We thought it was about time that we sorted a blog out, so family & friends a far could keep track of our doings!
We moved into our current house back in September 2009, after selling our house when Seren was just 2 weeks old. A month later, after living with Ellie's mother we (i.e. Ellie) decided that this was the house she wanted to live in. With a 6 week old baby, we started out our journey as a new family in our new home.
Come December I (me.. Chris) wanted to get to grips with some gardening. We'd had a taste of growing a few things in our previous house - mainly by buying plants from the garden centre, but this time around I wanted to do it properly.
Down the bottom of our garden, we had an area about 15' x 20' (in an arc-shape, not square unfortunately) covered with stone chippings. I set to work creating some beds:
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| Building the raised beds! |
After becoming a regular on some gardening forums I got a lot of the advice and help needed (by bugging the members there!) to start our growing our own fruit and veg!
To cut a long story short, after I had dug around 4' down through the stone chippings & finally filled the beds (went with the three larger ones in the above picture - still haven't used the small square ones) I became hooked on growing things. Every south-facing windowsill in the house was over-run with pots of seedlings and one of the bedrooms had the floor full of pots too. I soon ran out of (planned) growing space and put my name down on all the allotment sites around us.
Come March/April we decided to fence in the garden that was around the side of our house:
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| Side garden as seen from Google streeview! |
This would give me a lot more room to grow in, and also a site for a greenhouse (bad planning really - perhaps it'd have been better down the bottom of the garden, although I didn't want to have to fill in the holes I'd dug and shift almost 3 tonnes of topsoil/compost!)
Once the fence was completed I started to dig out the site for the greenhouse, as can be seen from the next set of photos. It was a bit of a pain as this side garden is on a slope, and I wanted to try and drop the level of the greenhouse down so it was a bit more hidden from view.
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| Pea gravel laid inside, and slabs laid to stop earth falling onto the greenhouse |
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| Frame up, only the glass to go |
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| Beds in the back garden |
I'd also created another raised bed in the side garden, 10' x 3' - and then divided this into 1' squares, to try out the Square Foot Gardening method, it's worked quite well although I'll be moving this bed later on. I created two further beds for fruit, and had put various pots and tubs of more fruit and veg.
