Spring Garden Plans

So I’ll have to tell you about books and music lessons another day because it’s Spring time, nearly Summer and the children have been outside for a couple of weeks now and I am getting on with the garden and creating wonderful spaces for them to play and things for them to do.

You may remember that we tried growing veggies pea pods, I made a frog pond a couple of years ago: Elizabeth’s post, My post about the bloodworm in the pond, and have had success in attracting wildlife to the garden: Violet Gound Beetle,we grew our own plants from seed: and made our own window shelves and we are constantly on the look out for plants being given away on Freegle, but during my pregnancy with Oona and post birth I’d not done much out there.

I have super plans for the garden this year: First of all I’ll show you a picture of the garden as it is:

I did have a go at annotating the picture on ‘Skitch’ but I’m afraid I messed that up so I’ll just have to describe areas of the garden…I’ll also use pictures taken by Elizabeth and Imogen in order to show in more detail what we’ve done.

If you look at the top left of the main garden picture (taken from our living room window which is on the second floor so you can tell how high the garden is!!!) you might just see the roof of the den. It is behind the leylandii. I asked the neighbour’s gardener, Carl, to come and strim the garden for me and trim back a couple of the bigger shrubs when he saw some pallets I’d picked up from Freegle and asked what they were for. I explained I was going to make some shelters with them but I’d been too busy. He finished the strimming then stayed all day turning the pallets into a superb den 🙂 He wouldn’t accept any payment saying he’s had a lovely day. It was so touching.
Here are some close-ups taken by Imogen:

At the back of the den you might just be able to see a Buddha head:

This is the bird feeding area. It’s also where the fairies live 🙂

Behind the laurel bushes (near that nest box, top right corner is our frog pond. It looks like a puddle in a bin bag…I need to pretty it up a bit (it’s on my list of jobs) but it does have lots of wildlife and frogs! 🙂

It has sticks in it and even a brick! But the children tell me that’s to help the frogs get in and out…so I’d better be careful when I go improving it to better suit my very grown-up view of things. The kids think it’s perfect as it is!

In the middle of the top slope is (as of this morning) a flower bed. That was a veg patch but after I spent about a week digging it (a couple of years ago) and then painstakingly planting veggies with Imogen, all the neighbourhood cats jumped in there and scratched up the plants and replaced all our hard work with poop. Me and Imogen were cross…and I said we wouldn’t be attempting veggies again. I know, I know, a defeatist attitude! Ok then, I might do peas. But in the meantime, we’ve planted pretty flowers.

all the children on the street have been helping my kids find suitable stones and donating them for the steps. It’s very cute.

On the left in front of the swing set stapled to the fence is our weaving wall:

I saw this: weaving wall TTS which was £12.99 and didn’t want to pay that. I also didn’t want 10m of ORANGE mesh. So I got on Amazon and found a seller and spent £3 on 2 metres. Pretty chuffed with that!

We made a mobile: