Making Our Garden Spectacular
After spending hours painting our fence green, we have decided to put up some hazel screening.
This is how it looked before:
This is our fence before. As you can see, it is a rather ordinary and boring looking fence.
So! We painted it!
We bought Sherwood Green wood treatment from Wickes and used some cheap brushes from Aldi. We didn’t need to use posh brushes as the treatment covered the wood fairly easily.
But we still covered it all in hazel.
It’s Time to Paint the Fence
With winter drawing in, we thought it might be a good idea to put some treatment on the fence.
This is the before picture:
We went to Wickes to buy the treatment, we bought Sherwood Green wood treatment in the smaller sized tub. It turns out that was just enough!
We used cheap brushes from Aldi but the treatment covered the wood well enough even using the cheap brushes.
This is a picture of my dad helping us to paint. I was obviously helping too, I just stopped to take the very important photos! But the fence did look fairly lovely in the end!
As you can see…
I’m really pleased with the result. I think it looks really natural and effective in our garden. What do you think?
We are planning to cover it all in hazel anyway.
Creating Plant Beds!
As I’ve said in an earlier post, we wanted a bit of an unusual shape to the garden. It’s all so easy to have straight boarders but they just don’t add character to these straight new build gardens.
The idea from the plan was to create a wavy journey from the house to the bottom of the garden (among the birds and the bees). As guests progress down the garden, they will pass colours and scents all the year round!
Well, that’s the plan.
The Tale of the Ropey Lawn
Our lawn was looking a little rough. Dad had been working hard in the garden which meant our poor lawn had been trampled on, smothered in soil and generally not very green.
It doesn’t look so bad in this photo but it was a bit of a squashed lawn. Dad’s solution was to rake the lawn. I think it looks really good now.
I know the raked side looks browner as all the dead grass has been pulled up, but it also looks a lot healthier and thicker.
Here is a pic of the not raked grass:
It does look green but to me it looks very thin. Perhaps the photograph doesn’t illustrate it well enough.
Here is a photo of the raked grass:
It does look a lot more brown but it is autumn at the moment. I think that it does look a lot better.
We have started to use the grass as a sort of compost for the other plants around the garden.
So hopefully our clematis will grow with lots of beautiful flowers.
That is the most interesting thing that has happened to our garden so far. Next up: Hazel screening!
Sieving!
We have been sieving out the soil. Being a new build, a lot of the rubble from the construction site is buried in the soil. This does not make for good soil. It can also make the soil very alkaline.
So, we have a garden sieve and have been sieving the soil.
This is the result! A lot of the soil that was here before has been moved to else where in the garden, and under here is a deep trench of stones, rocks and other debris from the garden.
This is the first step towards making out garden lovely and perfect.
This are Our Ideas
Before starting a garden, a plan is required. You might simply use a sketch or some of those amazing online garden design websites, but you will need a plan.
We chose to sketch our plan out and began by measuring the garden.
Using accurate measurements we were able to plan out what we wanted for our garden.
Bad Weather Fail
The whole purpose of our garden, for us, is for somewhere to entertain and have fun with our friends and family.
To that purpose, we bought a gazebo.
The only problem was the weather!
Going Green
We were a bit disappointed to see our lovely new house with only a patch of mud outside! Our house was beautiful but the garden was mud!
And, as you can see, a huge plate right in the middle of it! That was the last thing we wanted! However, the fence was built…
We needed lawn, and quick!
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| Our Garden April 2012 |
