The Terrace

With the help of Nicola's dad and uncle Bruce, we've made a start on our "let's terrace the garden" project. So far, we've cleared most of the garden of weeds (although further applications of spray are needed) and uprooted a number of troublesome plants. Last weekend we levelled the area outside the cellar (some say "dungeon") door, and laid some weed matting, sand and paving stones. The result looks pretty good:

We're waiting for a good deluge of rain, so that the ground can settle and we can see whether we need to re-lay some of the paving, as I suspect there may be a bit of a dip...

After that, we are looking at the rest of the garden and thinking about putting in some retaining walls to terrace that as well.

Steps

Whilst Julian and Bruce have been staying with us, they've undertaken a  project in our garden. When we moved in, the garden was clearly in need of some serious remedial work, having been neglected, so far as we could make out, since the house was built. It had originally contained some nice plants (as we discovered) but had been left to run wild.

One of the first things to be done was to dismantle a structure beside the house, which we believe was a fort for the previous owner's kids to play in. It was stoutly built of fence posts and decking planks, so it took a bit of effort with a long spike and sledge hammer to take it apart. We tried to do it as gently as possible in order to keep the timber.

I conquer the castle

We sprayed all the weed areas, and then began the process of grubbing out the larger unwanted plants. These include aloes and a large flax, which was eventually removed.

Along the way we found a second citrus tree (we'd found one already, almost throttled by the undergrowth), an olive tree and a hebe. These we're trying to retain, so will keep the weeds away from them and hopefully they'll have a chance to grow and, one day, fruit.

Julian and Bruce then built a set of steps to go down the steep part of the garden:

All their own work!

The next stage is to level the piece at the top of the steps and pave it, as this leads to our dungeon. After that, there's more levelling to be done lower down, and we need some more steps up by the top of the garden.