From this:
Fence going up 4 August 2009
This is the garden on a good day! Because I knew Davy was coming over to put up the fence, I cut down all the 5-6 feet tall nettles, docks, brambles etc so that he could actually see where the fence was supposed to go.
To this:
Fence up and bamboo screen installed at bottom of garden
To this:
Most of the ground dug over and nettles dug up 18 September 2009, and these are nettle roots by the way! Gate also covered with bamboo screening. I was going to just paint the gate but honestly it’s so awful that it’s much better just to hide it. I had thought also that I couldn’t do much with this mess of a garden except try to clear the nettles and put some grass down, but once the nettles came up, and I saw how good the soil was, I started to think that maybe I could do something more here.
To this:
20 September 2009
These are the raised beds from link-a-bord. While resting my ankle, I’ve been trying to work out on paper how to get the most growing space from what I have and have come up with this design, but I’m not entirely happy with it. Luckily it can easily be changed or moved so no worries.
25 September 2009
Beds are now full of soil from the garden. All those rocks and pots full of rocks and lumps of concrete that are lying on the path all came out of this section of the garden!!! There are also two full buckets of broken glass which also came out of this part of the garden, and some broken crockery too. This bit looks a million times better with the fence, the screening, the unearthed cement base, the cleaned up path, and NO NETTLES. Of course now it just looks bare and needs some growing things to liven it up a bit.
1 October 2009
These are all the slabs I found lying around in the garden unused, so I thought it might look nice if I put them in a square in front of the raised beds which will give me a good solid surface to walk on and also somewhere I could put pots etc. Lifting these nearly killed me and broke my wheelbarrow, but luckily before that happened I was able to borrow a porter trolley from Karen, which made things a lot easier. You can also see the bottom of the garden is tidied up now and the compost bins are finally in a place where I can use them and I also moved the green planter seat down here too.
13 November 2009
The grass seed I planted at the bottom is now growing – I was worried I was too late as I planted in October. I probably won’t keep it there but I wanted to see something green down there and it will protect the soil and keep the weeds down over winter.
It took some time, especially after I hurt my ankle and was on crutches for weeks and therefore out of action, and digging up nettles is probably about the worst job I’ve had to do. Those things are so strong and well established and thick as electrical cables that it was a real battle to get them out. They must have been growing there for years and they really didn’t want to leave.
