Plenty of digging required for various purposes:
- Turning over beds and borders that were remaining in place
- Digging out a base for the greenhouse to lay flagstones
- Creating a separate flagstone base for a large water butt
- Moving soil from above areas and the rear of the garden, which is planned to be a hedge eventually
- Using the excess soil, which is good quality topsoil having originated in the front garden, to fill dips in the old lawn
- Digging a trench to lay a cable for greenhouse electrics
The cable was being put in by a qualified electrician but had to be buried 18 inches deep, which as one might have expected, turned out to be three inches deeper in parts than a clay layer – that wasn’t fun.
Planning all this together with a few other preparatory jobs meant it could be done reasonably efficiently despite changeable weather, and three days over two weekends plus a few short evening sessions saw the digging finished by myself. At the same time, I removed any large stones, weeds, small stones in some areas planned for reseeding the lawn and a few bushes including some large ones. The stone went as hardcore for a neighbour’s drive, and the wood from the bushes, after being left to dry out for a few weeks, went to people who could make use of it.
I found once again that working in focused, relatively short periods of say 1.5 to 2 hours on particular areas with decent tools worked well, especially around the weather. I refamiliarised myself with some of the soil and what else lay underneath, including “ant city” and a forest of nettle roots under some of the undergrowth!
It also gave me chance to use some favourite tools, notably the trusty old mattock (similar to a pick axe) which comes into its own for this type of job. Hiring machinery to do just relatively small and slightly fiddly jobs didn’t seem sensible or time- or cost-effective.
Within this same task I also put bricks around a disused manhole for the old drain, and put a repotted magnolia on top as a temporary measure. 
This keeps the drain accessible should it ever be needed and lifts the surface level up to where the new lawn is planned to be.
The rear bed requires more digging but I’ve still not decided on the final plan for that so left my options open. Also further challenges await there; aside from some of the bush roots they include some buried tree stumps that I have a tentative plan for that hopefully avoids any probably futile attempt at their removal.
Recently we decided that we had let our garden drift to a point where we wanted to make changes. This subsequently developed into reintroducing greenhouse gardening into our hobby. Then we cleared quite a bit of the garden to address a few issues, including:
- Overgrown borders and some plants that were out of control and getting worse
- Some bushes that had lost any shape and housed a few mysteries of a probably unpleasant variety
- A lawn with a few weeds but also a very uneven surface in some places due primarily to a disused drain running beneath part of it.
We are not new to this and above all, we knew that we could do more with it and enjoy the whole process. I should add that after we had started, we were further enthused by a holiday in Cornwall, rightly referred to by some as the “garden of England”.
So our initial ideas revolved around:
- building a greenhouse to allow us to grow a wider range of plants and potentially, but not definitely, some fruit and vegetables
- sorting out various plants and the lawn
- sorting out the rear of the garden a bit more seriously than our casual and short-lived attempt a few years previously
……. while incorporating a few things that we wanted to do.
Our garden is never going to be a model for paradise, but just somewhere pleasant to relax. Both my wife and I enjoy gardening or sitting reading or writing and watching birds, butterflies and wildlife.
There are many aspects of gardening that I find interesting but overall I’m very much in favour of letting things evolve and watching the garden develop. I’d be concerned if I ever thought it was going to be finished.
While we like testing things, seeing what works and what doesn’t, we also know that for the most part, plants will right themselves. They might need a little help from time to time.
I’ve seen the idea of “mix and match” in gardens lectured against, but really you should do what suits you. I’m very much into the practicalities, take a “cheap and cheerful” approach whenever it’s merited although there are some false economies as I’ve sometimes learned. Most of all, I always take the view that my current plan for the garden might change and to me, that’s good.
