We’re finally ready to sow the seeds for our little green lawn! Aaaah. But before we reached this point, we had some final ground preparations to be achieve.
Firstly, we had to level out the soil so that rain water won’t pool and it’s not all lumpy bumpy when the grass grows. I actually thought we may need to add some top-soil to the existing soil as there wouldn’t be enough to fill the enormous hole I’d created, but surprisingly there was almost too much! Someone work that out for me? Grant made his very own super large hoe out of an old broom and a random piece of wood. The first two attempts collapsed, but third time lucky was actually pretty decent.
I also moved the last two rose-bushes. Actually, I’m not sure if one of them is a rose-bush. It’s thorny but the flowers are slightly different. Perhaps a carnation? I’m no flower expert. Anyway one of them only moved about 30cm closer to the wall, but this was necessary for my planned border. The other was moved behind the spikey bush (very technical name, right there). By the way, that same spikey plant is so spikey it’s actually made me bleed on multiple occasions. It recently spiked me in the eyebrow as I bent over too closely to it, which then proceeded to bleed. After freaking out that I’d nearly lost my eyesight I decided it was time for a haircut. I de-spiked all the low-level spikes (I’ve even heard the dog yelp at it before!) but I’ve left the higher not-so-dangerous spikes. Hopefully it’s danger-free now. I also moved the compost bin behind that plant as well so that’s it’s hidden slightly. Compost bins actually work best when they’re placed directly on soil anyway (opposed to the concrete it was on before) so it’s a win win.
We then had to de-weed the whole area. And there were a lot of weeds to deal with. Luckily I had Grant on hand to help. Finally we could plot out the border of the garden. I’ve chosen to use a cheap plastic border whilst the grass grows so that in a few months time I can remove the border and there will be a nice crisp line between the two. I know this requires much more upkeep with grass trimming. But I’m totally up for that challenge! The border was pretty hard to use; it kept sort-of pinging back into it’s ravelled self, and was really hard to create the shape I had in mind. In the end we decided to loosely plot out the border so that we can dig up the grass to create the border we want later.
Finally, we separated off an area where we intend to have a patio and new french doors fitted, so no grass was required. We used a stick to make sure this was pretty straight. No one likes wonky.
We do intend on breaking up some more of the concrete path to the right of the garden in the future… However as we’re running out of time (early autumn’s the best time to grow grass) we’re going to leave this until spring. I’m crazy excited about growing grass over the next couple of weeks, although slightly dubious about it all going wrong and not growing. Eeep. Let’s hope for the best!
…and here’s the finished preps!
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