Post Your Garden!

Stripped the grass and trailered it to the tip- put wooden edging all round - Made sure it was levelish then any soil we collected from the garden was sieved and spread across -also a few bags of compost and what ever - Now the hard part was raking it -never turned it just rake and rake till it was level - After a month out came the weed killer and killed everything off and so on and so on - At the end of last years hot autumn I seeded it then sieved a general purpose compost on top of the seed and next day we had all those torrential rain storms which pooled the seed hence some patches.

After all that I think some of the original course grass has regrown but will see after the next lawn feed in a few weeks time.
If I was younger I would say it wasn't such a hard job but age turned it into a marathon but got there in the end.:D
 
thanks very much for the detail, couch grass is th bain of my life i will take heed of this advice. i feel like the age thing just in the last 20 years the energy reduction and how i cope in the days after.

Edit: To actually make sense
 
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I used to work a full day sometimes working overtime then came home and knocked the house about - If anyone else reads this then take as much advantage of your first 50 yrs as after that it gets hard.
Glysophate 360 is worth buying if you have a lot of weeds - A 5ltr container of concentrate lasted me over 30+yrs and I had couch grass - nettles -bind weed - dandelions -- and that stuff kills it all

Years ago I would have wanted that lawn done yesterday but these days I just do it bit at a time - That lawn took 1 1/2 yrs really due to last years heatwave.

Anyway good luck
 
SuperOwl86 said:
The state of the garden from when I first moved in just under two years ago.

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How it currently is today.

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It has taken some time to try and tidy it up with soo little spare time to use.

Still loads to be done, need a new patio I also need to rip out the grass and start again since its all uneven. My idea is to raise near to the house and have a little wall that can be doubled up as seating on the patio. Yet I have no real idea what I am doing .

Any hints tips would really be appreciated.
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I'm not a pro gardener, and can't really offer any tips apart from really basic ones.

The temptation for me is to buy loads of different plants, and in the end that seems to result in a bit of a chaotic mess. Sometimes less is more (fewer plants but repeated).

A variety of different heights in your planting always looks better than a sea of same-level planting.

A pond is always awesome and really great for interest and wildlife - but a pond has little/no winter interest, it's all spring/summer/early autumn with ponds.

You probably need some big structural plants/small-to-medium trees. A fruit tree perhaps?

You also need to decide on a theme, type of garden. Native planting, cottagey? Exotic? Praerie?

Plants with a bit of movement are really nice to look at. I've gotten a few different types of grasses and it's just fantastic watching them sway around in the breeze. Too little movement (lots of woody shrubs or ground cover plants) makes the place look lifeless.

Scent is also a big thing for me. I love plants that smell really over-powering and pungent, but that's coz I have no sense of smell :p

You probably want a few evergreens for winter interest, or some plants that have nice fall colouration. Winter is a bit of a drab time in the garden.

Lastly you probably shouldn't expect to get it all right on the first go. Gardens are continually evolving and iterating. It's most of the fun of it. Getting stuck in, making changes here and there.

That said, you do want to get the basic structure right first time, esp if planting trees, etc. Decide where the paths go, etc, and be happy with it. Straight paths from front to back make the place look smaller, where a meandering, curved, or zigzag path will make it look bigger and not draw your eye straight to the back.

You might also want to have a big area in the middle that you have to go around, in order to see what's behind (a screen of big shrubs or whatever). Being able to see the whole thing (all four sides) at once again makes it look smaller/less interesting.

Everything is possible :)
 
Decided to give our lawn a bit of TLC while the weather has been good. It had a huge amount of thatch and yellow/dead spots that needed attention. I have no idea about lawn care so spent far too much time googling.

I decided to try and rescue it rather than rip it all up and reseed. I purchased a cheap scarifier from Screwfix and got started on the first pass on the highest setting.
This resulted in a huge amount of thatch being ripped up! (ignore the weeds in the borders, haven't got round to them yet! :)

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The first pass filled up my entire garden bin and and another large pile you can see in the corner of the pictures.

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I then set the scarifier to the lower setting and gave it another pass. Again, a huge amount of thatch came up. There was still some left but I didn't want to rip up all the healthy roots so left it at that.

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The next step was to top dress and reseed. After a bit of googling it seemed that compost would do the trick so I bought 720 litres from Wickes.
After top dressing, reseeding and some new start lawn feed it looked like this. Scary stuff!

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Two weeks later and plenty of sunshine and water and the lawn is looking much better. Still plenty of new growth still germinating so it should only get better.
Not had a first cut yet so we will see how it looks after that. Happy with the results so far though! :) I still haven't got round to weeding the borders as I don't want to keep walking on the grass until it is a little bit more established.

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I'm jealous it took 2 weeks to grow that fast!

What did you do specifically? And what brands did you use?

Mine took 2 weeks to germinate..
 
lee1101 said:
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It's always surprising how much thatch comes up. Worth doing at least annually though. Along with aerating, even spiker sandals do the job well for solid core.

Speaking of Scarifiers Screwfix now have a thatch rake in their inventory which will make easier work than a regular garden rake :cool:

Some pre-seed feed would be a good idea too if you haven't already :)

mOdO said:
I'm jealous it took 2 weeks to grow that fast!

What did you do specifically? And what brands did you use?

Mine took 2 weeks to germinate..
Click to expand...

Different species of grass germinate at different rates. But burying the seed too deep or soil temperatures being too low or there being little sunlight can cause variations too. Ryegrasses tend to germinate the quickest, fescues will be slower.
 
Thanks guys, I’m pleased with how it looks so far :)

I got the seed and feed from Lawnsmith as they were one of the only companies delivering in good time during the lockdown. I went for their classic grass seed as it seems the best all round. Lots of great reviews on their website as well.

I seeded the the entire garden by hand after scarifying, then raked in the compost top dressing. Then seeded again fairly lightly with one of the hand spreader thingys. I also bought some of the reflective bird tape off amazon to keep the pigeons and starlings off! It actually worked amazingly well, didn’t see a single bird in the garden for the first 10 days.

I got some sandal spikes from their too, I missed that part above!
 
lee1101 said:
Thanks guys, I’m pleased with how it looks so far :)

I got the seed and feed from Lawnsmith as they were one of the only companies delivering in good time during the lockdown. I went for their classic grass seed as it seems the best all round. Lots of great reviews on their website as well.

I seeded the the entire garden by hand after scarifying, then raked in the compost top dressing. Then seeded again fairly lightly with one of the hand spreader thingys. I also bought some of the reflective bird tape off amazon to keep the pigeons and starlings off! It actually worked amazingly well, didn’t see a single bird in the garden for the first 10 days.

I got some sandal spikes from their too, I missed that part above!
Click to expand...

I use Boston Seeds / Kiss My grass, same company and delivered overnight via APC :cool:

Thatch rake collected today.
 
lee1101 said:
Thanks guys, I’m pleased with how it looks so far :)

I got the seed and feed from Lawnsmith as they were one of the only companies delivering in good time during the lockdown. I went for their classic grass seed as it seems the best all round. Lots of great reviews on their website as well.

I seeded the the entire garden by hand after scarifying, then raked in the compost top dressing. Then seeded again fairly lightly with one of the hand spreader thingys. I also bought some of the reflective bird tape off amazon to keep the pigeons and starlings off! It actually worked amazingly well, didn’t see a single bird in the garden for the first 10 days.

I got some sandal spikes from their too, I missed that part above!
Click to expand...

Great work! It looks really good!! Has it grown in patches? It looks quite uniform.

Do you have any 'before' photographs?
 
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