My Garden In December

With the end of the year just round the corner, it seems like a good time to look back on the garden in 2016.

Our garden changed a lot in late summer when the landscape people arrived & did some major work. Underground drainage pipes were the most important part of all the work. There’s nothing to show for all this, except when it rains & then there is the joy of not having a water-logged garden.

Now we have a much smaller lawn & 6 raised vegetable beds. So far they’ve been planted with garlic, broad beans & mustard leaves. The leaves were a random, half-price, past their sell-by date purchase from the garden centre. But it’s nice to have something growing above ground, although they’re tucked under a little tunnel to keep them from the worst of the weather.

I’m looking forward to harvesting fresh vegetables, I really missed the beetroot & chard we grew when we had the allotment.

The greenhouse has been put together by my very patient husband, it was an epic build.

I discovered that designing your own garden is more of challenge than designing other peoples. There’s all that emotion for a start, & serious issues like how to deal with all the mini-floods in parts of the garden need a lot of thought.

We’ve lived here now for nearly 2 years & it’s gradually taking shape. There’s a good strong shape, wide, straight paths & grass edged with strips of metal for a crisp outline.

I’ve got the first batch of plants, shrubs, climbing plants & a couple of willow trees, to fill out the basic structure of the garden. It’s a good time of year to plant, as long the ground isn’t very wet or frozen, & it’s a good time to move shrubs that aren’t in the right place.

I’m planning to put down a thick mulch of compost/soil improver over bare soil after christmas too, to make the soil as rich & healthy as possible, ready for next year.

I’m looking forward to gardening after Christmas, nudging the garden on so the vision in my head finally happens.

I hope you manage to get out into your garden over the next couple of weeks. I’ll write more, with photos, as we make progress over the next few months.

Jill

all photos: Jill Anderson