My Garden's Working Progress

Thanks Jenny. I didn't sow them as sort, but I didn't buy them either. The front garden bed used to have foxgloves in them and some self seeded. I then dug them up and moved them into the bed last spring. Most of the other plants were sown by seed or donated to me and so the whole bed has cost me about £6 to plant up.

 

They really are magnificent specimens JJ and I like all the love in a mist too. Worthy of a framed piccie for a dull spot indoors in Winter , to remind you of these warm, early Summer days,
Jenny

 

I've loved following this thread and watching your garden evolve and mature. Jealous of your space!

 

Ok so I haven't posted in here for nearly a year because I've been busy with my allotment patch and a trying to get my business off the ground.

So this year I decided it was time to do a couple of alterations to the garden. One being the removal of the picket fence for my veg patch and the other the installation of a seating area.

I also felt that the garden could still be made to be more wildlife friendly than it currently was and so decided to start with this project first. I had plans last year of making a large bug box from a couple of pallet boxes that Mr Jane had received with a shipment of his lathe stand.

These are the boxes.



I decided then to give them a bit more of an industrial look and so made a stencil on my computer and then sprayed on these letters.



The next plan was to then mount these to the wall but this quickly proved to be a bad idea and so I abandoned the project for the rest of the year.

At the same time I had been working on building a screen/dividing wall to break the garden up a bit and also to protect the power cable that was running to my shed from my spade in the future. This was going to originally be a perspex wall with painted but again this was abandoned once I found out how much perspex would cost. Can't find any photos of what this looked like.

I hadn't thought anymore about this until I was passing a skip a few weeks back and found it to be full of these unused artificial slate roof tiles. I took a couple and realised what I needed to build was a large insect hotel, this would both act as a place for insects and also act as a divider in the garden.

Heres an example of one.



So I then began work on building this again. Using parts of the pallet boxes for the shell and the slate tiles for the roof. I had to cheat and buy some wood for the outer shell but the rest of the structure is made from wood salvaged from my garden.

This is how it currently looks.

 

What a great idea JJ. I love it and so will all the creepy, crawley, buzzy things,
Jenny

 

Let's hope so.

Thought I would take a leaf out of armandii book and put a nest box in the apex of the structure today.

 

Its finally begun! Started putting in the footings for our pergola this afternoon.

 

Wood arrived this morning and as Mr Jane was still asleep after his nightshift my neighbours kindly helped me lift them into the garden. I then discovered that they decided to put the posts into the footings too.

 

End of first day

 

That was nice of them, good job the footings had set though

 

Photo taken yesterday evening.

 

Just for reference, what it looked like before you started

 

I know! That photo was taken 5 years ago this Thursday.

Planning to add to this photo on that date too. We have tried to take a photo everyday for the past 5 years out of our loft window

 

A few pictures of what we've done in the last few months, I've broken this up over a few posts.

First of all the pergola is finished, but the area underneath still remains a dumping ground. Total cost £130, built from scratch because of the size of the area.