Gardens

I gave myself the day off today, partly because I needed a break (there's only so much fluff you can inhale in a week before you start to get high on the fibre fumes!), and partly because we needed to go food shopping.
Our nearest supermarket is 35 minutes drive away so we try not to go too often. We also call in the butchers in town. He wins lots of awards for his meat, and the service is fantastic, they always give us a bag of bones for the dogs too.
We also called in at the garden centre, the garden was a wilderness when we bough the house, and while there are some hidden gems, the brambles and nettles had taken over. Apparently our house used to be famous for the rhubarb it produced, and we did find a few very sorry looking plants hiding in the undergrowth, we're slowly nursing it back to health, but these things take time, as does filling 3/4 of an acre. We keep going back to the garden centre, and car boot full at a time it's filling out.

This was when we moved in, you can't see the giant conifer tree just out of shot, but a sense of the undergrowth is there just above the house. The drive was also a grassy, muddy mess, it took 18 tonnes of slate chippings to solve that problem!



Eighteen months later and the shrubs are becoming under control and the giant tree is gone.



Some of the few surviving plants were roses that were positively thriving despite years of neglect, after a good prune, they're growing really well.



This winter we dug a pond, the garden is full of springs, and has loads of land drains hidden away so we designed it to be filled with spring water, and have a natural overflow in to the other end of the land drain. The constant flow of water keeps the pond really clear, and the wildlife seem to love it.


In this picture you can see the gaps though, and gaps mean the weeds just keep growing, so the gaps have to go.
I think it will take a few more car loads though!