Moving matters #3: Home improvements

You know that thing you do when you're selling a house when you rush round getting all the jobs done that needed doing for the last five years but you've never got round to? Just in time for someone else to enjoy the fruits of your labours?

Well I've discovered the same thing applies to the garden. Now - brace yourself: this is a bit of the garden I never - and I mean never - show people if I can possibly help it.

Here's a 'before' shot, taken in June 2008 when it was at its absolute worst, of the middle section of the garden: the section we've been about-to do up for quite some time.

You can see why I avoided showing it to people, can't you?

Over the ensuing two years progress has been painfully slow, but there has been progress of sorts: we've moved the shed which you can see to the right, and cleared the undergrowth and much of the junk. However it has still remained the bonfire spot of choice and the place where large loads of manure, sand and topsoil get dumped for want of anywhere else. My experience of this little wilderness has led me to form a firm belief that scruffiness just breeds scruffiness.

Anyway: the idea was always that there would be a central children's play area to house slides, trampolines and the like (it's opposite the wendy house) and I would plant it up with something cottagey around the edges.

The imminent prospect of dozens of people walking through my garden and seeing the scene of wreckage above has acted like a large box of nitroglycerine delivered beneath our backsides: and we've finally got on and done it.


Do you know what - it took about three hours to install it and was really, really easy. Hubby has also laid a nifty little path across to it since this photo was taken.

Now for the exciting bit: the plan is to rotavate all the spare ground around it and seed it with one of those lovely Sheffield mixes of meadow-style annuals from Pictorial Meadows. A quick fix akin to painting over the stains on the walls with a swish of Dulux: but much, much prettier.

It is so maddening that you always get these things done just in time to leave them behind. I would have saved myself a lot of abject apologising had I got on with it, say, two years ago, and I'd also have been able to enjoy those sparkly meadow flowers all for myself every summer.

I think there's an aberrant and probably masochistic gene which only switches on when you begin moving house. I have it in spades: it impels you to demonstrate to yourself what might have been, had you been more efficient, more perfect, and just a bit less inclined to procrastinate.

The path to enlightenment #2

Back to the grindstone: you may remember I had a two-inch layer of MOT on the path which once I'd got the capricious and frankly malicious whacker plate under some semblance of control I managed to compress to a pretty good solid layer.

Step 5: start mixing your mortar. I went for a 1:4 mix of cement to sand which seemed to work pretty well. You slosh a bit of water in and then squirt some washing up liquid after it - this keeps the mortar elastic - before using the oldest spade you have to mix it up until it's the sloppy side of solid - about the texture of blancmange. This is the best way of ruining gardening tools I know.

Step 6: Use the mortar to set your edging bricks. At this point I thought I'd better start taking some pictures of my somewhat erratic progress.

This bit isn't quite as bad as it seems: I used pegs and string to mark the outer edge of the path so I had a line to follow and then it was a matter of using a rubber mallet to knock the bricks in place.

Step 7: go and do something else for a day while it all dries.

Step 8: it's time to play with the sand you ordered, if the neighbour's kids haven't got there first. A 2" layer inside the brick edging, if you please.


Step 9: level the sand and dry-lay the bricks, making sure they're level in every direction - I put a gentle camber on mine from one side to the other to drain the water off.

At this point Joe Swift produced a natty little bit of wood, with the profile of a brick cut out of each side so it "hung" on the sides of the path and acted as a template to smoothe your sand level.

I thought this looked like a good idea, so gave it a go. Sadly, I quickly realised the catch: it does assume that all your bricks are identical. In some misguided attempt to be a bit more environmentally sound we'd bought our bricks reclaimed at an auction, so they were every possible size, shape and thickness you can imagine and I had to lay them all individually, using my little rubber mallet and taking Bloomin' Ages.

Still, it's starting to take shape and look ever so slightly like a proper path by now.

Step 10: Mix some more 1:4 mortar but don't put the water in this time. Make sure it's not raining, or even a bit damp, and use one of those little pointing trowels to feed the dry mix into the gaps. Then follow up with a stiff brush so there's not even a little bit left on the surface of the bricks (where it will set in a grey and depressing mat of concrete). This is why it's essential your bricks should be dry before you start this bit.

By the way, the grey and depressing bits on the bricks above were already there - see reclaimed bricks comment earlier.

Now, I was lucky and it rained the night after I did this so all the mortar was beautifully watered in and set almost straight away. But if it doesn't rain, you'll have to do this yourself with a hose set on sprinkler - don't blast water at it all or you'll wash out all the mortar and have to start again.

By the way, being a very amateur bricky, I cheated.

I have three holes in my path: here, where the four arms of the cross meet (there are two little side-paths off to my shed and my greenhouse - oh, no, I'm not over-ambitious, oooooh no) and at each end, where the squares I made under the gates in and out were, ahem, not exactly square.

One of the many things I discovered through making this path is the reason why brick paths are always an odd number of bricks across. The width of my path, for reasons lost in the mists of history, is six bricks across for the main bit and four across for the side paths. This doesn't work, and my maths isn't up to working out why. So I just fudged it. A little concrete and a few pretty pebbles should fill in the hole nicely.

Doncha just love amateur DIY enthusiasts? What can I say - I make mistakes so you don't have to. Still, I got a pretty good new brick path, and I learned an awful lot of things - chief among which was that It's Never as Easy as it Looks On TV.

The path to enlightenment #1

We've gone a bit potty with the hard landscaping lately. First it was the gravel, which smartened things up around here no end, and then it was laying the brick path down the middle of my working area, which for the last seven years has been reduced to a muddy channel each winter, driving us crazy and causing not a few spectacular somersaults/twisted ankles/soggy behinds/caustic and very bitter swearwords.

So to spare our children further expanding their vocabulary we decided to invest in a Proper Path. Fortified by Joe Swift's enthusiastic if high-speed advice on an edition of GW a bit earlier in the season I set to work.

Step 1: dig out channel for path about six inches below ground level (the only easy bit in the whole process, I now realise).

Step 2: bash in some little pegs and use a long spirit level between them to make sure they're all the same height - viz. with the tops about 2" above ground level. This is Much More Tricky than they make it look on telly and takes a Bloody Long Time.

Step 3: get a lot of builders' bags full of heavy stuff delivered. First into the wheelbarrow and off down the garden was M.O.T., which when I were a nipper used to be called hardcore, but I think that word has a different meaning nowadays. Anyway, this is what they use under roads apparently: it's made out of grey chippings of what looks like old bits of concrete and though it's very heavy it settles down very satisfyingly to form a pretty impenetrable pad at the base of your path.

Step 4: put down a 2" layer and then hire a whacker plate (which I'm sure has a more technical name) to rattle the teeth out of your head making sure it's all well compacted down.

This turned out to be unexpectedly entertaining as the moment I turned it on the whacker plate set off at a terrific speed across the garden. I hung on for dear life as it headed for the herbaceous border trying to keep up and steer it away from the fence - do you have any idea how heavy those things are? About two inches shy of the first quivering plant I finally located which switch was the choke and managed to slow the engine down to a more modest chug. By which point my other half was on the floor in tears of laughter and I was a shaking wreck.

So at this point, I retired traumatised for a cup of tea and a lie down before tackling the next bit. Of which, more later (with pictures, this time).

Inspiration from West Dean #2

One for the hard-landscaping wishlist here....

There's a little loggia that formed the full stop to a very long pergola at West Dean Gardens (there's a picture of it on the front page of the gardens section of their website if you want to see it in its full glory). And inside, without a word of fanfare, there is quite the most beautiful floor I think I've ever seen.

It's very much in the local vernacular - the whole of West Dean seems to be built of flint from the nearby South Downs. I just fell in love with it.


It has such wonderful texture and a kind of instant agedness. I suspect the flint-knapping students at the nearby Weald and Downland Museum in Singleton may have had a hand in this. I wonder if they're looking for a course project in Surrey....?

How we spent our weekend #2

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.

How we spent our weekend #1

Have small children clamouring for goldfish and pathological hatred of cleaning out fishtanks...

will dig big hole.

Having drawn some interesting but perhaps not shareable conclusions about our domestic soil profile, we added the preformed liner donated by the in-laws (also pestered by said small children. Someone give them something to do - four of the six weeks of summer holidays have been survived but we're getting desperate.)

In a very clever way (mainly because we looked it up on the internet first) we made the hole about 2" deeper than the pond to allow for a layer of sand at the bottom. This was a blessing - the base of the Big Hole was like a particularly stony brand of concrete (see reference to soil profile above) so there was no way we were going to get this baby level without introducing some leeway.

Half-filled to stabilise it and it's looking good - the water is even lining up with those ledge things quite nicely so I guess that means The Bloke can use a spirit level after all. Actually he did most of this, but since he had his shirt off at the time I'm reserving the evidence for my eyes only. We did line up a lot of wheelbarrows (very small ones for the little people) and move dirt. And I got down in the hole with my girlie border spade and shovelled out the bottom bits (to much praise over my digging technique from mud-phobic husband: you see there was a reason for all that gardening, after all).

There's a clue to what we did next in the last picture. This was the technical bit so I withdrew to a safe distance and watched admiringly. Of which more later.

Garden makeover: Shedding about #2

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...!

How to make a coldframe #4

Time to get back to my coldframe construction - it's been put on the back burner a little since all the blessed weeds started growing in about April. I'm currently juggling with a Heath Robinson construction of planks and old greenhouse glass next to my greenhouse as the home for my long-suffering seedlings (late-sown summer annuals, mostly) - I do wish I could get on and finish the deluxe model. At this rate it'll be just about ready for the first frosts...

Anyway, I think I left this just as the uprights were nicely battened and ready to clad. You start by doing the end uprights, the ones you put battens around the inside edges as well as at top, back, front and base. The reason for these inside battens will now become obvious: these are what you fix the cladding to.

This is a pretty easy process: you can either use thin planks, like I have, or following the Terence Conran design more closely, you can use overlapping cladding, which is kind of wedge shaped and widely available from DIY stores. I originally thought this would look a bit clunky (actually I still think that) but now I think it might be the better option - the above looks smart, but it does inevitably mean tiny gaps between the planks, as wood rather inconveniently tends to move as it gets soaked or dries out. Cladding, on the other hand, can move all it likes but it's still overlapping, so no draughts.

The only slightly tricky bit is cutting the top triangular wedges to size: the best way is to draw the shape of the upright onto the planks as a cutting guide before you actually nail them on to the battens. Or you can do it like me, and fiddle about cutting extra bits off here and there as you go along, thus doubling the time it takes you and making you swear in frustration.

No prizes for guessing that we'll be cladding the rest of it next time.

Previous bits of the series:

How to make a coldframe #1

How to make a coldframe #2

How to make a coldframe #3

How to make a coldframe #3

Right, now having blown your brain cutting impossibly shallow angles for the upright dividers (I hope it wasn't that bad - I "borrowed" my husband's professional shed-making machinery so I cheated)... now here's an easier bit of woodwork for you.

The battens you attach to the uprights are to hold the cladding in place, and should measure 25mm x 25mm, though I couldn't find that at my local branch of Wickes so settled for 25mm x 38mm. As you can see from the pic you only need them along the top edge and down the two vertical sides of the dividers - not along the bottom. You'll obviously need the battens on both sides of the two central dividers.

You do need to cut the top batten to shape at an angle, but it's a lot easier this time. Use the edge of a bit of cut-off batten wood as a spacer to work out how far down you need to attach the batten itself (if you're using 25x38mm wood, use the 25mm edge). Just line the spacer up with the top edge of the divider and draw a line underneath. This marks where the top edge of the batten will go.

Then cut the batten to about 10cm (4") too long at each end and nail it on so that it lines up with the mark. After that, it's just a matter of cutting the ends off flush with the divider.

The upright battens are far easier - unless you're a real perfectionist (or are borrowing your husband's shed-building machinery) you don't need to cut the ends at an angle as they go in pretty close anyway, certainly close enough to fix the cladding to. You do still need to do the thing with the spacer, though, or the cladding won't lie flush with the uprights.

After you've done all that, you'll also need to put in an extra bit of battening all around the inside edge of the two end dividers - the divider in the picture is an end divider, so you can see how I've done this if you look closely. This is so that you can attach the cladding across them to form the ends of the coldframe. Again, you don't need to be too exact - just cut the battens off straight and fit them in as snugly as you can.

I'll get on to cladding the ends next time, and all this will hopefully start to make a bit more sense.

In case you missed the previous bits of this inordinately long series, here they are:

How to make a coldframe #1

How to make a coldframe #2

How to make a cold frame #2

Hmm... photography never was my strong point, but bear with me here.

For my mega-coldframe I've adapted the design from Terence Conran's Garden DIY, a very handy little book which has lots of useful projects and explains things simply enough even for novices like me. I've made both my compost bins from a design in this book, and very successful they've been too (when I make the third, I'll put that on here too). So if anything in my description of how to make these doesn't make sense - get the book.

After getting the base right, it's time for some woodwork. This design centres around dividing frames, which are then held together using the cladding. I suspect it will have little structural strength in the long run - i.e. I won't be able to move it much - but that doesn't bother me: if it bothers you, you'll need to work in some stronger connecting pieces to hold the dividers together.

The dividers are made from 2x2 (5cmx5cm for the metrically-minded) treated timber. Measure the depth (front to back) and width (side to side) of the space you have available - the good thing about this particular design is that you can have as many or as few dividers as you like, so the coldframe can be whatever size you wish. Mine is made up of three sections, so I've made four dividers (two at each end, two in the middle), which will eventually be spaced a little over 2ft apart.

For each divider, cut a length to fit the depth, then two more for the uprights: one at 1ft (30cm) and one at 18" (45cm). Finally, cut the length that will slope across the top: it'll need to be the same length as the base, plus about 4" (10cm).

Nail the two uprights on to the base at each end, using 2 3" nails at each joint, driven in at an angle - this will mean the joint is much firmer and won't pull apart.

To set the top rail, lay it across the two uprights so that it rests lining up with their top surfaces, and mark off the angle it lies at. It'll only be a very slight slope. Saw this off so that the top surfaces of the two uprights are now at an angle (hopefully the same).

Nail the top rail across them, using the same angled-nail technique as before, and leaving a length of rail sticking out from each end. Finally, saw off the ends of the top rail so that they lie flush with the uprights.

Next: putting on support battens (you can see a couple in the picture above - sneak preview!)

How to make a cold frame #1

Just occasionally I'm not so much a gardener as a builder. When you're developing a garden, the first several stages involve an awful lot of digging, lugging stone around and construction - it all seems to take ages and hasn't got a great deal to do with plants. But if you have the patience to do it, it's worth it.

I've been struggling to manage in recent years without a decent coldframe, so this spring I've decided to bite the bullet and make myself a super-deluxe model, the entire length of my 8' greenhouse and about 3'6" from front to back. This is not small for a coldframe - but then my greenhouse is already groaning with seedlings and I've only just started early sowings, so I do need the extra space!

As you'll see in the picture, the first step, before I so much as banged in a nail, was to sort out the area where the coldframe was to go. There were two blackcurrant bushes here, which were always a bit close to the greenhouse for comfort, so I moved them to the allotment this winter. I had to hoick out a spare gooseberry bush, too - not such a well-thought-out manoevre as I hadn't anywhere to put it. Luckily I've got two more to the right of this area, so I'm not exactly going to go short.

Then I marked out the area and dug it down to half-a-spade's depth. This is a really useful depth for hard landscaping - it does for paths, patios... pretty much anything, really.

Next I edged the area with boards - I used 4" boards, but you can use standard gravel boards which are 6". These were attached to short stakes at the corners and checked for straightness with a spirit level.

I roughly levelled out the earth inside the boards, and then put down some weed-suppressing membrane, stapled to the boards on the inside to about 1/2" from the top (you can just about see the edges in the picture). And, finishing touch, about 9 bags of gravel from the local DIY store. This means you can level it easily, and the coldframe isn't resting on bare earth - which means it won't rot so quickly, either.

Next instalment... the start of the woodwork!