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.