Starting work on a new garden: First Full Day

Well, I have finished my first full day in the new garden so I thought I would add another blog post.The main lawn in front of the house is in a terrible condition. It is full of moss, really spongy to walk on. It has quite a mature weeping willow in the lawn down at one end. I have trimmed some of the overhanging branches to lift them up off the lawn. I'm not sure whether they would layer themselves into the lawn! Either way, it looks much tidier now. I'm going to recommend that the owners get a lawncare firm in to do the seasonal treatments. I won't do that just yet, I'm going to leave it until later in the Autumn; the lawn is in such a bad state that mosskilling, aerating and scarifying will completely ruin it for the rest of the summer. It'll recover quite happily but will look dreadful for a few months and I think the owners will prefer to have the lawn looking the way it does now for the rest of the summer. My lawnmower has a rear roller so maybe that will help to clear some of the moss over the summer anyway.Having done the routine cut on the lawn, I turned my attention to some of the borders surrounding the driveway. There was a small patch which was created by their previous gardener in one corner. This was now completely overgrown with weeds so I thought I would tackle that first. I started off just hand-weeding the little bed so that I could see what was in it. I could see that a herbaceous geranium (probably G. 'Johnson's Blue') was in there. The rest of the bed was just weeds, with the odd red Valerian, which I decided to leave in. As I was pulling up the weeds, I came across a load of sycamore saplings. They had just been dumped into the border, some of them half-buried. There must have been about 30 of them! These were obviously weeds which had self-seeded and the previous gardener must have dug them up and just dumped them down in this bed. Having cleared the bed of all this detritus, I turned the soil over and raked it downreasonably level. The soil in the bed doesn't look too bad, so the bed itself should be ready for some fresh plants to go in. I'll have to see what I have coming along at home that can be divided and go into the little bed.Diagonally opposite the newly weeded bed is a triangular bed which is in dreadful condition. The soil is made up of subsoil, I think from when the driveway was hurriedly created (apparently there were planning issues with the driveway & access to the house, so these borders and the drive itself were cearted in a rush). As a result, this bed is full of quite large stones and has almost no fertility to it at all. The bed is populated with a sparse selection of roses and cordylines which were apparently left over from when landscapers were creating gardens for the new houses built on the land which was sold off. All I have done with this border so far is to give it a go over with the hoe to keep the weeds down. I'll have to get some topsoil delivered to properly finish off this bed. Sometimes being a gardener makes you feel like you're a designer, contractor and nurseryman all in one!That was just about all I time for in the day yesterday. I had planned to weedkill the paving in front of the house and the driveway, but there was no water supply at the house so that will have to wait until next week.I've checked my bank account this morning and their payment has already arrived (I only emailed the invoice this morning), so the owners are probably OK with what I have done. I must say that I love this new faster payments system.

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Andrew Fereday June 29, 2008 at 10:34pm

Find more photos like this on Landscape Juice Network
These are some of the photos taken on the first visit to the new garden so you should be able to get a better idea of what I'm working with.