WEEDS!!

So, some weeds have managed to poke their unwanted heads through my lovely new lawn! Mainly the beginnings of blackberries, but they are coming not only in the lawn, but also in the rockery. Not many though, to be honest, so I've bought some weed killer to get rid of them. The ones on the lawn are a pain, because I don't want to kill the grass, just the weeds.

I came up with a way to kill the weeds without killing of (hopefully) loads of grass too. I cut both ends of a plastic bottle to put over and contain the weed, and then spray into the bottle. Although some of the grass will undoubtably die off, it probably won't be too much. Hopefully anyway!

Just the planting to go!

So I am very happy with the result! I've had a few weeds come up, mainly blackberries, but have been spraying them with weed killer so they just disappear! I read online that white vinegar is a good weed killer too, and also a lot nicer to the environment, so I'm going to give that a go. But for now, I'm going to leave the garden to settle for a few weeks, before thinking about some planting.

The final corner!

I've finally got to the last part of the garden (for now!) and all that's left is a square patch of earth at the top of the rockery and next to the path that I made. It's not very big so I don't want to lay turf as it will be a nightmare to cut it so I've decide to get a round decorative paving slab to go in the middle, and lay some of the stones around it to carry on the theme. After some online research of prices and sizes, I've opted for this Sun Stepping Stone. I only need one as it's a small area, and then I can put a pot there too with some flowers in, or maybe a little tree.


 I had to order the stepping stone so it took a couple of weeks to arrive, so that gave me a chance to lay the newspaper and compost and let it settle in. When it arrived, it was a really simple job of just laying it on top of the compost, and scattering the stones around the outside.
And it feels really good to be done!

The last of the turf is finally down!

From day one of this project, I knew the biggest cost I would have would be the turf. I've used 17 turfs, and at approx £3.50 each, that's £60. Not a huge amount of money, but along with the cost of the compost, the stones etc, this is an expense that I could do without. What I noticed early on is that at garden centres and DIY places, if you wait until the day before the new stock is going to arrive, the price of the older turfs plummets!
I did this religiously, and as I have done the garden bit by bit, I had the luxury of buying a few turfs at a time, all of which I paid a fraction of the price for. They usually go down to about £1 - £1.50 per turf, but you have to be quick as they go really fast at this price! Initially, the turfs are not as green as they could be, but after a week or so and plenty of water, lush green grass!

Planting the Centre Piece

I filled up the flower-box with compost, and had a look around in the garden centre for some colourful and fairly hardy flowers to go inside. I chose the following :


Pink 'Daisies' - In the middle
Lobelia - In each corner
'Pinks' - On each side


They have added a nice bit of colour to the garden.

Path

At the top end of the rockery, there is a gap between some paving slabs under the length of the front windows and the path that leads around to the back of the house, and my mum suggested some paving slabs here to make it easier to go from front to back. This made sense, but I wanted to have something there that was a bit more pleasing to the eye than just paving slabs. There is some natural slate that was discarded around the back of the house, along with a couple of old roof tiles, so I thought that maybe I could make something out of these. 

 Wet newspaper and compost went down and I rounded off the top of the rockery with bricks before laying down the natural slate tiles in a kind of pattern across the top of the rockery towards the other paving along under the window. In between the tiles, I put some more of the decorative stones to gel in with the rest of the garden and it began to spring to life and look quite attractive! I topped up the stones around the rockery, so not quite so much compost was showing through. All of a sudden, the end of this huge project was in sight!

Finishing the rockery!

I had some of the bricks left over, so to match up with the centre piece of the garden, I decided to use these along the edge of the rockery, and then turf up to them. So I began the final push of the 'wet newspaper/compost' combo right the way up to the edge of the rockery which took a good couple of hours and quite a bit of compost! But it meant I could flatten out the ground as I went, as this part of the garden was the most uneven. Once this was done, I layed the bricks out in a wavy line along the length of the rockery, working out roughly how many more turfs I needed as to where the bricks should go. I wanted a decent amount of space in front of the main rocks of the rockery so that in the future I will be able to have some plants there, but also had to balance out the cost of the turfs and that I didn't end up spending a small fortune on them! Once this was all done, I sprinkled some of the decorative stones along the length so it would match up with the centre piece, and VOILA! Rockery (just about) done!

Getting there gradually...

I have continued layering up the wet newspapers and compost, bit-by-bit-by-bit! I've only really had weekends and odd days that I've had off from work, so in between looking after two crazy boys, a husband and running a house, it's taking me a while! I'm enjoying it though, but this part is somewhat tedious. I want to do it properly, to hopefully stop the weeds coming through, so I'm determined not to cut corners! Been thinking about the rockery and how to finish it off and have had a few ideas. 


Had a lovely surprise too! My amazing dad made me a flower box to stand in the centre!
So I've been out shopping for some pretty, colourful flowers to go in there. A little light relief from all this newspaper!

Starting the rockery

I started to have a look around for some rockery rocks. You would be surprised how many people want to get rid of rocks, bricks and slabs for very low money, as long as you are happy to go and collect them yourself! I found these rocks on eBay, and managed to get them for £1.04! 



All I had to do was collect them, and as they were local, it was no problem. So after I picked them up, I started to prepare the ground where I wanted them to go in the same way as before, layered wet newspaper and compost, and then began placing the stones on the top, spacing them evenly along the length of the garden. It was built up very quickly and before long the rocks were in place, taking up a good part of the garden, looking great

and saving me money on turfs! 

To finish off, I put some of the

small decorative stones around

the rocks and over the compost.

Centre Piece!

So, this is one cost saving project I came up with! To save a bit of money on turfs and compost, I decided to make a centre piece for the garden, with the intention of having some kind of raised bed on this spot. The bricks I had in the back garden going spare, so I made a square out of them, six bricks by six bricks. I used the layered wet newspaper method in the middle of the square, and filled it up with compost. On the compost I put a layer of small decorative stones. This would hopefully become somewhere where I could put a tub of some sort with plants and flowers in. I also got offered a load of unused soil from some friends of my parents! A HUGE cost saving, but an awful lot of lugging about! Still, no pain, no gain!

And it begins....

So, to begin this laborious task! I started by cutting the grass as low as it would go with the strimmer. When I looked closely, there were so many weeds, so I sprayed weed killer as I went. I placed two sheets of newspaper at a time, poured water on them from a watering can to make sure they were wet all the way through, placed two more sheets, wet those and gradually layered them up to about six sheets over just normal grass, and more over weeds and brambles. When they were soaking wet, I poured compost over, probably about two inches thick in most places, mostly to give the turfs a good base, but also to even out all the lumps and bumps of the lawn. It was then that it dawned on me what a huge task I had taken on, but I was determined to give it a good go! But I had to come up with a plan to keep the cost down, as buying compost and turfs was going to be somewhat expensive on my measly salary!

Newspaper weeds away...?

I began researching ways to keep the weeds at bay and create a new lawn without the difficult and tiring job of digging over the entire garden. The ground was incredibly hard, so digging would have been near on impossible anyway. I came across a few websites that showed how to lay wet newspaper down around plants and cover with mulch to stop photosynthesis of the weeds below, thus stopping them growing and was completely biodegradable to boot! Since I didn't want any plants in the middle of the lawn, I decided to give it a go, but instead of mulch, I would put the wet newspapers down over the entire lawn, cover it with compost, and then put turf down. Easy peasy....

Garden BEFORE

We moved into this house in May of 2012. The house is perfect! Very close to school for my two boys, close to work for both my husband and I. The neighbours are lovely, but the garden, sadly, was another story. The previous tenants just let it turn into a jungle, with terrible grass (if you can call it grass) coming through the uneven 'lawn'. There were weeds everywhere, and even blackberries that just kept on coming through. When it came to cutting it, the only thing we could do was to get a strimmer and cut it as short as it would go. Every time I came home and had to walk past it, it would irritate me, especially considering the rest of the gardens in the street were well kept. I've always enjoyed gardening, and my mum is an avid gardener and I'm not scared of hard work, so I thought I would start tackling it and see how far I got!