Top Garden - 2024 preparation

So the strategy for the first summer and autumn was really just to get the Top Garden under control; clear out the rubbish, dead wood and weeds that had overwhelmed the space; make good the boundaries and get a lawn seeded to help stop weed regrowth.

Tree Surgery

I'm really fortunate to have a great friend who is very handy with a chainsaw and doesn't have my slight fear of heights! We swap labour on our bigger projects; kind of like a bartering system 🙂.

There were 6 trees in the Top Garden when I arrived. 4 apple trees, a hawthorn and a huge sycamore. The immediate priorities were the apple trees and hawthorn - the sycamore needed to wait until winter after it had lost it's leaves.

I had cut back most of the apple tree and hawthorn next to the shed when preparing the shed base but Phil took the apple tree down to a stump and pruned the hawthorn on the boundary back very hard to about 4 feet tall to promote new growth. 

 

There were another 2 apple trees halfway down the garden that had been planted too close and they had grown into each other, so the weaker of the two was pruned out and chopped down to a stump to be dealt with later.

Finally, the remaining apple trees were pruned back to try and open them up and promote some healthier growth. 

While the chainsaw was out (!) these very overgrown privet hedges at the boundary between the Top and Bottom Gardens were cut right back to give them a chance to start again.

Everything was much lighter and open after that lot!

Stump Removal

One of my son's was visiting and of course got roped in for a day's hard labour. We decided to dig out the two apple tree stumps - what a day of graft that was! We took one each. I must say that Andy's was probably harder as it was next to the shed whereas I could get all around mine, but he had youth on his side.

The mattock was definitely the tool for the job.

Andy showed he's still just a big kid at heart when he celebrated victory over the stump by climbing one of the big holly trees!

Dry Stone Walling

On the same day as the tree felling, Phil started to pull out the ivy to expose the boundary wall. It was not a pretty sight, revealing a lot of collapsed slate. This was the point where I started to think that maybe I should build a timber fence, but fortunately sense prevailed.

Completely coincidentally I came across a free stone walling course in Holyhead, basically a gang of us helped take down and rebuild some of the heritage walling on Holyhead mountain and got an introduction to it at the same time. When my mates heard about it, they decided to join me. This is us with the section of wall we rebuilt in the day.

So, buoyed with enthusiasm and thinking "how hard can it be", I set to, puling all of the loose stone away, sorting and grading it for size and shape and then slowly rebuilt it. It took best part of two days. I'm sure it won't win prizes, but I was pretty happy with the end result.

There was some stone left over from various bits around the garden, so I used a few leftover concrete blocks as footings and built this little wall against the end of the paved area to tidy it up a bit.

Cold Frame

There were the remains of an old, very well built cold frame halfway down the garden. Stupidly, I'd been filling it up with bits of rubble which, of course, was now in the way so job 1 was to clear out the inside down to the rapidly growing pile of rubbish at the end of the Bottom Garden. Then I broke it up; removed all the rubble and dug out the grotty soil from the base. Finally, I regraded the garden in that area to smooth it all out.

Digging over and prep for lawn

I started digging out weeds really early on, thinking that I could do a little bit each day and it would soon be done. That was kind of how it panned out, although I did put in a couple of big shifts on it as well when the enthusiasm was high! 

Most of the weeds came out easily and the soil was revealed to be really nice - not altogether surprising as it had been nourished for years with apples and leaves falling onto it and rotting.

The very first few feet cleared

There were quite a few plants in there that were salvaged and moved to a "nursery bed" at the bottom of the Top Garden. Not much variety in them though, and I wasn't sure how many I would eventually reuse.

Once it was all cleared and forked over to remove any roots, I used one of the huge beams that had come out of the workshop roof and dragged it all over the soil to try and get a degree of flatness about it, with gentle slopes rather than an uneven area.

I stomped all over the soil to get it firm and then made a 3' wide rake by hammering a load of 2" nails into some scrap timber. It ended up looking like a medieval torture device but worked really well to get the soil raked to "a fine tilth" as all the books tell you to.

And with that done I was ready for seeding just at the right time of year - September, when the soil was still warm but not likely to dry out while the seeds established themselves. 

 

After a couple of weeks, plenty of seedlings were showing and before long it was time to get a first cut done. 

Free plants!

I mentioned above that I'd salvaged some plants from the garden and moved them to a nursery bed.

I replied to a local Facebook group post offering some free plants and met up with a new buddy - Ann. She now regularly rings me if she is thinning anything out to see if I can use them! Again, everything went into nursery beds till I could work out how I'd use them next spring.

I also had a kind donation from another friend Karene, who arrived with a boot full of plants they'd split. These went into another nursery bed. 

These untimately have become known as Ann's Bed and Karene's Bed of course.