Two New Projects for our Friendly Builders

As my lower back problems continue, we again employed our builder friends to do a couple of hard landscaping projects in the garden. The major job was the construction of a concrete block wall to be a raised bed in the fairly utilitarian are of the ‘new garden’. This bed was for a number of purposes.

It has been built in front of a bank with a boundary hedge growing in it where our neighbours, Ollie and Monica’s garden is some two foot higher than ours. Historically badgers and possibly foxes have on several occasions tried to set up home under our neighbours’ garden. This happened even before we bought the piece of garden from our next door neighbour, Dave, some ten years ago ( in total we share a boundary with eight different properties). Both Dave and us have filled in holes on numerous occasions, and tried to prevent further excavations by leaning paving slabs, and pallets etc against the bank. The new bed has hugely tidied up this part of our boundary. In addition it has been a place for the builders to dispose of the partially dried silt that Linda and I cleared from the pond last summer and soil they excavated carrying out their paving works. Finally on completion the raised bed has become a home for around thirty of our own seedling Epimediums, which can grow on for further assessment.

Their other tasks were to extend the York-stone paved area by the ‘bridge pond’ and to create a bamboo barrier with cut paving slabs.

There ia a short growing Pleioblastus species growing on the pond bank which stabilises the pond edge. The slab edging has created a narrow bed for Epimediums between the bamboo and the newly extended paved area. The enlarged paved area is now large enough for us to use it as an area for shredding woody prunings and weeds etc. The area was used for this purpose before the area was paved, but it often became very muddy especially in winter.