wow days 10-13...pic overload..lol

Not sure whats happened to the photo here but it shows the nice new scallep gates my hubby out onto the compost bins to keep it looking tidy. How posh do they look...lol

We now have a little shed to keep our tools and more importantly where we can sit and have a nice cup of tea

sorry i didn't realise it had been a month since i last did our gardening blog, so much has happened in the last month

we have made 2 brassica cages...our little polytunnels as we call them....ready for our cabbages etc to go into into away from 2 fat gready pidgeons who seem to attack our vegetables. These tunnels were made out of bamboo canes and mdpe water pipe.

Well we have managed to blag free wood and was able to finish all the beds, paths and edging of the garde. We can now see what space we have the amount of beds we have and how it is going to look next year.

This is the shape in the middle of the garden with paths leading from the shape in the centre, which is currently planted out with winter brassicas....these are to be moved under the polutunnels away from the birds under some wondermesh we purchased from a local company.

i will so a before and after post once i get some new pictures taken....well i will attempt to take some

our washing machine brazier

We managed to sorce and old washing machine drum from our friend dougs old washing machine and ally managed to put on 3 legs of metal from an old metal bed we had and hey presto we have our very own washing machine brazier.

The legs are old angle iron from an old bed and the ends of them have a bracket on them which we can bolt down to breeze blocks or slabs.

So we now have a nice cosy brazier to huddle round when its chilly

It is amazing what you can make out of recycled junk isnt it.

after day 9

We are happy, we managed to get the pallets all painted and put together to make recycled compost bins...instead of 3 we managed to knock together 4 and of course we have the plastic one at the end...so lots of compost making ahead.
I even had a bag of lovely dung from my rabbits and guinea pig to start it off...lol...we hope to make as much of our own compost as possible to save us money and to get rid of the rubbish from the garden.

Today we have screwed all the top paths new wood so we have lovely new edging on the top path way, giving back the garden its shape.
Then today we have managed to mark out 4 paths and 4 nice beds in the centre round the pumpkin patch....with thanks to amandas hubby steve and my son michael.
Everything is pegged and screwed in place so it is nice and solid...and of course all with recycled wood which is even better.
With this all now in place the middle of the garden looks alot better and we can see how the garden is going to look.
so a third of it has now been transformed ...only 2 thirds left to attempt...groan....lol

after day 8

Today was a bit of a clear up day

The huge pile of old sticks, wood and rubbish needed to be burned.....and burn it did and what a cloud of smoke went with it and the stink...ewwww

So its now down to a nice pile of ashes which we will now dig back into the ground.

We also went over the bit doug dug for us last week and weeded out all the roots and weeds and

made it into a pile ready to burn another day.

So i think we have just over half the garden double dug and weeded out the roots and raked over...its looking great if i do say so myself.

Amanda planted out some home grown pumpkins by amanda into our shape to get us started and they look lovely. So at least we can say we have planted something this year.

The square got another dig over and rake over to get it a little more level in preperation for our permanent fruit bed...and boy what a difference it is. The ground is lovely and the soil is really lush just ready for our fruit in the autumn

phew so that was our mornings work over and done with...

after day 7

Work started on the bit we call the square this morning.
We gave it a good dig, got rid of alot of the weeds and made a start to levelling out the ground.
The ground is beautiful and really soft....though a little stoney its looking good.
We have also decided its not where the garden shed and composters are going ...this was our plan.
It is now going to be out permanent fruit bed...we will have blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, strawberrys, raspberrys and fruit trees....phew sounds loads doesn't it...lol
It is going to be lovely as we plan to have a big fruit cage round the fruit to keep the birds and beasties out.

after day 6

Had a good dig of the ground again today.

We have moved all the sticks to the far end of the garden ready for burning along with a pile of roots to dry out to stick on the fire.....that is only half of the rubbish we need to burn..lol

I got my son michael to dig over the shape again and give it a level out to kill out weeds and the ground is lovely.

Here is a slightly better view of the garden which thanks to our friend Doug has been nearly all dug over. Another couple of digs and a clear up of any weeds and we should be sorted as to what we want it to look like.That in itself is a mammoth task as i have no idea how we are going to set it out...it has to be functional but pretty at the same time.We also need a heap of bark to make

the paths with and to cover all the weeds on the bottom path....so more blagging need to be done to get some bark and lengths of wood

Day 5 and a surprise for amanda

Well another sunny day and amanda is off to london for the weekend to watch madonna in concert. So while amanda is away i managed to get our friend doug to borrow a truck and we have just removed all the black bags of weeds.

It took 2 loads and we had over 200 bagsof stinking rotting weeds to load and unload.

So the garden is now black bag free and we can see whats what.

I managed to dig alittle more in front of the shape while waiting for the first load to be taken away, and managed to fillt he last 6 bags with roots so we could get them away in the second

load

The weeds are growing like the devil so we will have to get going and get the paths all watered with weedkiller to keep them at bay, i am thinking eventually we will fill the bottom one with bark and weed control fabric to make it look better and to keep the weeds at bay.

after day 4

The first thing we did this morning is to unload the car. I had a bench from home that hubby thought we could use in the garden so its sitting on the bottom path in shade under the big sycamore tree so we had at least some shade when the heat got too much and boy was it hot here today.

The big dig has begun

My friend Doug came up this morning with his fork and turned over a good part of the garden this morning.

On the left is the garden as it was and on the right it has been doug over for the weeds to dry before taking them off and bagging them for the tip. Although it doesnt look like much believe me he got aload of the garden dug today

I also moved the big pile of sticks over on the dug ground ready to burn in the next week or so.

While we were digging about in the garden hubby was putting up a fence in the square at the end where the compost bin is going
So these pictures is before the fence went up and after the fence is up...they are both still to be painted to match the gate but the square is beginning to take shape.

Then the next job was to remake the shape we have in the middle with newer wood and pegs.

It took forever...lol....

While waiting we gave it a good dig over and removed as much of the weeds and roots as we could.

Then after the shape was pegged and made we raked over the ground to let it dry out before we give it another dig and weed out.

So this pictures is of it before it was renewed and dug and the next is how it now looks.

Pretty good isnt it....it really does look very different to how it was this morning .

after day 3

This is a new fence we had put up at the back of where our compost bins and shed are going to go. This is a square that we cant do much with so we are going to weed it then try and flatten it out.
It has now been stained the same colour of the gate by my youngest son scott

This is views of the path round the top of the garden which we can now see once we gave it a good dig and got rid of all the weeds and roots. It really defines the garden now and we can see it taking shape and of course have somewhere we can walk now

after day 2

Another day on the garden

We decided that we would try and define and clear up the paths and steps round the garden.

At the far end of the garden there are steps from top to bottom.

In the morning i decided to clear the steps and we found a nice step of steps with chuckies on them (stones) and as the stairs are good we have decided to keep th em as they now are apart from putting down some weedkiller to keep them looking good.

We then cleared up the rest of the weed piles and bagged and added them to our already large pile of black bags.

It is coming together nicely isnt it..lol

after day 1

This is the garden before we started to clear up

This is the garden after we bagged up most of the rows of weeds.

We bagged up and moved all the weeds into bags and boy was it a messy day for me and amanda we got scratched, stung and dirty but we managed to get most of the rows bagged up.This is how much bags we got the first day and how it looked after our morning of work.

Only working in the mornings as the heat is too much in the afternoon and it gives us the afternoon to get cleaned up and sort out our own gardens..lol

The difference is subtle but it is beginning to take shape slowly but surely

garden gate

with the garden being on a public road and having no gate we decided to get a gate put up. This is what it looks like before the gate....once the gate is made ...and......the finished stained gate

This gate will keep the local kids out as well as keeping the dog walkers and their dogs out but most importantly it keeps our garden safe from being damaged or vandalised.

Our New walled garden

WOW we have just taken over a plot of land we hope to turn into a garden allotment type thing...

this is how it looked when we took it over.

The owner had strimmed all the weeds and green rubbish and had raked it into piles.

Ready for us to make a good start in clearing it all up.

we plant to have fruit and veggies in our garden and hope to get the garden into a good shape