This year's garden

This year I decided to keep our garden a bit more simple. It was nice last year but needed a lot of watering and up keeping...this year I have neither the time or the money (or to be honest the inclination) to replant it all.

So I decided to just tidy it up and replant some things and call it done..to be honest anything was better than the before.

Dead plants and empty pots. Stylish.

It felt a little crowded before to be honest so I wanted to keep it at 'less is more' this year. We had a few pots that were here when we moved in, and when they had their garden redone the landlords said that we could give them back any pots that we didn't want as it looked like they were getting in our way (and to be honest some of them were). So some of their pots went up onto their garden, and ours got emptied, we had this many left!

Plus Minty who will not let me take a garden photo without her (evidenced here, here and here). They are now next to the barbecue, I didn't throw them out as they were expensive to buy and when we get a bigger garden might be handy.

I re-potted some of the larger plants into bigger pots, and then moved them all up onto the nieghbours/landlords garden (they were on holiday so I took the opportunity to steal some space) and I cleaned the concrete. I bought the cleaner back with the stuff from this post, but I never got round to using it. You can see in that post and the pics above that the concrete was pretty stained and dark, I wanted to clean it up a bit for this year. I just brushed this solution on (I forgot to take a pic/note of the stuff but it was from the 99p store and called 'Path Brite' or something similar) and left it for a while (the bottle was really not specific on how long!)

Then rinsed it off and brought all the pots back down, it looks a bit better now, the concrete is definitely cleaner. I could do with a pressure washer for some of the marks, but as a quick fix it has worked well!

The large plants are all that I've kept, and I like that they will keep coming back year after year.

I have some mixed lettuce to plant in the long planters as we do miss having salad stuff to hand, we have just not gotten round to it and it’s too late for much else now. Other than that this is it for this year. I like the more minimal feel, with the lighter concrete and fewer but larger plants I think it looks more airy and bright. Last year we had a lot of plants and it got a bit crowded.

The plant on the right was given to us by Tom's Nanna, it had sat in the plastic pot we got it in until now but just in the couple of weeks since being re-planted it has grown well. I have no idea what it is but I'm told it will do well anywhere, so that's good!

It is also a lot less to water, and although my black thumb only seems to apply to indoor plants and I manage to keep outdoor ones reasonably healthy it is still a bonus to only have 6 plants to water rather than 20! I’m still using the watering globes, but some of them now have 2 as I had spares, which means even less watering. This is the one downside to potted gardens that they need more watering than a normal planted garden as they don’t have any groundwater to use…don’t get carried away and plant loads of pots then curse it for the rest of the summer when you have to water them all every night! Upsides are no weeding, no lawn mowing and no digging borders though so on balance I don’t mind a few extra refills of the watering can.

This is the best shot to show just how little room we have to work with, and how much space we have gained by thinning out the plants a little.

Next year I might add in a couple more flowering plants to bring in some colour, and some more edible things, but I like that the plants we have now should last us and they have all come back well this year, again I didn’t get a photo of the clematis flowers but it flowered well again this spring.

We have also decided to get rid of our bikes as we never use them, so that will free up a bit of space. I realised when I was tidying that I’d kind of forgotten they were even there so we obviously don’t have much need for them!

Now we just need to get the gas on the BBQ refilled and we are ready for some summer evenings outside with a BBQ and a cold glass of something!

Sponsor me to climb Kilimanjaro! 

www.justgiving.com/katie-kili