An Embarrassment: Landscaping Trials

One of the immediate puzzles of the garden was what to do with the squared-off mulched area at the foot of the lawn. (Originally the site of a greenhouse; the glass is still in the shed.)

My first thought was that we could put a pond there. Indeed, we put down our potted pond as a trial effort and (as there were spare stones from the dry stone wall lying around) we built a small cairn around it, to create an insta-rockery feature. It was the perfect location, nice and central, clear sunlight and a focal point when looking up the garden. A larger version would look amazing.

There turned out to be one small flaw in that plan: the site is right by the septic tank and directly in the path of the drainage field. As I don't wish to make raw sewage into a garden feature, we threw out all ideas that would involve digging.

At that point, the most obvious thing to do was to extend the lawn over the spot. I'm not wild about lawns... a well-maintained lawn is terrible for the environment (and constant work). One of my favourite things about the garden is that there isn't much lawn, so I was a little hesitant to make it bigger.

I dithered and left it for a year to see what the garden would do with the space. Predictably, the weeds took hold, predominantly toadflax which I found I rather liked. It gets very tall and looked quite striking against the background of ornamental grasses. It's a standard eco-recommendation to let a patch run wild; the centre of the garden isn't normally the suggested location, but that's what is going to happen until I run out of other garden projects.

That said, there's a pathway between the shed and the rear lawn border which connects the main garden path to the lawn / pergola. I didn't want to block that nor did I want to keep the right angle that cuts deep into the lawn, so the plan is to turn roughly half the area into lawn while the rest grows wild.

I just had to figure out how to extend my lawn past its stone edge. To its credit, the grass was cooperating fully with seeding itself into the mulched area, but the mulch was a couple of inches below the level of the lawn while the edging stood an inch above it.

As the edging was concreted in, I borrowed a crowbar and sledgehammer from my Dad and enlisted my son's assistance. I don't typically make the children do gardening chores, because it's a quick way to kill their joy in the garden and the relaxation gardening gives me. However, I do make them join in periodically when I either need an extra pair of hands or when there's an opportunity for them to learn some practical skill.

Besides, my son was very taken with the crowbar. (So am I. Crowbars are amazing, and we're going to get one of our own.)

After about half an hour's solid effort we prised up four edging sections with chunks of concrete still attached. They're not made of the best stone (maybe limestone?), since two broke in half as I moved them around, but all the pieces can be reused.

That's for another project though... my first priority was getting some turf to go against those newly raw edges. My target for that was the other end of the lawn, up by the retaining wall onto the patio. That's the most likely site for the still-hoped-for pond (a 'next year' goal), so I figured we could sacrifice the grass there.

Dutifully, I read up on the most basic method of turf-cutting:

String twine between two stakes to mark out a straight line.
Using your spade, cut lines one spade-width apart into the turf.
Still using the spade, roll up the strips of turf between the lines, and transfer to desired location.

I gathered my dubious children and we slammed that theory into the stony wall of practice.

The grass had a tendency to stick to the retaining wall and the ground beneath it was stony at best and concrete at worst. (Perhaps this is the plumbing leading to the shed?) We found the spade too unwieldy to use, but with sulky trial and error, we figured out that our best system was to perforate each line with a handheld garden fork, then cut it with a weed knife. I ended up rolling the turf by hand, using the weed knife to cut through any sticky parts. The rolls quickly got too heavy, but I would just pull them off and start afresh.

This sort of labour was painful on my back, arms and fingers. I let the children bail once we'd cut the lines so I was rolling the turf alone, but I still got three or four strips (in 12-15 pieces) done that afternoon.

At the turf's destination, I had laid the stone edging sections into a curve, as a rough guide between what we were leaving to the weeds and where we wanted the lawn to be. Our sloppily cut turf filled about half of the area to my relief and to my daughter's withering pronouncement: "You made it worse."

Strictly speaking, the time to lay turf is in spring when the new growth will help the grass establish itself. However, there are a million (my conservative estimate) garden jobs that are best done in spring, so by necessity, some of them must be done out of season.

As 90% of my garden maintenance is weeding and at least 50% of that is pulling grass out of every part of my garden that isn't lawn, I figured that I would only need the tiniest fraction of grass to survive in order to colonise the new ground. Even if all the turf died, I was pretty sure new grass would take it over within six months.

While I was not hugely invested in nurturing the displaced grass, I did time it right before a week of forecast rain, since the internet was emphatic about daily watering. That week turned into a very wet month, but on a dry day a week later, I cut two more strips of turf, which just about filled out the rest of the area (or close enough).

The original grass was already looking better, and the new grass came up much more easily, probably due to the rain softening the ground.

One section of the stone edging was half against the flower bed and half against the lawn. I solved that problem by cutting out an extra triangle of turf to extend the border, though it meant more crowbar work to get up the stone bricks that served as edging between border and lawn. Predictably, when I replaced them, they weren't long enough for the new line. I've popped some other stones there as a temporary measure, while I keep an eye out for something that matches the bricks. (Please interpret "temporary measure" as lasting in excess of two years.)

The relaid turf is very uneven and there's still a discrepancy between the levels of the lawn, the relaid turf and the bare ground. I'm going to let the weather, roots and worms sort that out, crossing fingers that it will be stable enough by the time we start mowing again in spring. (We need to mow already, but we're procrastinating.)

In due course, I'll remove the loose edging sections as well, and we'll just maintain that boundary with the mower, which is already what we do with the bamboo. The pathway between lawn and the paving on the other side of the shed remains indeterminate ground cover, which I'll figure out with selective weeding.

My favourite aspect of gardening is that you do a project part of the way then let nature take its course for a bit. It goes beautifully with my brand of ADHD.

Letting nature take its course is less of an option with the patch of bare earth we'd left at the front of the lawn. As said above, the vague plan is to put in a pond next year. What are we going to do for the intervening twelve months?

To start with, we've built a temporary compost heap. We'd found a pile of bricks in the garage and another on the terrace behind the greenhouse, while an old mesh door had been discarded down the side of the garden fence. (I'm not sure what this door was used for, but it's in near-perfect condition.) We stacked the bricks loose to make the sides and propped the door up against them to create a back wall, which I pull out to turn the pile.

The door falls over with every gust of wind. One might argue it's totally irrelevant, and I removed it in this week of Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin. Our casually laid bricks, however, have withstood the gales admirably from their sheltered position.

It's not a thing of beauty, but in the cold, wet winter months, having a compost heap right off the patio is much appreciated. I have a vague intention of moving it come spring, but I don't have a place in mind, so it's very possible we'll have rotting organic matter in the foreground of our view all summer.

Some of our old flowerpots have two year old tulip bulbs stubbornly coming back up in defiance of every gardening website I've read, so I've popped those next to the compost heap to cover the last bit of bare ground. I'm gambling that I'll remember to come back to this area before the weeds re-landscape it. (The odds are not in my favour.)

As I keep forgetting to take pictures of the early spring flowers coming up, I'll leave you with the comparison shots: