We’ve had a highly-concentrated flurry of work being done on the house. In the last couple of months, we’ve had more done than possibly the last year. Although this has been good for getting work done it means I haven’t had much of a chance to post an update in a while, but hopefully this will be the first of a few as I catch up.

Firstly, we’ve had a lot of work going on in the gardens. We’ve finally had the fence in the back garden put up, so next door can’t just wander in (which their dog and children tended to do). And the wall at the back has been re-rendered on the bad parts, and since the weather has been so good recently, I even got round to pressure washing it and slapping on a few coats of paint.

We continue to prevail in our ongoing battle with the unrelenting tentacles of ivy which seem to be trying to drown every solid fixture in the garden – but the war continues.

I’ve painted the wall with Sandtex’s ‘Chalk Hill’ it’s a grey so light that’s almost white, but it’s a little less bland. It was a lighter colour than I thought it would be but I’m happy with it, and it’s certainly better than the semi-attempt at graffiti that was there.

We’re having more trouble on trying to decide what colour to paint the fence, however. I like the natural colour but am happy to paint the fence either a cream or grey or green (to match our new front door!) but Paul disagrees.

It’s not just the back garden that’s been getting all of the attention.

I’ve planted some delphiniums in place of where last year’s foxgloves were. One was completely chomped down by slugs overnight and has now been replaced by a new one I bought today (and now surrounded by slug pellets). I replaced one of the lupins that didn’t come back from last year. I’ve also put in a couple of anemones to fill two gaps beside the lupins. But the lavenders are still going strong for now.

A few months after we first moved in, Paul cut down all of the useless bushes along the long patch of soil running down the side of the house. Although it opened the area up, we didn’t do much more with it, until now. We pulled up all of the horrible stones that covered it and discovered that the previous occupants hadn’t bothered using proper ground sheets to stop weeds from coming up, but just used the bags that the stones had come in, and then filled in the gaps with reems of Sainsbury’s plastic bags (classy!).

Once we’d removed all of that, we dug out the rotting roots, and have started to plan and even plant some new things. The whole raised area is reserved for edible plants. At the moment it’s mainly made up of a lot of herbs but we also planted  a couple of rhubarb plants in February at the shaded end, having successfully grown rhubarb at our old flat.

All of this garden work means we have learnt a few things, and one thing is that the soil is a bit rubbishy. We have a heavy clay soil which makes it really hard to dig down deep but is also very stoney – although we try to pick out all of the stones we encounter it’s made even more difficult by the fact the clay soil solidifies when it’s exposed to the air for too long. We also found that the the area between the old fence we tore down last year and the wall that we can now see, was used as a dumping ground by previous occupants, meaning we found some lovely items, including motorcycle parts, lighters, bottles and bags of retro food packaging. It’s a bit like Time Team, but it over covers a couple of decades, although Paul was quite good at identifying old sweet wrappers and bottles from the 90’s.

We’ve taken many bags full of stones, bricks, and other crap to the local recycling centre, which they charge for, so it’s been an expensive clean up. But it’s considerably clearer now and today we bought six large bags of soil conditioner and have tried to cover and mix it with our front garden soil in the hopes it will improve the quality and make planting/growing things a lot easier. Fingers crossed. We’ve also ripped out even more of the plants and bushes that were just growing around the place. Thankfully the recycling centre don’t charge for this, because we have taken car-loads of the stuff recently, and although we have started using our beehive shaped composter, it’s already full just with grass cutting.

Despite all of these changes, our garden has been a bit bird crazy recently. We always try and have bird food out anyway, but in previous years the bits we’ve put out have been ignored by the local wildlife. But when we noticed a couple of birds that kept visiting us, we bought some more and then suddenly it’s escalated to flocks of sparrows, at least a couple of blue tits and a great tit, two black birds, a fat wood pigeon, and two magpies. we’ve been having to fill the feeder up every day with suet pellets and seeds (although looking at the floors around the feeder, they don’t seem to like black sunflower seeds, so they are probably getting through it so quickly just so they can get to the bits they actually like). We’ve since purchased a water feeder as well as several other little feeding areas for them all.

Today we’ve bought a sparrow bird house and Paul’s climbed on top of the utility roof to put it in a warm but protected area. We probably won’t see anything this year, but fingers cross for the coming years.