Feeling all smug with my new found supreme gardening knowledge (cough cough), I decided to go into the garden. It's amazing what you can learn by watching a few YouTube videos and reading forums, but needless to say I was still the epitome of amateur gardening. I had a very overwhelming task ahead of me and a very small budget to do it with, so the only real way things were gonna get done is if I worked systematically and seasonally. This basically meant I was gonna do whatever the hell I could in the Spring/Summer without bankrupting myself at the same time.
Trying to revert my mum's flowerbeds back to their former glory was pretty high on the agenda for me, so I cut down all the long grass and yanked out as many weeds as I could. The amount of bramble I found was just a little bit alarming (and just a lot painful). Next up was working out just what was underneath all those overgrown weeds and grass and that was gonna involve hella digging.
One of the things I learnt about my wonderful garden is that we have clay soil ...EVERYWHERE!!
For those of you that are not aware of what clay soil is like when it hardens... it is like trying to smash through a solid brick wall with a spade.
As much as I like to believe I'm the black superman and nothing can harm me, digging up clay soil is, to this day, one of the most physically challenging things I've done. It was great for my triceps, but at the same time a nightmare in every other humanly possible way.
[GARDENING TIP] I do not recommend trying to dig clay soil in the Summer or during a dry period. If you know you have clay soil in your garden, dig in early spring or after heavy rainfall, so the ground is a bit softer.
One of the great things about being able to look back over what I've done with a bit more gardening knowledge now, is that I can spot exactly what I did wrong at the time. This section is just such a time, because with the sheer volume of clay soil my garden has, I would have needed a whole lot of compost and organic material to make it into beautiful and grainy soil. However hindsight is 20/20 and I still wear glasses, so I dug, mixed compost with the clay and put a bark chip mulch on top to keep weeds at bay. In my head I was a friggin genius for this but in reality I had given myself a lot of work and not put in any weed membrane to stop the deep rooted weeds from just coming right back.
All this talk about digging, I forgot to mention I was hooking up my new flower bed with some fresh looking wooden borders I got on offer from Wilkos on a 3 for 10 deal, which I felt was a good price; so as you will see I bought many more. Also there is a certain fern you may recognise (it's on the home page...keep up guys) in the pics that was beginning to really look great in its pimped up bed.
Little did I know that there was a LOT more digging in my near future and a very neglected front garden on the horizon...
