2014:The Year of the Garden.............

Well folks, its coming to the end of the 'outdoor work ' weather here in Aberdeenshire and so a chance to look back at what we have been able to get done in the garden this year. 

It was only last year that the pond was filled in giving us a much larger garden space and the grass seed has grown over it nicely. In that area of the garden we marked and dug out some decent sized flower beds and planted them up with as many shrubs and flowers as we could afford.....roses, lavender, daisies, agapanthas, fuscia, more roses, potentillas, hydrageas, delphiniums, loopins......all the cottage garden favourites and some evergreen shrubs thrown in for winter structure. Even my parents helped me out with the digging and my Mum brought us up a car load of plants as she always does.

I have tried to give the lawn a shape with curved edges......its not a perfect cicle but I think we get away with it. We have also planted some trees randomly in this area, picked for either thier foliage in the Autumn or blossom in the Spring.

The flower beds are all edged in box hedging- they are only small just now but I know in a few years they will all join up and form a neat little hedge. So far we have put in about 500 of them at 15-20cm tall.

 

These shots were taken from an upstairs window. Bats live in that Ivy to the right

 which has totally taken over our giant Ash tree.

We were able to tidy up the patio area quite a bit too by extending the original patio out to one side over a pile of rubble and meaning we can now actually use our utility room door. We dug out a gravel path along the front and this will exend all the way down the garden when I find more old bricks at the recycling centre to edge it with!!
We added a new step down onto the path which is not quite finished and will use some old stone to clad the breeze block to blend the extension in with the old part of the patio when we get around to it.










We are planning on replacing all the windows with Georgian bar panes as it will look much nicer..........thats why there is only one window on this side that is glazed like that- it was the new one we had knocked through.



You can just see our 'trio of monkeys' looking out from the kitchen doors there...........

I have used bark for the first time, mostly because the flower beds are pretty large and consequently there is a lot of bare soil...every time it rained, at least 100 new weeds appeared. It is working very well as a weed suppressant and just makes things look a bit neater. We got a delivery of 3 tonnes from the local  timber yard.  That was about 200 wheel barrows to shift.............my back will argue that it was more..............and we still have a lot left.

 Around the other side of the house is the vegetable plot we built last year. We had such high hopes to really get stuck in 'growing our own' but we have been working so much over the past 12 months that we havnt grown anything but weeds. Next year!!

 

After the weedkiller had done its work...............a bit depressing isnt it? I wish I had more time.

Last winter we planted 300 beech to form a hedge around the property.......These were bought at 90cm and have really taken off, I think we only lost 3 or 4.Another 300 to go in bare root over the next few months.....its a much cheaper way of planting a hedge.

Its been a lot of work but I know the rewards in the long term will be worth it.....I kept reminding myself that we will never have a lovely garden here unless we plant one and its already come a very long way. 

Back in May 2013.......what a mess!