Tuesday 16 February 2010

Our Garden; A History: Part 4

Our attempts to get out into the garden have once again been thwarted, this time due to our Little Garden Helpers both suffering the high temperatures, rotten coughs and aching limbs associated with very bad chest infections. I am very much hoping that this slow start in the garden since Christmas will be followed by a very active spring and does not reflect the way things will be for the rest of the year. In the meantime however, I thought it would be a good time to return to the history of our garden.

At my last installment of Our garden; A History, it was June 2008 and Garden Dad, Grandad South and Uncle M had just completed our new fences. Garden Dad assures me that in the next few weeks he will write a post all about how they acheived this but as he is currently painting our kitchen I will not be pestering him too much; yet.

Just days after the fences were completed, Garden Dad was busy fitting the gravel boards while Garden Girl and I were sitting in the sunshine eating homemade ice-lollies and I started to feel contractions. Garden Boy was on his way and just 7 hours later he was born. We never quite finished the gravel boards and while working in the garden took a back seat for a few months our neighbour plugged the gaps with bricks which have remained there ever since. Although the desire to have our own vegetable garden remained strong, we agreed to take a break for a while and enjoy the garden without the work. For two months, the nearest we came to a vegetable garden was looking after our friends courgettes when they went on holiday.

It was August before we started on the hard work again and with renewed energy Garden Dad pulled up some paving stones, took out his pick axe and started to smash his way through the concrete at the bottom of the garden. This revealed a rubble filled pit that had once been a concrete lined sandpit so after all the rubble infill had been piled up beside the shed there was more concrete to smash through. When it was finished we had a newly revealed patch of soil ready for the raised beds we were to build and a mountain of concrete, rubble and broken paving slabs piled up next to the shed which remained there as a monument to Garden Dad's hard work until 2009 when a new year finally urged us to get rid of it all and make room for a greenhouse.

Clearing the concrete and rubble was just the start of preparing the ground however, so we roped in some help from Grandad South to remove some of the lawn and level the ground where we wanted to build the raised beds. Garden Girl thorougly enjoyed helping out with the digging and quickly settled into her role as 'site supervisor' which she has held onto ever since!

With the digging done, all we had to do was build the raised beds and we would be ready to start 'growing our own' the following spring, but that is a post in itself so for now I will leave you stamping in the soil with muddy boots.

3 comments:

  1. Golly! I remember turning the garden into ours as well. Still a few things to complete but most of the hard graft is finish, thank goodness! I'm sure you feel the same way too.

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  2. Lovely to see your next instalment. I really shoud do an update of ours, it seems a long time ago I detailed how our garden developed, mind you the allotment took over more of our tie last year and the garden came 2nd best. Hope to do more it in this year.

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  3. I love the picture about the Garden Dad with a breaking hammer! such enthusiasm and energy. ~ bangchik

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