The Garden

I've been "suggesting" to Andy for a while that we get some help with the garden. He wants to do everything himself but we just don't have the time or the knowledge to do it all. Yesterday morning we had a call from next door's gardener saying that he'd had quite a bit of work cancelled this week and Michael suggested he ring us to see if we wanted anything done. Yippee, we now have a gardner.

He's a really nice guy called ... Andy. We have so much we want to do so I took him on a tour and we came up with a plan. I want to rotivate the large vegetable patch right at the end of my agility area and reclaim this for agility training. So, yesterday Andy strimmed all the weeds and then when the new growth starts to come up he's going to come back and spray it. Then he'll rotivate and seed the area. He's also going to fill in some of the uneven areas at the top end of the garden to try to make a flatter surface. Many years ago the top end of our gardens were allotments so you have lots of uneven areas where vegetable beds used to be. We've also moved the bonfire further up so we can reclaim another area for agility.

Our back garden is walled and on one side the wall is very old and lovely to look at. Trouble is you can't see it because we've allowed the Ivy and Russian Vine to take over to a ridiculous extent. We were going to tackle it earlier in the year but we found black birds nesting in their so we abandoned the exercise. We also have a lovely magnolia tree at the rear of the garden and that also was starting to encroach to far across. See below!





So after strimming the vegetable patch, Andy set to tackling the above. He is a brave man. We don't want to lose all the Ivy and definitely not all the Russian Vine as the colour is glorious in the autumn but as you can see it was becoming triffid like in its proportions!

Here is work in progress and later on I'll post some pictures of the finished job. Andy is still busy out there today working on this walled area. He is a tree surgeon as well as gardener so he is also going to have a good sort out of our willow tree which has lots of dead in it. Once he's had a good go at the things we want him to sort then he'll come back periodically to help us keep it under control and give us some advice on planting. We have an area which used to be a pond and still has the line in place and this we want to make into a bog garden. Andy says it'll be ideal and is going to help us create this properly. There is so much to do in this garden and it's lovely to see improvement as we tackle various areas.

The wall starting to re-appear

I will post some more pictures at the end of today's work. The difference is amazing. The garden feels much bigger as a result.