Preparing the ground

11 September 2019


Having returned from our two-week tour of Egypt, we slept for a couple of days, and then threw ourselves into preparing the garden for some 'hard landscaping'.  This essentially means we get a digger in to do a bit of reconstruction, ideally without trashing any of our trees or existing infrastructure.

We have decided to put a large wildlife pond in the space where we have serially failed to grow very much - the six beds at the bottom of the hill.  It is the flattest area we have, and six beds of one metre by four gives  us around four by eight metres, including spaces between beds. 

So Dave started by strimming all the long grass, so we could see what we were doing.

 This shows the edge of the beds that have never done very well, now sadly overgrown.  There is also an unused raised bed, that I made to get some decent wood used up and out of the house before the floor went in.  

 Tackling some very overgrown areas.

 While I disentangled all the growth in the mobile chicken netting, and rolled it away neatly for another time.

 While we were away, Rowan and Paris stayed in the house to look after it for us, and Rowan got on with more of the terrace, putting in these lovely steps to the south.

 This is the area I cut and cleared.  It is the bank below the house, and was full of building rubble, branches, irrigation pipes and very overgrown.  The flourishing plant at the top left of the photo is my prized comfrey, which grows wild in the UK but needs to be positioned on top of our grey water outlet to survive our summer.

Further along the bank to the right, behind the mixer, there is a lot of lime overflow from cleaning out the mixer.  This will have to be dug out.