Landscaping

Well this is awkward. Here’s a post from last summer that I wrote and everything, and then… forgot about.

There’s another one to come as well. But I’ll give it a day. Heh.

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The assault on the garden has been more or less a case of wandering around it until we have an idea that is good enough to constitute inspiration and then hacking away at that bit. It had been years (many of them) since a digger piled up all the nice dressed stone that had to be moved the foundation works and piled it all unceremoniously at the far (awkward, difficult to get to) corner fo the garden. And there it lay untouched until it was so covered in weeds that it was difficult to identify individual stones. It was becoming more of a small hill.

The whole area was a bit of a dump, with the old shower looking shabbier and shabbier and lots of piles of old crap we were vaguely saving to use someday.

Lisa took it on as a long term task to dig out the stones and move them around so we could actually see what we were dealing with. We managed to extract most of the large paving slabs and lay them, but we were left with a large number of smaller stones and no plan. And more awkwardly, a small number of larger stones that were way too big to move.

Once again, Anthony to the rescue. I hired a mini-digger and he came and drove it for a weekend, completely tranforming the whole area.

He managed to move the big stones and build a sort of retaining wall of them behind the apple tree, shoring up the planned lawn area above.

Sarah, Steven, Julian and I went round and collected up a lot of the rubble that needed losing and chucked it in behind the stones before some soil went on.

And Julian started building a raised bed in the corner from all the stone.

Naturally it became a race against the weeds as spring turned to summer.

But we were determined and inspired and progress was quite quick.

Both of us had aching forearms for this entire period. Those stones are really heavy!

We managed to use a pretty solid proportion of them, and along the back where there had been a low wall anyway, it was just a matter of re-setting the original stones.

By the end of a very hard working weekend, we’d finished the raised bed.

With a fair amount of leftover stone which will be used to form steps and borders between various areas back there.

I was meant to be planting it up this week, but here I am blogging about it instead. However, I’m not even going to publish this one for a few weeks, so I will very likely add to it and all you have to do is keep reading.