Working hard...

More work has been begun. A lot of time was spent with the small fork digging up the side of the garden - continuing the already completed side part up towards the top. The whole area was stripped of any life - grass or weeds - and piled into the center of the pathway. The plan is to move that dirt up to the back once that has been dug up to add texture to the back area. The ultimate goal is to put red wood-chips over the area that has just been cleared and red woodchips & rocks at the back section (from the back fence to about 10 feet in). Here is what it looks like:

Also, the whole area was mowed to just tidy it up a little. Looks better already:Also, the front - which is also messy took a mowing. It doesn't look too good - it needs some work to get the grass back to life but it can't look worse than it did before the mowing:

Finally, I put down some stronger weedkiller at the side of the house (see a previous post) as the other stuff was too mild. The weeds are dead and that area will be turned over asap.

Purchases:
Broad range weedkiller: $20

So far, so good.

Normally, there will be postings as a days work has gone by but - as this is the first entries - there has been a couple of days work. So, we'll try and cover everything completed so far.

Firstly, we decided what we wanted to do with the garden. As the previous blog showed, the area is mostly grass and this isn't very pretty and hard to maintain. We made the decision to take areas and lift the turf and put stones down and a walkway up the side of our house to the garden. The thought was that we could make the grass squarer, a smaller area and therefore musch easier to look after. Remember, we aren't used to maintaining a garden. So, the first jobs to complete were digging out the areas that were to be "paved". So, on 3rd/4th July a fork was taken to the ground up the side of the house to clear away all the weeds and try and get the ground clear for the process. What a job that turned out to be...

Anyway, it got cleared-ish. Some of the weeds didn't want to leave so weedkiller was put on them to kill them off. This is just the top half of the pathway, the bottom half was simply sprayed with weedkiller and left for everything to go brown first - before it gets digged up. This is what it looked like before the spraying:

Also, we started a compost heap. We just used an old garbage bin and added brown leaves from the autumn and the greens which were taken from the soon-to-be path. The brown leaves had a lot of worms in them so they were added to help decomposition. The hope is that, once the garden is nearing completion, that we can have a wooden compost heap on the ground so it is rife with worms etc. The green/brown combination should give us some compost for when we put in the vegetable patch.

Purchased so far:
Fork - $11
Jute twine - $2
Weedkiller - $17
Gloves - $5

Existing tools:
Shovel
Rake
Trowel

Also, we did a recon to Home Depot to get prices for the pathway. The plan is to tamp the ground (rent an electric tamper), put down weed-proof breathable material, add sand and flatten and then add stones and slabs to creat a walkway.

Not much has been done but it seemed like a lot of work.

The first post

So, we decided to start working on our garden - it is basically a mess. The previous owner just grassed (poorly) the whole thing. There are gaps in the grass, stones in the grass (the previous property - according to a drunk in our local bar - burnt down so there is poor quality of soil thanks to the stone etc), no planting areas, dead trees and misplanted trees (they need 2 feet gap between them and they are right next to each other and, more dissapointlingly, they are right next to out A/C unit) amongst the many other things. Couple this with the minimum effort we have put into the garden and you have something which is more likely to be deemed a disaster area by the local town than an area of beauty!

Anyway, we want a beautiful garden (who doesn't) but we don't want to spend thousands on landscaping so we are going it alone. Two complete beginners, shovels and the will to complete a project. The mission is to transform that garden to a garden we can be proud of and sit in.

This blog is going to document this transformation so that people can offer us friendly advice about what to do and what we are doing wrong. I cannot say this enough: we have no gardening experience at all - we re just going for it.

We hope you enjoy and we hope you can offer advice and help.

Finally - and most importantly - this is a picture of it on day 1...

Note: to the right of the photo, those are the two trees blocking our A/C unit.