Tag Archives: paving

Back indoors again

28 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in greenhouse

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Arrrrrrrgggghggeeeeeuuuuuucchchhhhhhhgggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmfffffff

I HATE February!

Especially THIS February! 1

The gods of weather up there are looking down at me and laughing themselves sick. Right, they say. We’ve given her ice, snow, hail, sleet and torrential rain on a Biblical scale for the last three weeks: now let’s give her a nice sunny Saturday. Look! Lovely! Warm temperatures, and no rain at all! We won’t even make it windy! Let’s make it that exact Saturday she’s got to stay indoors because it’s her little girl’s birthday party and not even she can come up with an excuse that can get her out of that so she can go gardening.

Then on Sunday, when there’s nothing much going on and gardening to do, let’s unleash the forces of hell on her! Yay! Lashing rain – tick! Howling gales – tick! The kind of temperatures that freeze your nose off as soon as you look outdoors – tick! Oh, what fun we had!

Harrumph. I’ve had to retreat back into the greenhouse again, as you may have guessed. I do actually like my greenhouse, but it is so frustrating not to be able to get outside.

Anyway: enough moaning. There’s been a lot going on in both greenhouses just lately (wonder why that could be?). The one in my garden is chocablock with seedlings after I (again) started sowing a little earlier than I should. And up at the allotment there are changes afoot.

For the last six years since I put the greenhouse up there has been a fine crop of dandelions pushing their way up through what passes for a path (trodden earth, doncha know… that’s code in gardening books for gardeners who couldn’t be bothered to lay a proper path, and is almost always a very unsatisfactory option to choose). It’s extremely irritating, especially as they seed themselves into the border, occasionally grow big enough to trip you over and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

So I’ve been spending the last few sessions up there fixing the problem. And here’s what I did.


Before I started: see what I mean about that path? Not really up to scratch, and certainly not model-allotment stuff. You can even see the failed previous attempt at path-making there. Let nobody ever accuse me of seeing a job through from start to finish.

Anyway: the dandelions were history after a bit of brisk hoeing, and I was ready to go.

First job was to hold the borders back with a smart edging of gravel boards. Actually they’re the gravel boards you can (just about) see in the above picture after cleaning up. Recycling and allotmenteering were made for each other.

The weed-suppressing membrane is recycled too: a gardening job I did where I had to rip up a membrane someone put down over a potato bed after planting (don’t ask…) I’ve stapled it on as insurance against pesky weeds pushing through the gap – a lesson hard-learned from previous experience.

Sand was next: this evened out the bumpy bits nicely. I used a load of sand I had left over from doing the path in the garden (see? Nothing goes to waste around here!) and trod it down with the gardeners’ soft-shoe shuffle (you’ll see the same dance wherever lawns are to be laid: pretend you’re an Egyptian mummy swaddled from head to foot in bandages and then try to move your feet up and down and you’ll have it). Once raked and levelled with another board dragged over the surface it was ready to go.

Ta-daaaah! Almost the finished article: my camera ran out of batteries before I got the sand brushed into the cracks to finish it off. I would have mixed cement with the sand had I been really serious as the weeds will still grow through the cracks using plain sand – but at least I’ll be able to pull them out easily.

By the way the concrete slabs are recycled too: I picked them up from our local primary school after they had a patio lifted.

So all this cost me… well…. nothing. Apart from about three or four half-hour sessions down the lottie. Not bad, eh? Wish I’d done it years ago now…

1: except the crocuses, I like those. And all those buds and shoots I was wittering on about the other day.

How we spent our weekend #2

28 Friday Aug 2009

Posted by in pond

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A little update on progress with the fishpond…

This is the Bloke’s department – far too much precision involved for ditzy old me. The slabs are a sort of mellow limestone left over from a landscaping project on a far posher house than ours – hubby was the carpenter so he came home with a pile of this really rather lovely, though somewhat brittle paving. Since it did crack so easily I was fretting about how to use it – heavy-duty pathways and the like were entirely out of the question – but it turns out it’s a shoo-in for crazy paving.

One sticking point, if you’ll excuse the pun, was the cement: I simply cannot figure out how you’re supposed to lay paving around a pond to hide the edges of the liner without getting cement in the water. This is obviously A Bad Thing as it poisons fish (and no doubt sundry other wriggly things) but absolutely impossible to avoid. In the end we stopped worrying about it too much and simply re-cleaned the pond at the end of the operation.

The finished product: after clearing up those left-over slabs it’ll be the tidiest thing in our garden. Next step is the bog garden and a lot of plant shopping. Now that is my department.

Garden makeover: Shedding about #2

01 Monday Sep 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

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Guess what I spent my weekend doing…

After my little bit of inspiration over the twin evils of a shed in the wrong place and a nasty little problem spot, there was no point hanging around really so I got out the tools and got to work.

First job – dig the whole area out to a spade’s depth (getting rid of all that borage in the process) and put down a nice clean layer of weed suppressing membrane. Lo – the problem area is no more.

Next, after those nice people at Wickes delivered a load of building materials, it was barrowing a couple of inches of hardcore (actually the same stuff road builders use so it can’t be bad).

That was the (relatively) easy bit done – then I had another couple of inches of sand on top of that:

…and the tricky bit was getting the horribly heavy paving slabs down. These were recycled from the paving slabs that were alongside the shed already, which seemed like a good idea until I realised how damned heavy they were. They were the kind you use for pavements – great for settling down and not moving anywhere without a small bomb beneath them, awful if you do actually want to move them somewhere. I did my best – it wasn’t quite patio standard, but it was OK for a shed base, and looked pretty good by the time I’d finished.

Then the fun bit – ta-da! One minute the shed was over there – the next, it was over here!

The tarp is because we managed to tear the (already gently rotting) roofing felt while we were moving it, but no matter, we have another roll in the shed which we’ll finish it off with next week.

I’m dead proud that we got it all done – but don’t be deceived by the “before and after” pics above: this was a long, sweaty, difficult job, especially the moving-the-shed bit which involved a lot of swearing and entailed dismantling the entire building and reconstructing it over a period of several hours. However – it’s also a job well done: we discovered a rat’s nest underneath where the shed used to be, since they hadn’t gone to all this trouble and had just put the shed on fence posts laid on the ground. Ain’t no rats can get through this lot, I guarantee…!