Not very exciting, but we’ve started breaking down and raking the bed where the lawn will go. This has been harder than the digging…

And, I have to confess, that I have had a bit of a change of heart. I didn’t want to use any chemicals on the land – hence all the digging etc. But I have come to the conclusion that if we are going to be able to grow a lawn from seed then we will need to spray it first – the number of roots and shoots in there is large and so I think it will be too much competition for the grass seed. This is a problem for me because the spray will unavoidably wash into the rest of the soil, end up in the lawn shavings and ultimately end up in our food which wasn’t what I intended to achieve… I feel a bit sad about that, but I think it’s probably a sacrifice that will need to be made.

Big leaps forward.

On the 2nd January Steve decided that given he hadn’t made any new year’s resolutions that 2007 was to be the year of the garden.

First he borrowed a relatives hedge trimmer and butchered the hedge. It took several hours and a saw was used more than the trimmer. That was piled up at the end of the garden.

The next weekend another relative came around with a strimmer and chainsaw to finish off the hedge. We don’t think that the neighbours were overly enamoured at the strimmer being fired up at 8am on a Saturday morning, but then they weren’t enamoured with the garden either so at least some good came.

That same day the digging started and over the next 5 weekends it was dug over. It turned out that the former owner had had a couple of greenhouses – we can vouch for this being true because we think we found half of the panes smashed under the ground. We found the old plant describing thingies buried with it all – they were using the greenhouses for growing some sort of tomatoes.

Other highlights included stacks of smashed tiles that some workman or other couldn’t be bothered to dispose of plus the usual piles of rubble, metal and two lengths of rope.

In the intervening time strong winds brought down the remainder of the delapidated fence, including the bit closest to the house.

You can see from the photos two rectangles marked out with wood – that is where we intend on putting the shed (furthest from the house) and the greenhouse.

Oh, and as an added bonus, you will noticed that we dug up the old concrete path – under about 10cm of soil by the end of the garden, you had no idea a path was there from the 30th August photos eh?

We didn’t move into the house until November, but we nipped around the back of the ten-foot to take some quick snaps before the neighbours phoned the police.

You can see that the hedge was unloved, the garden unloved, the fence unloved, and well there just wasn’t a lot of love going on in there.

We couldn’t find any evidence of cultivated plants and thistles the size of, erm, big thistles.