I hope you are all well? We are heading to being 7 weeks into lockdown in the UK. Its meant that we are only going out for exercise once a day and essential food supplies. We took advantage of the good weather (there have been lots of mid 20 degrees c days) which we’ve had for the majority of the time (thank goodness) to do things in the garden like painting and gardening. I do appreciate that we are lucky that we have this space and so wanted to use the time to try and make the space work better for us. Many months ago though we made a start on this part garden, we always knew it was a project that would take some time to sort. Now at first glance (see the image above) you might think that is a lush little corner, but the trees that were planted there (22 years ago) weren’t meant for a small garden and even though we’d hired a tree surgeon to reduce the trees he’d let us know that in fact they really needed to go. So that’s what we did, taking both of those huge trees in the corner down but keeping the more manageable silver birch.
Plans to improve :
The image above, is this spring, at the start of the lockdown. You can see the corner is looking really scruffy. We had plans to take advantage of it getting lots of sunlight and plant it up, however, a traditional flower bed wouldn’t work as the ground was just impossible to dig because of huge tree roots from those old trees. We considered making a bench seat over the two tree stump too. We then decided in an ideal world we wanted to somehow section off this area to grow veg or even cut flowers. We hadn’t wanted to order lots of things and frankly didn’t want to spend any extra money. So our plans were to reuse whatever we had in the garden.
Gathering the materials :
This is the area as we started to gather everything we needed. I’d been searching for ages for a raised bed, we knew we didn’t have enough wood to make one so that was out. After seeing one of my online friends recommend this style of galvanised steel bed I thought long term it was worth making the investment. We had a few of those bricks left from the patio and drive we’d had built, as it turns out we had just enough. We also thought it was a great spot for our fire pit, which we’d never really found anywhere to permanently put.
So here is where we are now :
My husband Alex sunk those bricks to create an edge around the seating area and we decide rather than build a bench over the tree stump we would rest the arbour over them.
It’s still very much a work in progress. We need to reseed the grass, I think the fence definitely needs a lick of paint but that will all have to wait until we can easily buy some. I think we’d also like to get another of the steel veg planters so we can really give ‘growing our own’ a good go. This will all happen over time though. Getting seeds or plants is proving to be more of an issue as delivery understandably takes a long time and most places are closed. However, this is a feature that we’ll use this year and build upon as time goes by.
UPDATE : I’ve found a local business that sells a small selection of plants so I’ve done a very small order to get us going and used up some really old seeds that I have.
Dominique Jubien-Rickman says
Hello lovely lady and sorry I have kept away recently. I guess the lockdown is disrupting everyone’s routine… I hope you and your family are keeping well. We’re fine here on the South coast but carrying on being very cautious as required. Can’t remember the last time we went to a large supermarket.
Glad to see you made the most of the great weather, and those of us who have access to outdoor space are, indeed, very lucky. What you have done looks so very lovely, family-friendly and re-using materials is really satisfying. I’m a bit of a recycling-hoarder.
I love your raised bed – very stylish. I could do with something like this as I want to sow some French radishes and curly lettuce (apparently they’re easy to grow). We too have lots to do in the garden but (and I guess, thankfully) I’m still able to carry on working for myself from the garden office so time is always a bit limited during my working week.
Keep posting those lovely photos and keep safe. Dominique xx