Deconstruction

Adrian was also busy last week, beavering away in what was the old fruit cage area to turn it into both a more manageable space and another little place for seating.

The beds are now mostly emptied out, and the few remaining plants and shrubs in the bed to right will be removed soon.  The two hollies are ear-marked to fill the gap in the side hedge border on the other side of the garden.  There are also a couple of ferns and an alchemilla mollis in the bed, which may go over in the raised bed on the far side of the garden at the house-end of that border.  I had thought that I might move the fuchsia, which is currently helping to smother the nature pool, over to that bed but quite frankly it grows so horribly vigorously that I think the best thing will be to just remove it altogether!  Instead I am considering filling the raised bed with a variety of ferns.  As well as the two in the bed above there is another in the path border that will have to be moved, along with at least one in another border that could be moved to the raised bed as well.  Alas, sadly for my enjoyment quota although not for my purse of course, methinks there will be no necessity to indulge in a nice little spot of online plant shopping 😄   

Anyhoo, enough talk of plant shopping and back to the job in hand.  Although Adrian had already dug out a lot of the soil from the centre bed, as he started to dismantle it he realised that he would have to dig out even more to come down to ground level!  Rather than trundle it round to the new soil mountain in the back garden, he decided to just bag it up for now and use it first in due course.

He also suggested that whilst we were repurposing the boards from the centre bed to make the right-hand bed taller, why not just plough ahead and buy in some additional boards to increase the height of both the beds?  As you can imagine, I thought it was a very good idea.  Not only would it make weeding said beds more comfortable, it should also ensure that we will be able to get rid of the soil mountain and hopefully at least some of the not-completely-composted-compost that we had to empty out of the bins earlier in the year.  Two birds with one stone 😉 

We had some oddments of weed membrane leftover and Adrian made good use of them to cover over the bare soil where the centre bed had been.  As they were odds and ends he had to do a fair bit of overlapping but at least it's put them to good use.  For now, he's simply pulled over the stone chippings that had been pushed to one side whilst the bed was being dismantled.  Once the other two beds have been made higher and filled with soil, he will then spread out a layer of new stone chippings which will finish off what we had left over from the earlier Big Job.  Speaking of which, it's now become apparent that we will need at least two more bags of the bloody things delivered at some point 😒 

By the weekend we were both pretty knackered to be honest so we didn't do anything out in the garden on Saturday, plus it rained in the afternoon.  As it was dry on Sunday morning, though, we decided to do a job that we've talking about doing for ages: give the lawn a jolly good raking over.  It's not much of a lawn, to be fair, but we just haven't had the time nor inclination to improve it.   

In all honesty, although we did rake up a good bit of moss, the "after" photo doesn't look all that much different to the "before" one!  OMG, it was bloody hard work too!  So guess what Adrian spent the afternoon doing whilst we both bemoaned our aching backs and shoulders.....yup, you guessed it, comparing the merits of various electric lawn scarifier/rake machines 😉