Extreme beginner needs inspiration please!
JojoJojo
Posts: 1
Hi everyone!
I am a complete beginner to gardening, but we bought our first house before Christmas and my little boy and I are looking to tidy it up during the Easter holidays.
Im looking for inspiration as to what to do to the garden! In the family there is myself, my husband, and our 5 year old and 1 year old and family dog. Our plan is to freshen up the colour on the garage, cut back all of the ivy along the wall, plant some easy to care for flowers in the beds already there, and we are going to attempt a home made water feature using pots. I really dislike all of the concrete though! I'm on a budget and it needs to be something I can try and do myself. I considered decking as you walk out onto the patio but we have a sewer access lid thing (can't think of the name!) and I'm not allowed to cover it.
Ive attached a photo for reference, and would love any ideas and inspiration please!
Thank you ☺️
Posts
FIRSTLY, DECKING BECOMES TREACHEROUS IN WET WEATHER UNLESS YOU PAINT IT EVERY YEAR WITH ANTI SLIP PAINT. A PAIN IN THE BUM, IN BOTH SENSES, AS I HAVE FOUND TO MY NOT INCONSIDERABLE COST.
SECONDLY, THAT IVY MIGHT BE HARBOURING A BLACKBIRD'S NEST AT THIS TIME OF YEAR. IT WILL CERTAINLY BE THE HOME TO A LOT OF INSECTS AND OTHER CREEPY CRAWLIES WHICH YOU MIGHT FIND USEFUL LATER ON IN THE YEAR.
APART FROM THAT, GOOD LUCK.
If you live in Derbyshire, as I do.
Always excited for people with a blank canvas scenario.
The brick beds are ready- made for you to clear and fill with goodies and I can see a trellis too. Would you like to keep all or some of the grass? As for the concrete - it will actually serve you well as a base for a seating area and some pots.
Your 5 year old may like to have their own bed/section for vegetables, flowers or a wildlife garden. Make a note of which areas have sun or shade during the day to help you decide on plants. You could have a mini flower meadow by mid-Summer for the price of a few seed packets, some compost, and some time spent clearing and preparing an area.
I'm sure some great ideas and advice will flood-in here...
Last edited: 18 March 2017 17:40:53
I'm with pansyface on the ivy. If it's on a wall , it's unlikely to be doing any harm and might well be home to lots of little lovely creatures.
Maybe lose all the grass on the left for planting ( whatever takes your fancy, and leave ( part? ) of the grass on the right as a soft play / sitting area?
It's a good "first" garden. Not too big to be daunting. You'll make mistakes and change your mind along the way, but that's part of the fun / learning curve.
There's no need to hurry. Have a look at your neighbours' gardens as they're likely to be of similar size and have the same sort of family make up. See if you can pick up anything you love, or hate, and use that to help formulate a plan.
It's your garden. We might end up loving it , or hating it whatever you do. That doesn't matter. Just so long as YOU love it and enjoy it.
I've used decking in gardens with a screwed down access panel over drains etc.
You can get man hole covers designed to take a paving slab. That concrete will be a good flat base for nice paving which you can do slowly over time as funds allow. Start with a small seating area and stand pots on the concrete around the edges. Work your way round to paving the path when you can afford it, but in the meantime concentrate on planting up the beds and having fun with your son planting seeds and young plants.
I suggest strawberries and sunflowers
I agree about the ivy. I'd leave it. It's a lovely evergreen feature and who knows what hideousness is beneath it. At the moment your eye goes straight to the houses at the back so I'd want to obscure those. A tall narrow tree like a silver birch would be nice on the right and I'd put a cherry blossom in the far left corner. Prunus accolade would go nicely. The concrete is fine and far better than decking in my view. Give it a power wash and it'll come up lovely. You could also paint it with a good floor/Masonry paint. This is something I've done before myself and I loved it. For the path you could paint paving of some type on it. Much easier than you might think.
Another one voting to keep the ivy here! You can always prune off any really straggly bits which are waving around but you essentially have a very low maintenance, wildlife friendly hedge there. I'd definitely keep it.
I quite like Hosta's plans to make the LH piece of grass into a bed. A nice deep area there where you could grow a range of plants around a child friendly water feature and there would also be room for a few veg plants as well if that takes your fancy.
I agree that the concrete as is looks quite ugly and can see a big crack in the piece nearest the house. You could consider putting wooden shuttering around a new bed and the small lawn and then just putting a load of shingle over the concrete. It would look better, is reasonably cheap and you can just scrape the shingle back to access the manhole cover. But you do need some sort of edging to keep the shingle out of the grass and out of the soil.
I cannot agree with planting a silver birch so close to your neighbour's house. They become very large trees and (as one who lives next to one) they shed loads of debris (seeds, leaves etc etc) through any open windows. I have to clean my bathroom floor every time the window is opened and there is the slightest breeze - loads of stuff comes off my neighbour's silver birch.
Last edited: 19 March 2017 09:19:48
I too would avoid birch in a small garden and so near to houses. They grow quite rapidly but are generally short lived and easily damaged or blown over in strong winds, plus they produce high levels of pollen in spring which can be problem for hay fever sufferers.
Buy, hire or borrow a pressure washer to clean up teh concrete and it will look a lot better. If you take up that left hand lot of grass as Hosat suggests, you could plant blackcurrants, redcurrants and rhubarb - all easy plants with no prickles and will teach your child about where food comes from as well as being good to eat. You could put strawberries along the path edge to break up the line a bit and provide more fruit. You'll need to remove all weeds and then improve the soil before planting and you can mulch with chipped bark to keep weeds down afterwards. Do not use cocoa shells as they're poisonous to dogs.
Leave the ivy for the above stated reasons. It may, as some friends of mine once found, be all that's holding up the wall and will be a pig to remove and clean off.
Weed and tidy up your raised beds and then freshen up the soil with some bought in compost or soil conditioner. By Easter, any desirable plants should be showing and you'll be better able to see what's worth keeping. There are usually some good offers for plants at Easter as it's a major weekend for garden centres.
Keep your grass trimmed to about 1" high and apply a weed and feed treatment in April, following instructions on the pack.
That should give you plenty to be getting on with and then you can think about adding some colour along the right hand border with climbers and other flowering shrubs and plants that will be football proof for later years.
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." - George Bernard Shaw