I am not green-thumbed. Whatever I know, it's taught by the internet. I have grand ideas but I am limited by budgets so what I'm planning to do is to sort the garden in stages:
Stage 1: Get it looking acceptable and manageable with a border DONE!
Stage 2: Dig a strip the same width as the border, to split the garden into 2 sections. West (furthest area in pic) will have grass 4mx4m for leisure activities. East (near side) currently has a grass width of 2.5m. I've recently got this as mentioned in my previous thread - yes it's ultimately an extravagant grow bag but it fits my current budget.
Here's an illustration made with Paint:
Green box is 75x75cm willow raised bed. The light brown is the strip I'm digging across to split the garden and the darker brown will be a border around the raised bed.
I am thinking to either cover all the bordering, including the border around the raised bed and strip with either ornamental bark (budget friendly, big bag 35L for £2, estimating 5-7 bags to do the lot) or gravel (more expensive but I can be patient and wait for some offered on Freecycle to fit my budget)
Anyone have experience there?
Stage 3: Possibly more raised bed in the East section and eventually no more lawn in that area - purely veg growing. The South wall (left) will have troughs sitting on it for possible Strawberry planting
The depending on how I get along with the big lawn, trying to reseed the bald patches as previous owner didn't care for it. It's arid! I may go Stage 4 where the 4x4m lawn gets replaced with artificial lawn. Focus of my garden maintenances will just be the fruits and veg whilst still enjoying the green, green lawn.
Anyone have other ideas if you were in my shoes? Some visual examples are always appreciated - thus far, only Stage 1 complete, so still have time to change my plans.
Stage 1: Get it looking acceptable and manageable with a border DONE!
Stage 2: Dig a strip the same width as the border, to split the garden into 2 sections. West (furthest area in pic) will have grass 4mx4m for leisure activities. East (near side) currently has a grass width of 2.5m. I've recently got this as mentioned in my previous thread - yes it's ultimately an extravagant grow bag but it fits my current budget.
Here's an illustration made with Paint:
Green box is 75x75cm willow raised bed. The light brown is the strip I'm digging across to split the garden and the darker brown will be a border around the raised bed.
I am thinking to either cover all the bordering, including the border around the raised bed and strip with either ornamental bark (budget friendly, big bag 35L for £2, estimating 5-7 bags to do the lot) or gravel (more expensive but I can be patient and wait for some offered on Freecycle to fit my budget)
Anyone have experience there?
Stage 3: Possibly more raised bed in the East section and eventually no more lawn in that area - purely veg growing. The South wall (left) will have troughs sitting on it for possible Strawberry planting
The depending on how I get along with the big lawn, trying to reseed the bald patches as previous owner didn't care for it. It's arid! I may go Stage 4 where the 4x4m lawn gets replaced with artificial lawn. Focus of my garden maintenances will just be the fruits and veg whilst still enjoying the green, green lawn.
Anyone have other ideas if you were in my shoes? Some visual examples are always appreciated - thus far, only Stage 1 complete, so still have time to change my plans.
