The garden

The weather has been amazing this past week so we have been hard at work in the garden, and it is now almost unrecognisable!

 this is what it looked like when I moved in.

The two laylandii on the left are now gone - Georgie chopped the trees down and Neil and I dug up the roots. I have extended the flower bed I am using old wine bottles to boarder the bed as most of the original wooden edging was rotten.

This currently looks like this

After raiding some recycling boxes last night we now have enough bottles to finish the bed. I saw this in a front garden nearby and thought it looked really cool so fingers crossed mine will too!

We pulled down the smaller of the two sheds last week (why anyone would need two is beyond me) we are now turning that space into a little nature area, which includes a pond! Much fun was had digging away but the actual creation of the pond was a little bit trial and error...

Neil and the hole. the pond (before)

 using some plastic sheeting we found as pond liner, note the hole...

 holding it down with gravel... cat fish

 looking good...

Unfortunately, this was as good as it looked. By Saturday morning there was merely a puddle left in the bottom ...

a swift visit to the garden centre to buy some real pond lining and now the pond looks like this

and I am happy to say that the water has stayed in there now for 3 days. Its a bit murky at the moment but that should settle. I bought some plants for my pond too..

fringed water-lilly , water mint, water forget-me-not, water avens, all English plants to attract lots of bees and butterflys.

You may be wondering what I did with all the soil we dug up, well in a corner of the garden there was a pile of old roof tiles that the previous owner forgot to skip - and as I'm very bad at throwing things away myself I thought I would recycle these tiles into a lovely raised bed.

I also used a couple of bits of the horrible york stone we ripped out of the front room when I moved in. This bed has now become the herb patch and is looking very pretty.

Back row: Sage, Rosemary, Clary Sage, Borage

Middle row: Bronze Fennel, 2 Florence Fennel, Curry Plant

Front row: County Cream Oregano, French Tarragon, Thyme (can't remember what variety) and Roman Camomile.