This picture shows all the work we did from April-August.
I thought I’d share the final results of our garden. When we moved in we had no intention of putting grass in and thought we would just deal with how the garden was. Tidy up the over growing weeds and put in some pretty plants and leave the rest, as we are renting and didn’t want to do too much work. {Warning! Picture heavy!}
The first part Ryan & I did on our own. I ripped out all the weeds I could, Ryan then sprayed them all with weed killer {just the weeds in the middle section, not on the borders} and then turned over all the soil. During this we realised just how bad a state the garden was in and after much discussion we decided to rip up all of the bricks and paving stones and spread out the soil and then either add grass or re-lay the paving stones and add more.
My Mum and her husband came to visit one day and helped us rip everything up. It was hard work and to be honest, Ryan and my Mum’s husband did most of the heavy lifting and to be honest I think they enjoyed knocking down the brick wall!
During this process, lots of frogs had to be rescued! We’re not really sure where they came from but there was a whole family full, about 8 in total.
At the end of the day, well about four in the afternoon, so after about four to five hours of working on the garden and after sweating in the sunshine and nearly levelling out all the soil and rearranging the paving stones we called it a day. If my Mum and her Husband hadn’t have helped us this would have taken us a ridiculously long time to do!
Over the next week, whenever we had some free time we would try and finish levelling out the soil, because at this point we decided to take the cheaper option and add grass. So we needed to level out the soil so we could add the grass seeds and some more compost.
Another week later we bought lots of compost and again levelled it all out to try and make it even.
A week after that, we added about three-quarters of a large box of seeds. Right up to this stage we were watering the garden once a day, generally in the evening, when the sun had started to set and it had started to cool down to make the soil moist for the seeds going down. As we didn’t want the soil to dry out before we could add the seeds, because really we added the seeds during the summer when you’re meant to wait for Spring or Autumn to add them.
Then we went crazy and watered the garden soil every morning and every evening, every day for the rest of the summer.
And it totally paid off! At first we were really worried that it wasn’t going to work but if it didn’t we were just going to try again in the Autumn.
The box said eight weeks before we’d start seeing results but for us it was between four to six weeks when we started seeing sprouts and a green tinge to the soil, that let us know that grass was growing! We realised though that the grass was growing best in the places where there was more compost that we added a few weeks previously. If we’d been a bit more savvy we would have bought a ton more compost than we did. But it still worked out ok. We were still watering the grass twice a day here too!
This picture was of 24th July and was the first full grown garden we had ever done! We planned on cutting the grass to find all the patches and adding more grass seeds to the patches and still watering the garden twice a day.
I hope to update this post tomorrow morning with a final picture of what our garden looks like now. If you scroll back up to the top you will see what the garden looked like after a second scattering of grass seeds. Although we still haven’t decided what to do with the outer borders on the back and to the right of the garden. We may plant daffodils or just add some bark to the top of it and add my planters once Spring arrives.
{Edited: current look at our garden as of 07/11/2014}
