It was all very well making a garden in a London backyard, a bit different in two acres. And I intended to use the lot.
I started by digging.
But I soon discovered that it was hopeless to think of digging the most part of two acres.
Then somehow, I do not know how, I discovered Ruth Stout. We had no internet, no Amazon, the local library was great but not so much for gardening. I used to trawl secondhand bookshops looking for affordable garden books and I must have found her book somewhere. She changed my life and made Veddw possible.
She was a gardening pioneer who wrote the book “How to have a green thumb without an aching back: A new method of mulch gardening” which proposed deep mulching with straw, hay, or other organic materials to eliminate the need for digging, weeding, and watering. That copy, published in 1974, is on Amazon at £174.60. I really must have a look around and see if I did get a copy.
In a new garden such mulch is not readily to hand, but, greatly cheered and full of hope, I began by using the grass cuttings.
And there they are, on the right. No more digging!
But – yes, how were we going to mow two acres? It was mostly lovely prospective mulch – ie lots of grass, but it needed cutting. (Oh, yes, one problem follows another when you’re making a garden.) And now I know how valuable ancient grassland is, which this was, I possibly shouldn’t have made the garden at all. (see Monmouthshire Meadows). I’m happy to say we have kept some as meadow. Another story for another day.
We needed machines. (yep, the money we did have was vanishing like water down a plughole). I got a little hayterette
Charles got a second hand (third hand?) Allen Scythe.
Here he is, apparently using it.
Then it all had to be raked up.
Charles
The Allen scythe, which was a slightly more modern machine than the one on that brochure, was anything but “light work”. It was an absolute beast. It had an 8 HP engine with a recoil start and used to shake like crazy. Yes, it drove the wheels, but turning it required a huge effort. My arms ached every time I used it. We needed it until we had less grass and we upgraded to a ride-on mower (though a totally inadequate one at first. Another story) However, we did discover an alternative mulch – sawdust from the local paper factory. I used to go and get huge trailer loads. And then we discovered carpet, but that’s probably another story.
Anne, continuing
Don’t take that as a recommendation of sawdust as a mulch. Gardeners are often told that wood chips used as a mulch rob the soil of nitrogen. I’ve never found that to be the case and ultimately we have used enormous quantities of wood chip and bark for mulching. If you want to know more, try here. But sawdust did leave plants looking short of nitrogen.
There will no doubt be more about mulching, but before we could really get going on making the Front Garden we had another problem to deal with.
Our predecessors had made a pond in front of the house.
The pond was now full of muck, and sometimes smelly water, and an ominous Stag’s Horn Sumach was lurking alongside. The pond was made of white plastic, which had hardened and cracked, and underneath was a large layer of concrete.
It needed to go but I had no idea how we could possibly get rid of it. Or that tree, which has a reputation for suckering all over the place. And though I had no plants to speak of, I didn’t need a forest of sumach.
But, amazingly, a friend arrived to see our new home, bringing two tough and enthusiastic children along. And between us and a sledge hammer we smashed it up and wheelbarrowed it away. Including the tree. Where all that stuff went I have now no idea, and I hope I don’t encounter it one day unexpectedly.
A long way from all that to this:
