The blue tits continue to pay regular visits to the blue tit big brother house, but just like the real big brother they rarely do anything interesting or different to the things we’ve already seen. There’s certainly no sign of nesting, and given that it got down to -7°C last night, that’s hardly surprising!
It’s been a while since the blog was updated though, so to keep things going I thought I’d write a bit about our recent garden makeover.
Our back garden is about 20m long and 9m wide, and was dominated by strong straight lines running its length that made it seem very narrow. Wanting to make it more attractive to both ourselves and to wildlife we recently made some big changes. OK, we recently paid someone else to make most of the big changes 🙂
We’ve got a lot of bare earth now, and a lawn that looks dreadful since Sophie hired a scarifier and removed all the moss—which was most of the lawn. We’re waiting for things to warm up so that we can do some seeding, but this is the view from the landing window:
Seen from the patio the sweeping lawn seems to widen the garden, which is just the effect we were hoping for.
On the left you can see the cherry tree which the Blue Tit Big Brother house is mounted in. The sweep of the lawn will be extended behind the green house when it’s time to sow grass seed. The end of the garden will be wild flower meadow, interspersed with fruit trees and bushes. We had an apple ‘Rubinette’, a blackcurrant and some rasberries which we put in a while ago, and a fantastically productive gooseberry which was here when we moved in. We’ve added a pear ‘Concorde’, Victoria plum and a cherry ‘Sunburst’. Right at the bottom is a native hedgerow that we planted a couple of years ago.
The pond is well stocked with plants that a colleague from work gave me from his pond, and we’ve created a bog garden behind it. The decking at the end of the garden will one day have a bench on—it’s the place where the last of the evening sun falls. Here’s the view of the pond from the decking at the moment:
The trellis hides a scene something like I imagine the Grundy’s back yard to look like, but is a key part of our attempts to live and garden more sustainably:
The main purpose of this area is to store, cut and split firewood to keep our wood burner running. Wood, which is near carbon neutral, is our main winter fuel. There’s also a twin bay compost heap into which most of our garden and kitchen waste goes. The big black tank holds about 1000 litres of rain water harvested from the house and shed roofs, and has additional storage space for logs beneath it. As you can see, this area also tends to get used for dumping all those bits that you find around a garden that don’t look very pretty.
Tags: Garden
