New house - new garden

View towards Brixham from our house in Paignton

At last we've moved into our 'new' house, with garden front and back - and two lawns. Grass is something I've missed over the past seven years whilst we lived in the wonderful, spacious house in Paignton with fabulous sea views of the whole of Torbay.  


We had large patio at the back, complete with hot tub, decking, large fish pond with five koi carp and big L-shaped workshop - one end was 'his' for tools etc, and the other end was for gardening paraphernalia (mine).  

The front garden was very long and wide and meandered down the the road. This consisted of wide flower beds with trees, shrubs and flowers and little steps wandering downwards. 

Torquay - giving those in Paignton something to look at!

At the bottom of the drive was a larger area with summerhouse where we could sit and look at Torquay (reminds me of the old joke: 'what is the purpose of Torquay?'  - 'to give us here in Paignton something to look at'.  And it certainly did!  

Sometimes it felt like living in Monaco, with the lights of the town and of the bay with twinkling light from any ships moored in either Tor Bay or the much larger Lyme Bay.  We sometimes had huge cruise ships visit and when the weather was rough there were often many oil tankers and similar moored.  This was a very expensive thing so ships only moored up when absolutely necessary.  One wet and stormy day we counted 22 such ships from our living room window.

However, returning to the grass issue - what I didn't miss over the past seven years was the actually mowing!  I missed the grass clippings for the compost bin but not the work of giving the lawn it's fortnightly (or even weekly) haircut.

View of patio from living room

We have access to the patio (terrace?) from both the kitchen and the living room, then there are steps down to a large-ish lawn.  At one side there's a rather nice wooden shed which we've just installed to replace the old one which was riddled with rot and completely leaky.  Around the lawn there are flower beds.

The front is pretty similar, with block paving semi-circular drive, then lawn with surrounding flower bed and a hedge at the front, like most of the other houses in the road. 

So it's a pretty blank canvas and we're now deciding what we can do to make this garden more suitable for our way of life.  At some time this garden was looked after well but it look as though for the past couple of years the flower beds have been left to their own devices and just been cursorily weeded.

I think one of the first things we need to do is ... nothing ... just see what comes up once the Spring and Summer arrive, something which is very difficult to have the self-discipline to do.  

Then by the look of it all the beds need to be dug over and about 75% of the plants discarded.  Already (sorry, couldn't wait) we've dug up lots of crocosmia, bluebells and other bulbs and given them away, on the basis that there are so many of them that we won't miss a few.

I'd like to grow some vegetables, although the space available isn't nearly as big as we had at the allotment.  So will need to think carefully about what are the best things to grow.  One school of thought is to grow fruit and veg which is difficult for supermarkets to transport, therefore rather expensive, such as raspberries and blueberries.  And another suggestion is to grown foodstuffs which are much more tasty when just picked, such as peas and asparagus. I also prefer home-grown runner beans as they're so much more crisp.

We've turned the leaky water butt upside down and made a compost bin.  Then bought another water butt and attached it to the new shed, so we now have our own pure water, which plants much prefer to the tap stuff.  But one compost bin isn't nearly enough, so we're planning another one elsewhere in the garden, perhaps a wooden one this time.  I found one with slats at the front for easy emptying (http://www.primrose.co.uk/easyload-wooden-compost-extra-large-litres-p-7465.html?cPath=38&src=list_img#material=7854&type=).