From Building Site to Front Garden: Our First Year
A year ago, our front garden in Oakham was still a building site, having been used for skips and building materials during our bungalow renovation. Before that, it had simply been a gravelled area with no planting.
We decided to build four raised beds from used scaffold boards, each measuring 8ft x 4ft. The site slopes gently towards the bungalow so the scaffold boards needed to be dug in to the ground on one side to level them off. We lined the inside with plastic to protect the boards and put some bits of rubble in the bottom of the beds.
Even so, it took six huge builders bags of topsoil to fill them, plus luckily our neighbours were getting rid of a load of soil so we used that too. It was surprising just how much soil it took to fill them!
We also added some new gravel to smarten everything up. The total cost of the scaffold boards, soil and gravel was about £1000 which seemed like a lot at the time!
The black wooden house shapes add some visual interest and mirror the gable at the front of the bungalow. They were inspired by the Nick Bailey show garden at BBC Gardeners’ World Live in Birmingham last year. Bev also made a chunky bench and a storage box for her tools at Women in Sheds.
Then came the fun part - the planting.
The front garden is Bev’s domain (mine is the back garden!), and she wanted to fill the beds quickly, so she didn’t overthink it. She planted a mixture of vegetables, herbs and flowers, along with some step over apple and pear trees.
One of the aims was to create a cutting garden, so we could have lots of flowers in the house. It’s been so enjoyable watching it all fill out and provide so much colour throughout the summer.
Many of the plants are annuals, and the white flowers were grown especially for our wedding.
The plan is to gradually replace some of the annuals with perennials, making the garden a little less labour intensive. We’re also going to sow some green manure seeds this winter, so that the beds can stay as green as possible over the colder months.
We are both amazed by the difference in just one year. Having raised beds makes it all so enjoyable to tend, and the gravel means we never have to worry about getting muddy feet!
The photos below include some of the before shots and then how it looks now, including Bev in her usual gardening attire of a fully sequinned jumpsuit from Phase Eight, ably assisted by Sky.
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