The big cut.

Trying to make my mark on the garden has been a trial when I'm working around what is already there especially since a lot of the back of the garden is overgrown and the plants, although nice, are just a bunch of straggly bushes that have grown up unchecked over the last how every many years. 
In making my mark on the garden I am cutting these plants back to see what there is in the rest of the beds and waiting for them to come back in spring and see how they then react and how they can be incorporated into the garden.
The back beds are raised up from the lawn but having cut the plants back I can see that this bed is split into two and the second bed (at the back) is raised up from the first bed by a small amount. In addition to this we can now see a 'rock feature' that is present in the back left corner of the garden which looks like it was possibly aimed to be a water feature but never really made it to completion. I will have to see how the plants grow around it in the summer as to what I will eventually do with it. It will probably just end up being a support for growing plants up/on.
There are plans in the pipe line for the two bed areas, the back one will have the main bedding plants, providing the visual part of the border whilst the front bed can support a small veg garden. It would be nice to get some form of self sufficiency going even though we only have a small 'town garden', but we will see how this idea progresses the bed seems to need a fair bit of work doing to it before it would support any veg I think. So it may not be this time round that the bed is good enough for planting but I'm keeping my fingers crossed


The front bed currently only contains a tree, one sickly looking honeysuckle a confer hedge and an old lavender bush. This bed I am planning to convert into a herb garden, eventually moving the lavender from the steps side to replacing the conifer hedge but this will take time since I have decided to put in a new lavender bushes so will take a few years to grow from cuttings. But the plan is there, and that is all that matters at the moment.


Currently the paved area of my garden is a mess of logs and cut down shrubbery waiting for the garden waste to be collected so I can put this into the bags. Our garden waste is collected in two green sacks every other Tuesday, which has meant that there has been a pile of hedge cuttings on our front 'lawn' for a while now, waiting to be fitted into the bags and removed! Nearly all gone now though. 
Not all of the stuff we have removed from the garden this time round will go in the garden waste, some of the larger pieces are being logged and stacked in the garage to dry so that we can burn them in the wood burner in our kitchen. I have also gained two sacks of logs from my grandparents garden which will also go to help keeping us warm this winter. Bring on the reduced heating bills!!