Two months ago our back garden was a vast expanse of soil. Well, to be completely honest it is hardly vast (it seems that room sizes aren’t the only thing to be much smaller with new homes) and it isn’t really accurate to refer to it as ‘soil’ (‘two feet of rubble with a sprinkling of nails, nuts, bolts, cigarette butts and a very slight dash of soil’ is probably a more accurate description). But nevertheless, two months ago it was merely a blank brown/black canvas. Fast forward 60 days and here we are – our laughably small patio has been extended, we now have a small area of decking in the corner, and the remaining 25 square metres or so of ‘soil’ is covered in luscious weeds.
OK, so the weeds still need sorting out (more about that later) but it feels like we are finally beginning to make our mark on the garden. My wife shared a few polite words with the site’s patio slab layer not longer after we had moved in, which yielded our much-improved patio. And all of our trials and tribulations with landscape gardeners were ended last week when not only did we get one to visit our house and give a quote, but we also managed to get him to do the job only a few days later. Ironically, it wasn’t one of the 10 companies we had telephoned (only 2 of which even bothered to visit our house), but it was a man who my wife approached after seeing some decking on the back of his van. I tell you, if I didn’t have a wife I’d have nothing. Anyway, his quote was around 50% less than the other two, and we are delighted with the finished result.
So it is now just the remaining area that needs sorting out, despite exhaustive efforts to convince my wife that the rampant weeds merely give the garden a great ‘meadow feel’. What are we going to do with this area then? Turf it? Gravel it? Tarmac it? I’ll leave that cliff hanger until a later posting, but I think you might just be a little surprised by the answer.
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