Chapter 3: Making a Plan
Ideas
As with any project you start you have to have a few ideas of what you want to do. My garden is rectangular shaped so it is pretty basic, there fore keeping nice straight lines will really enhance the lawn and border areas. Also you can onserve the garden from an upstairs window as you can then have a birdseye view and you can have a better perspective of the finish you want to obtain. Develop a mental picture of the finished garden and you will really spur yourself on. Also start taking photos of the before and after parts of your work and you will be quite surprised of the outcome.
Laying the Foundation
As with any project like this you have to lay a foundation to work with. Once you have completed the ground work you will have done a large part of the work. Do not even think about plants and flowers at this stage, as you will not have a scenic view to work with. complete all the heavy work first like any digging, raking, ,building etc so you can see what you have to work with. It is like if you was going to build a house, you would have to have a nice strong level base to work with. Getting a decent and beautiful garden is very much the same, so complete the foundation first.
The Lawn
I have a lawn in my garden that was sown quite a long time ago that has been moderately mowed over the years, a bit worn torn and bare in places with a path right up the middle. On one side there is a square shape dug out for a small flower display and a somewhat border right around the edge of the lawn. So at this point there was 2 tasks that i wanted to do, give the border a good dig over, improve the lawn and at the top of the garden it is higher than the rest if the garden, so i am going to make it into a tier with steps leading up.
The Border
Up until now the time spent on this project was about 3 weeks and now half way through August so i had reasonably good weather to work in. We gave the border a good digging over and gave it a nice straight line using the method of stretching a length of string between 2 sticks " the same way a brickie would do when building a brick wall " close to the ground.Around the border we have a camellia shrub that was bought several years ago at an earlier attempt to spruce up the garden along with a few rose bushes, but they were left to fend for themselves but the rose bushes were cropped down to the stump. Some knowledge was gained to looking after some plants several years ago.