...This guy for those of you that don't know who that is. While he is one of the characters from a game that I am humbly amazing at; Cluedo. He is also my alter ego in the garden apparently. I can't explain it but from day one I have had an unhealthy obsession with getting plum slate into my garden. It was one of the only certainties I had from day one for my garden design and this week everything sort of fell into place at my all time favourite price ...FREE!! :D
I can't overstate how amazing that price is for what these things would normally retail at. Anyhoo I'm getting ahead of myself a bit, let me begin at the beginning. If you remember in the 'Happy New Year' post we came back to a real mess and had to do some clean up to what will hopefully be an area for alfresco dining. Well it was not gonna happen in that swamp, and when the opportunity arose to rectify that I jumped at it. Recently my neighbours across the road had been doing up their driveway and had a tonne bag of leftover builders sand in their drive. It had been sitting their for a few weeks, so not having the required social skills to persuade my neighbours I sent my mum on the charm offensive. She went over their and in a way only mothers can, talked her way into me being able to use their sand for the bargain price of £FREE.99. Bare in mind a tonne bag of builders sand would usually set you back around £50.00... Make no mistake I wasted absolutely no time getting over there with Steph's wheelbarrow and shoveling load after load of sand into my garden. I spread the sand using my garden rake to make the lumpy mess underneath as flat as possible and that was that. I was already feeling much more positive about the garden progress.
I had ordered some black weed membrane from ebay a little while before, so covered the sand with that to suppress weed growth and give the plum slate a smooth bed to lay on. Pinned the membrane down once I had cut it to size and I was done. I just had to find some plum slate from somewhere...
Queue a lady called Pippa and her lovely mother, who I found on Gumtree trying to get rid of about 15 bags of plum slate from their front garden. Guess what price... say it with me now... FREE, FREE, FREEEEEE!! I couldn't believe it, so I got my sister to give me a lift to pick these bags up on the same day as I knew they would not hang around for long at that non-existent price. I'll admit it wasn't pretty as the bags were muddy as it had been raining and I had to battle some spiders and slugs for them but it was totally worth it! When you get a great deal like that you have to jump at it. I simply had to spread the bags of slate over my membrane and we were heading in the right direction to make this garden beautiful. I imagine the amount of slate that I collected saved me 40 to 50 quid, meaning I had saved a grand total of £100 from being resourceful and opportunistic (Shout out Mumsie)
[ GARDENING TIP ] Sites like Gumtree are crucial for finding great deals on gardening tools, landscaping materials and plants. You need to be persistent but if you put the time in it really pays off, especially if you're on a tight budget like myself. Most people just really want to get rid of things like soil, sand, paving slabs e.t.c as they take up space and you can snap it up for practically nothing. Also some people don't know the true value of what they are selling as it has probably just been sitting in their garden and they just want it gone. So be prepared to play the long game but don't waste any time as it will be picked up within a couple days if the deal is good enough. Good luck guys!
