We’ve been thinking about what to do with the piece of garden to the left of the house when stood with our back to the front door. It’s the strip that runs the length of the property and ends where we were growing the vegetables. The plan is to keep the bit along the side of the house for vegetables, but the bit at the front we were undecided on.
This is our property from the catastro, the bit of garden we are thinking about is the bit I’ve marked in red. The carrot is where we will keep for vegetables and at the back of the house is where we have our orange, lemon and grapefruit tree and we’ll plant the avacado and probably the pomegranate at the back or side too.
We have a wall and gate which separates this from the main front garden which is the bit we use most and is the animals can get to with the animals.
The plan will be to remove part of the wall which separates the two bits of garden so we can use it more. At the moment it is weedy grass and we don’t really want a lawn, cementing it would be too costly , so we thought instead about planting a few hydrangeas (hence the cuttings) and other bushy plants to fill it up and hopefully make it low maintanance! Then it will be nice to look at from the kitchen window, but not take a lot of work . and we could still build in a sitting area if we ever wanted to in the future when we open the wall up.
That sorted the grass question, however the hedge then raised some questions. It’s overgrown and not particularly nice. Ideally we wanted to take it out completely and replace with a fence. The challenge though is that the hedge is along the edge of a bank down in to the road. We had a nasty feeling that if we killed the hedge the roots would start rotting and the bank may collapse!
So plan B is to strip all the brambles and nettles from the hedge and see if it will fill out again – and if it does if it will help to stop the brambles from taking over again.
So that is what Ian has started doing! The hedge is actually in better shape than we anticipated but some bits are better than others so if we do end up with gaps we’ll replant in the gaps.
I’m think we’ll propably stop at this point which is where we’re likely to put a fence at some point anyway.
The hedge has gaps in the bottom so it means that it’s not animal proof (getting in or out, but hopefully the gaps are too small for boar!), so the plan will be to fill the gaps either permanently-ish or temporarily until the hedge fills up again with some form of netting or something else.