A wall re-imagined.

What do you do with a very strange garden feature?  It's purpose is still unknown, but the wall has been coming down bit by bit.  Here is one last photo as a memorial.

So what to do with the bricks.  Re-cycling / up-cycling are rife in gardening, and the best gardens often have some element of re-used materials.  It's a skill, especially when the supplies are limited. There is also a danger in a small garden that too many materials can do more harm than good.

Thankfully at present everything is temporary, and an opportunity to experiment. So what do you do with an ex-wall?  You make an extra area for pots.

Only about half the bricks were good enough to use, it was enough for this area and a similar one the other end of the decking.  I quite like the randomness of it, and I may use it in the front garden. If nothing else, it has given me an idea of how to make the pathway in the front less separate form the rest of the gravel planting. I know gaps in paths are bad for people in heals, so if I do use it, it will only be the fun path to get to the plants, not the main one to the door. Those gaps cry out for some alpine planting.

In the mean time, it has been covered in pots.

Moving the large agave montana was fun, it was only resting in its last place for about 8 months, but had been doing some exporing.

So much for the idea that agaves don't need root space.

A few more pots in place and it turned out there was space for a couple of cushions. It's a nice place to sit and enjoy the evening sun.

It looks almost respectable.  Sadly as you sit sipping your wine, you look over the other side of the garden which is a mess!

A little work

Seems to make no difference in the new garden. We can't properly start on the garden until the plans for the extension are accepted and we know where the new bits are going.  Although they say you should live with a garden for a least a year before making major changes. I guess it allows time to get used to the sun, shade, wind and how you use the space.  It is very frustrating.

In the mean time, all we can do is slowly clear the flower beds. Strangely the more we do the worse the garden looks.  It seems even badly planted flower beds are better than empty ones. Normally this would mean no photos of the garden, but there are only so many post on pots you can do before you have to show what else is going on.  Besides this is a much a record for us on how the garden develops over time, so this mucky middle stage should be recorded as well.

So remember the lovely feature wall?

You can see the grass besides it is mainly weeds. The wall has to go, so to look at the foundations and provide some space for pots, we dug a little trench along the far side. The grass/weeds were removed along with the stones, which were used on the surface to give something for pots to sit on.

It's no better is it. But on the plus side, it is perfect for the pots which get sun all day and are loving it. We ran out of stones to do the rest of that side, so will have to finish it later.

Next up was the secret garden, the optimistic name we have given the bit that you can't really get to behind the garage. This is it from the street.

Again nothing we can do here as the garage has to be pulled down, and may be moved into this patch. So just clearing the mess for now.  It turns out this was a fruit garden at some point, we have left the raspberry and gooseberry bushes.

You can see how dry it is. The soil seems to be more stone than soil and despite the fence and wall it gets the sun a lot of the day, so has a bit of a micro-climate. The fruit bushes will be left to fruit while we find out how best to bring them back to full health.  It seems a waste to just get rid of them; longer term we may be able to find space for them somewhere. It is amazing what you find in a part of the garden like this, the black barrel shaped object on the right hand side of the photo seems to be a masive lump of tar!

Apart from that it has simply been setting up areas away for the house for the pots

  

I'm sure that space is going to fill up very quickly. I'll do another post on the agaves, they have done very well.  

Lots going on, but nothing that is making the garden look any better. There are several ideas rolling around for the garden. Next stage will be to do some sketches of options, first up will be deciding were to put the garage or workshop.

This never happened when I just had pots to look after

I wonder if breaking your first spade or fork is some sort of right of passage for proper gardeners.

The aim was to clear one of the flower beds expecting it to be a relatively easy job. It appeared to be full of small bulbs and perennials, that is until the first stump appeared 5 minutes into the project. It seems the previous owner had the entire bed cleared of small trees or large shrubs and instead of digging the roots up, they just cut the trunks off at soil level. So far the total stands at 6 in the cleared stretch.  Instead of being a quick job, it has taken a couple of day and it's not finished yet.

There are three stumps still to go but those may need to wait until we have recovered from actually having to do some proper digging.  The cleared area, which gets sun from 9am - 6pm , is going to be this years temporary succulent terrace. It will free up space while we have some building work done after which I can build the permanent beds.

Right now my muscles are telling me it was a lot easier when I had a small garden!

The big move

I finally have a bit of time to sit down and post about the move.  We have been planning it for such a long time, then suddenly it seemed to go from nothing happening to actually moving overnight. It was a great relief when the previous owners agreed that we could have access to the garden a couple of days before we legally became the owners. This allowed all the plants to be moved over the weekend, with the actual house move happening on the Monday.

A while back I bought 10 fold up crates, the idea being that I could fill them with the small pots, and probably fit all 10 in one car. They were a huge help, the first consignment was packed up on the Friday night ready for the next day:

Each crate took on average 10 plants, so it was also a simple way to work out roughly how many pots I do have.  Come the first move day my sister-in-law and her two kids very kindly came over to give us a hand.  I was right, all 10 crates fitted neatly in one car, with space for a few extra pots around the edge:

With one car loaded with crates, the other was loaded with larger pots:

The new house is only about 10 minutes from the old one, so everyone jumped in the cars and it was over to the house, a quick unload, and back for a second load.  It only took three trips to get all the small pots over and it was very strange when we had finished to look back at terrace and not see a single pot!

The fence looks so orange without all the pots hanging off it. Not to mention the shed with empty shelves.  A lot of the plants in the shed were too delicate to go outside, so they were moved to my kindly donated parents shed.

Once the delicate ones were settled, it was back to sort the pots at the new house.  I had no idea where they were going to live, so was pleased to find a paved area. It was covered in weeds, and a quick clear up revealed the edge of a brick area. This is actually much nicer than the crazy paving, so not sure why they allowed the lawn to grow over it.  I hoped this would give me enough space for the pots until there was time to sort something more permanent. The first set of pots went in nice and easily:

Sadly it filled up more quickly than I would have liked:

It was a bit shocking to have the whole area filled and to turn around to find the overflow:

Given the old garden was tiny, I couldn't figure out where all these pots were stored before. Then it dawned on me that I used a lot of vertical planting, even just taking the two posts outside the patio doors that was 16 pots out of the way.  Thankfully I have a more space to play with:

The garden faces due East, so it gets the sun all day, which is great for my succulents.  At some point expect to see the whole left hand side of the garden with one long succulent bed. In the short term I need to think about this winter and where to house everything.  What you can not see from the photo is a section of garden about 7m x 5m behind the garage. My current thinking is to just stick a roof over the whole bit and everything can go in there. It will make the garden less interesting over winter, but will also keep everything out of the way while the current flower beds are cleared.

Now all I need is some time off from working on the inside of the house to get out to play in the garden.