Working on the garden

This should really be Steve's blog, but we might wait a very long time for an update if he was left in charge.

So to recap - the builders left the garden looking pretty ropey and more or less destroyed what lawn we had.  Then, we recently smashed up the concrete in the back garden that was remaining after our first bout of concrete smashing, and had a titanic struggle with some crazy plants.

Well, since then we've (mainly Steve) been working on turning the backyard into a garden.  We've already done loads to it - planted a row of trees on the back fence, put up loads of trellis, added the deck of course, and now that the concrete is gone we have the opportunity to start planting the main part of the garden.

After our chimneys came down we had loads of bricks in the garden - here's the pile of them which we demortared a few months ago and stacked neatly -over 900! Until the bricks are gone there's a big part of the garden that we can't redevelop (because it's covered in bricks!)



big pile of bricks


The trees along the back fence are having mixed success - the maple and robinia are growing slowly, but the coprosma and pittosporum, from very small plants are now both over a metre.  The pseudopanax had a greenfly attack which held it back a bit but the star is the Akeake (dodonaea) which has added a metre at least in a year and is now about 2.5m and doing a good job blocking the sight line to the rear neighbour's lounge!  It's just out of shot to the right of this picture.

We did get 100% more flowers on our kowhai this year which was cool - a total of 4 from a base of 0 last year...  Probably not enough to bring the tuis in just yet.

three lovely flowers on the kowhai



We have put up quite a bit of trellis on the eastern boundary and the clematis, (which was one of the very first things we planted in the garden so has had nearly 3 years growth), gave us a great display of flowers in September/October.  You can also see the piles of gravel and dirt occupying other corners of the garden. 

clematis doing its thing.  Jasmine to the right doing its best to keep up

But back to the bricks.  We previously did quite a bit of work on the path down the side of the house - built a full 13m of it in fact starting around about this time last year over the course of a good few months.  The plan was always to extend the path round the back of the house but obviously we couldn't do this until (a) we had more bricks and (b) we had less concrete.  Strangely we don't seem to have ever written about this so here are some progress photos.  The path down the side of the house used to be dirt, with a river down the middle when it rained.  Building paths is a slow process and 90% done by Steve - my job was mainly demortaring bricks.

Anyway by the time builders were in we had built 13 metres down to the bottom corner of the house.





working on the path down the side of the house





the final bricks before the builders came

Since the concrete came up Steve has been beavering away on the path at weekends and we are getting there.  Once we had turned the corner (literally) he was then able to implement phase 1 of the back garden plan - garden bed.  So armed with a list of plants we went off to the garden centre and came back with the selections you see below planted into Steve's carefully designed bed.  

On the left of the pictures is the start of my fernery.  It almost never gets sun as it's on the southern side of the house so I will be planting lots of lovely ferns.  The shot below is pretty much exactly where the fig used to be.



Doesn't it look good?  Obviously we're still missing grass to the right of the bed, but suddenly we have the makings of a real garden.

 There's a lot more path to go and obviously a lot more garden too.  So watch this space...