Taking Back the Garden - The After

So winter left and spring arrived. This meant that there were finally no excuses left the weather was now good enough to get outside and get the garden under control before the next round of growth spurts happened.

I evicted the spiders from my gardening gloves, gave my trusty pair of secateurs a coating of WD40 and set to work chopping back the brambles. I learned some things in this process:

1. Brambles can grow blackberries
2. Bramble jam comes from blackberries
   
3. Brambles can grow very long vines that can also take root all over the place
4. Brambles are vicious things that have no qualms about tearing into your skin when you least expect it
   

Once that was done I decided to tackle the grass. I currently own a very cheap, small Flymo type lawnmower. Our previous garden was tiny and it could whizz through that in 10 minutes. I wasn't sure how it would handle the overgrown expanse of grass before it. In fact, I would have completely understood if it had done a runner while I was fetching the extension cable.

But, you know what? It did it just fine. Okay, so it filled up every 2 minutes but it was doing it without any smoking, melting or otherwise abandoning it's post. Bravo lawnmower, take a bow!

By half-way down the garden the green-waste bin had been filled. Since the tips were closed to non-essential users (due to the pandemic) we opted to pay the council even more money for their green waste service; something I'd vowed not to do when they got rid of the free service 10 or so years ago and made it a paid-for thing, but desperate times call for desperate measures and we'll definitely be getting our money's worth!

The bin needed emptying before it could be filled again so that's where I left it. Tracy, however, had other ideas. She had spent the winter looking out at that garden, with all it's squandered potential, and was itching to get out and improve things. So she wasn't about to let a tiny problem like "what will we do with all the rubbish" get in her way. Oh no, she was going to go for it!

Out came the hedge trimmer; it hadn't been seen in a decade (wish I could have a 10-year paid holiday from work!) and after a drink of WD40 it got straight into cutting back the bushes, cutting back plants and generally having way too much fun with Tracy.

 

There was one error that is worth mentioning so that you don't end up doing the same thing. It turns out that this type of plant doesn't grow back. So we've now butchered this tree permanently (not that we were left with much of a choice after how overgrown it had become).

This is a close-up of what is left of the flowers. Hopefully some nice person will recognise this plant and let me know what it's called {edit: it's a Buddleia, thanks friend} but if you have one of these - only cut where it's actively growing otherwise you'll end up with a load of bald branches!

 

Anyway, Tracy and the girls then got the stones off the path. My parents let us borrow their jet washer and, again, Tracy had way too much fun with it! Before you knew it, the patio area was clean and we discovered that not only did some of the slabs have colour but they were different colours in a pattern! Check out this time-lapse of the work:

 

 

If you're wondering what I was doing during most of the video, I was doing some exploratory work for the extension - but that'll be covered in a different post. For now, let's bask in the glory of Tracy's work with the jet washer...

 

Before the jet washing

After the jet washing (the greenhouse seems to have suffered somewhat)

Again, after the jet wash but with furniture deftly placed by the firstborn

After the jet wash again. Just look at the colours on those slabs! Also, those weird stone faces were discovered in amongst the plants once all the foliage was cut back

A vast improvement, I'm sure you'll agree. However, the pile of rubbish was now huge. Hopefully the tips will be open again soon because we probably have enough to fill our green-waste bin for the year already!