Garden Overhaul

So the side of the garden doesn’t get much use, even the grass was a bit out of hand, all thats around there is my shed, but its a nice little sun trap from early afternoon until late in to the evening so I wanted to do something nice with it. So I got some bee bombs and got to work.

Size approx 5 meters x 3 meters at long sides. The only cost was the bee bombs, everything else scavenged from the garden. Total time for everything about 16 hours.

This is the order to do it in, not necessarily the order I did it in 😂

1. Cut the grass really low.
2. Burn off the grass.
3. Cut the sods of grass roots out (2-3 inch deep).
   1. I piled these up at one end and added in some stones I had about the place.
   2. I had an Aloe Vera plant and a Succulent that were getting out of hand inside so I put them here – not sure how they’ll fair outside.
   3. I also grabbed some random things that had seeded themselves around the garden and replanted them here.
4. Cut an edge out on the side with a path and fill with gravel.
5. Drop some gravel along the hedge and leave enough extra room for hedge cutting.
6. I love frogs, the neighbours pond have them and sometimes they come in the garden. Since my cats have passed on, I dug a hole and put a plastic box in – hopefully some frog babies might move in! Failing that birds will hopefully use it.
7. The week before I started this I trimmed the apple tree tops – well over due so I got some nice long ones, which I used to create a fence around the area to keep the dog out – he’d only be digging it up and rolling around in it!
8. Drop the bee bombs! I did a mixture of dropping them whole, and breaking a few up in to smaller bits. I used two bags – probably could have done with a couple more.

I finished the whole thing about a week ago, watering it a few times a day – one of the joys of this lockdown is being able to look after things at home throughout the day.

Theres a tiny bit of grass thats been breaking through which I’ve been keeping in hand. The bee bombs, particularly the ones I broke up have started growing (28 days since I dropped them), and of course theres some weed growth – I’ll wait and see what they’re like before I remove (some people say to put weed killer down first, but I didn’t want to do that) as there are some nice ‘weeds’ in other parts of the garden.

August 2020 Update

I wasn’t expecting this many to blossom in the first year, but there was loads. I would have preferred a bit more variety of flower and colours, but it attracted loads of bees and butterflies which was the whole point. Hopefully not too many weeds will come in over the winter and it won’t require too much work in late Spring.