH took the far end of the garden. I started off just sweeping up the leaves and cutting back some of the plants in the borders. I didn't clear all of the leaves, as we have a toad that we often find in the border and I wanted to leave him and other creatures some cover.

OH cleared the leaves in the other half and then decided to create a new border down the right hand side of the garden. He moved the hot bin next to the low fence and edged the whole bed with some large thick planks of wood we'd bought a while back.

We decided to remove the second raised bed in this part of the garden.  Having the allotment, we don't really need to grow veg at home too, and we want to build a brick patio in this half of the garden eventually. Creating the border gave us somewhere to put some of the soil from the raised bed, plus it gives me a nice new area to plant up next spring. OH also cleared away all of the wood left from the decking project, so it generally looked a lot tidier.

Here's how he got on:

There's still a lot more to do on this side of the garden. We desperately need to prune the cherry tree right back and a corkscrew hazel on the other side, but once the raised bed is down, this will make these jobs a lot easier. The brick patio might not get done until the spring, but I think it will make this part of the garden look a lot better.

As for my half, here's what it looks like now:

We moved the bench onto the decking in order to create the new border and I like it here for the moment, as it gives us somewhere to sit out with a hot drink on a dry day. I swept up the leaves and pruned a few plants right back and it's looking a whole lot better.

It's amazing the difference a bit of a sweep up and moving a piece of garden furniture can do.

There's still more pruning and tidying to do in this half of the garden too, but I was happy with the progress we both made.

On Sunday and Monday, whilst I was at work, OH did a bit more work in the garden and started to replace the border edging on the left hand side of the garden. It had rotted over time and collapsed. He dismantled the raised bed in order to reuse the sleepers to edge the border. He couldn't quite fully clear the soil from the raised bed, as we didn't have any bags to put the excess soil in. Some went in the newly edged borders and other parts of the garden, but there was still more than we needed.

As a consequence, on Tuesday, OH did a tip run and emptied quite a few bags that could then be filled with the compost and he took most of these to the allotment to put on the plot. The whole of this half of the garden is now covered with plastic, making it easier to walk to the shed and it is also now ready for the patio to be built.

I, in the meantime, transplanted a few plants here and there into the new border and generally tidied around.

Here's a final picture of how it looks now:

There's a few more leaves fallen since we swept up, but such is life. I bought a waterproof cover for the garden bench in view of all the rain we've been getting. It's not particularly attractive, but it was inexpensive and as long as it does it's job, it should prolong the life of the bench.

There are a few more jobs to do before we finally put the garden to bed for the winter, and we hope to do these before the end of the year.

I'll keep you posted with further progress as it happens.