Urban Gardening

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Well Firstly let me explain. When i moved into my current house the garden was derelict. For the first year we didn’t even touch it (to much to do on the house). Year two was a mad dash to tidy up and plant summer flowering plants as we only ventured out side when the weather was warm. I have to confess i read somewhere that clay soil was acidic and stupidly dug some lime through! Budget was extremely tight and this meant doing a little each month. One side of our garden is a big concrete drive leading to a reduntant garage. With some shoestring a few tyres we found abandoned on some near by waste ground we slowly turned this into a container garden. I couldn’t afford fancy pots so i spent £2.50 on some acrylic paint from ebay and me and some freinds sat and painted some cheap terracotta pots from wilcos. some varnish and a bit of glitter later and hey presto the concrete seemed more cheery!

Year two came and we realised we had no spring interest at all! Also things failed misserably. we laboured on having the monolithic hedge trimmed by a proffesional! this opened up an area that had been layed to paving slabs up to the sun. We shifted the slabs, dumping them unceremoniously behind the garage and dug the bed over. This became our veg plot. again begins a process of trial and error but let me tell you the purple sprouting broccoli, that grew over winter was delicious and a real spring pick me up after the long hard winter. year three spring bulbs spring and we’re starting to get a sense of what works. Now buying some rhododendrons for a shady area beyond the veg patch was a bit of a revelation. After purchasing said shrubs and planting them in the ground, I began to read about them. worried about the soil conditions a bought a Ph testing kit…If only I had done this at the start, i could have saved my self literallytens of pounds on plants that later died. but hey ho what can you do…except build a raised bed for your rhododendrons of course! Finding that B&Q multipurpose compost is actually quite acidic and much cheapper than Ericaceous compost (you should see me now I’m Ph testing everythig!) I filled my new raised bed with about 12 bags of this then added a couple of bags of Ericaceous compost and some bark chip. I also moved some unhappy ferns up there planted some toad lilly I’d grown from seed and some sweet woodruff (which is eddible), also a himalyan blue poppy and a poor azalea that i realise know was dying a limey death in my flower bed. I love my new woodland garden (area) check it out!

• 23 May, 2010
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