Autumn?

It’s looking a lot like Autumn in the garden right now. Luckily, most of the leaves are from the surrounding trees not ours and that’s probably because all our shower water goes on our trees.

Thought we might see some rain today as it got very dark and stormy. We did - about 10 drops!

Woke up this morning to a lovely birthday present of my first Water Lily bloom. Chuffed!

The rest of the garden is just about surviving the drought (no rain since mid May) by using bath and washing up water, but I’m not sure about the grass. Not wishing to use the sprinkler too much, even though we don’t have a hose pipe ban, I’m hoping it will recover once we do eventually get some rain.

Nothing to do with me!

Call the RSPB (Royal Society for the Prevention of Bad Taste), something strange has landed in my pond!

Pond life

Great to see damselflies using the pond already.

Sprinklering

Not sure that “sprinklering” is a word but let’s hope that there isn’t a hosepipe ban!
Plants are being positioned and going in, at last.

Grass!

What a difference a lawn makes.

Trees

Trees!

Today we have made tangible progress on the garden design itself, not just remedial work.
The path along the back fence is taking shape and the water feature is now well under way.

Underway at last!

As you can see from the photo below, we discovered some drainage problems when we started to dig out the rill. So, once more, the garden was put on hold whilst we discussed how to remedy this. Crest Nicholson didn’t want to know, even though it was their equipment that had compacted the soil so much as to make it like concrete and they had just covered it over with topsoil, no surprise there. 

So, having waited for the water to evaporate somewhat, R&B Groundworks (Rob and Bernadette our garden creators) came up with a cunning drainage solution of a perforated pipe sunk into a ditch to help the water run off the concrete like surface and soak away.

This has worked brilliantly. So we are now ready to progress with the garden proper. Fingers crossed that the weather holds. 

Progress, at last!

After delays, due to the horrible weather we have had, we are off at last. Very excited!