Garden progress

When John and I first came to look at our house before we bought it, I loved the garden but I think it was a case of rose tinted glasses. Our garden is really big and it did have loads of plants, a gravel path leading to the shed, a sunken patio and a pond which resulted in loads of cute frogs. I thought it was really cute and I was excited about finally having a garden. Below is what it looked like before, minus the workshop to the right on the first picture. The previous owners took that with them. 

Last year when my Mum came to stay we started working on clearing the garden as we discovered that it was all pretty much overgrown and dead underneath. Not quite the pretty garden I thought it was. We did a hell of a lot of work last year and went through 3 skips to get rid of all of the waste but we still weren't finished. Last year was a year of filling so many garden waste bags, giving away the gravel for free on Facebay and killing ourselves. 

This is what it looked like last summer:

Not quite the pretty garden it was before!! So, this year we are making a start on making the garden nice again. Last weekend one of our neighbours came round with his chainsaw to cut down the trees for us and get the stumps as close to level as he could which was a massive help. We've also had a new fence put in on the side we're responsible for. We've nearly got the sunken patio filled and only one area of plants left to clear as well as filling in the pond. It's getting there... slowly. Now that we have a dog I really want the garden to be more friendly towards him instead of just being a garden full of mud and not much else.

We're planning on using artificial grass and decking in the middle part of the garden. I then want to section off the back part of the garden with a picket fence and archway/ gate so I can have nice plants in there that Jackson can't eat. Also it will mean being able to have one part of the garden closed off and usable without really having to worry about the rest for a while. 

Maybe this summer I'll finally have a section of the garden I can sit in and read when it's sunny!

A skip and some hard work

Before the clear out!

After buying an old Victorian house, I have quickly started to realise just how much needs doing to it. One of the first jobs on the massive list was to clear the garden. The previous owners were artists and the guy made his own pottery. Well, I say pottery but it was figures and things mostly. As we looked around the garden after moving in we saw so much hidden underneath bushes but it was all ruined! Every single thing we found was broken in some way or another apart from a few plant pots. We had already started to pile this up in the middle of the garden so at least it was all in one place.

Then there were the plants. The garden is about 60ft in total although a chunk of it is patio. Two thirds of the garden was gravelled but with a lot of bushes and plants everywhere. My mum came to visit a couple of weeks ago and just started pulling things up, showing me that it was all dead anyway. That led to a weekend of pulling and digging up bushes. We were obviously left with bags and bags full of garden waste but we pay to have a garden bin and that is slowly going down now.

After

The gravel we had gotten rid of a lot of weeks ago as I offered it for free on a local Facebay site as long as the people who wanted it were prepared to shovel it and take it away themselves. A couple came and took three trailers full which did clear a lot. Now we have cleared more in the skip as well as deciding to re-gravel our shared driveway with the neighbours. That already had gravel in the middle but it was looking really thin and horrible so hopefully putting our gravel there will help it to at least look a little bit nicer. 

Patio area

Anyway, yesterday we got a skip delivered and we could really begin clearing things out properly. All of the gravel in bags has now gone as well as every single piece of broken pottery. Our sort of seating area is cleared now so we can finally use the table and chairs we have. There is still so much work to be done as the back half of the garden needs tackling at some point and everything needs leveling out before we can do anything else to it. However, this is quite far down our list of things to have done now but we have loads of time to get that done before next summer.

It's so rewarding to see such a big change in our garden and although it was hard work, it was well worth it!