Hello !

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:

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:

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.

Choosing the best orientation

Started to dig the site out

I'll finish this post off with some more photos to show you the progress made...

Site cleared, trench dug, base assembled

Base concreted in, leveled out and stabilising fabric down  

Pea gravel laid inside, and slabs laid to stop earth falling onto the greenhouse

Frame up, only the glass to go

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.

I started a Picasa album with more photos in - http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/chris.marks/Garden#