Gravelling the garden

Last year, my girlfriend and I spent 3 days building decking in our garden which I blogged about at the time: The great decking project & Decking finished. It was always the intention to cover the rest of the garden with gravel to match some already there. Unfortunately we didn’t get much summer last year and that combined with me being disorganised meant that the garden remained unfinished for about 9 months.
Finally, as the weather starts to pick up for spring, I got around to arranging delivery of 2 tonnes of gravel.

I paid extra for morning delivery, but hadn’t quiet expected it to be 8.15am on a Saturday. But I guess it was good to get an early start.
I roped in a friend to come help as we had just buckets to ferry the gravel through the garage and out onto the garden. WIth 3 of us it took relatively little time to shift it all. Just a couple of hours, including stopping to have pate on toast for breakfast ;-).

Kat and I got about this far before Steve arrived

And it didn’t really take much longer to complete the job

It makes a big difference to the look of the garden to finally have this finished. Given that we finished pretty early we decided to go out and get some pots and plants. The plan is that we only have plants that either smell nice, or produce something. So herbs, veg, fruit. Plants in our garden have to earn their keep.
We also decided to get our selves a chimnea. I have a hopeful notion of being able to use it to deliver some nice heat over the decking area to help us make use of it later into the evening. Time will tell how effective that proves to be for the moment I have a few ‘curing steps’ to go through before I can try to get a full blown fire going.

The reault of our efforts and shopping spree look pretty good

I really like the effect of lots of different sizes/types/colours of pots. We realised that if we attempted to have any common theme, chances are if we wanted to add to it in the future we’d struggle to match something. This way we plan from the outset that the theme is mistmatched.

I’d like to say that the garden is now finished. But we still have a few things to do, clean up along the other side of the path, get a few more pots and plants. But it does at least now look presentable, so we will have to arrange to have people over.

The cost of all this has not escaped my attention, Even doing the decking ourselves I think we’re looking at about 900 pounds so far. That’s actually not that bad for what we’ve achieved, and spreading out the activity helps spread the cost. From here on we have no single big expenses required though, just a pot+plant here and there, some accessories like seating cushions.

Overall I’m very happy with the results of our labour, now I just have to hope that this year we get a reasonable summer with which to enjoy it.