It was a hive of activity here in West Sussex at the weekend.  Three long days for whipping the garden into shape.  We have been getting on with projects but we were keen to get our breakfast eating area sorted out, the water feature installed and planted also move an old rickety wooden arbour to its new home in the vegetable patch.  We enlisted the help of our strong handy man Barry on the Friday to dig out the breakfast area and lay hard core then shingle.  He stripped the grass from the remaining area ( keeping it for around the new water feature ) then he dug over where the grass had been.  I should say he used a pick axe to pick over the area.  This garden is on chalk so we have roughly about a foot of soil then we hit the chalk layer.  So as you can imagine this hadn’t been touch in a long time so it took quite a lot of digging and removing of rubble to make it into a border ready for planting.  Once Barry had done all the hard work I dug in some well rotted organic matter and removed more of the chalk chunks.  Then I had the fun task of planting.  I had saved some Aquilegia and daffodils from where the water feature has been placed so these went in first.  Then I scooted up to our local nursery to choose some plants.  As the border already has a lovely mix of cottage garden plants I decided to continue with this theme.  I choose some ground cover roses, camassia, hardy geraniums, geums, heuchera,  alchemillia mollis and lychnis.  These were planted quite closely so that the ground will be covered and hopefully suppress any weeds in time.  By this time it was quite late ( these lighter evenings are great for gardening) and I was in need of a glass of wine so with a chilled white in hand I gave my new border a water and said goodnight to the garden.

Day two.  Up early and after breakfast we enlisted the help of the family to lift the heavy lead tank to its new home.  The hard work had been completed again by my husband and Barry.  The circle of hard core was laid and pounded then this was covered by a layer of type 1 to make it smooth.  The tank was man handled into position with a sigh of relief and then filled with water.  Our electrician had made up an outdoor cable for us to connect into an outhouse so we could connect the pump and now we have the sweet background sound of splashy water.  On my trip to the nursery I brought some water plants to disguise the pump and give the whole pool a softer effect.

Day three started slowly with us all nursing aching muscles over with a long lazy breakfast.  Then we went out for a walk before starting on the garden projects for the day.  I decided to tackle a half dead rosemary bush that had suffered in the very cold winter.  I had left it to recover hoping that it would perk up but unfortunately some of it did not so secateurs in hand my daughter and I set to work.  We had chosen this side of the house because it was out of the very cold wind.  Once cut back we were pleased with our renovation.   As you can see a gravel mulch tidied it all up and will help to suppress any weeds and the cysistus will knit together and hopefully will flower all summer attracting insects.

A good job done and now for moving the arbour.

We took the roof off and managed to put it onto the wheel barrow.  Then we moved the main bulk over to the vegetable garden.  As the time had moved on we decided to stop for the day.  So watch this space as we reassemble the arbour in its new home.  I think that we will have to make a few modifications as it seems much bigger than in the original place.

Tags: Bee Attracting Plants, Gardening, Spring Flowers, water

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 10:05 am and is filed under Suzanne's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.