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Participant diaries

Starting from Scratch

By 11th March 2016One Comment

My family moved to Tayport in September, and for the first time in years we have a garden. About half paving and half that could pass for a lawn, with a patch of pink gravel in the corner serving no apparent purpose, all rounded off by a towering conifer hedge.

Pavement and lawn

Our garden this February

As soon as we moved in, we began talking about transforming it into the garden we’d always wanted. “Let’s take up half the paving, extend the lawn, replace the gravel with a vegetable patch, put in some flowerbeds, maybe some herbs.” Brilliant! No bother, we’ll sort it out in the spring, we thought. So we shut the back door and spent the winter dreaming of the garden we’d be enjoying in no time at all.

We are new to gardening. As the evenings became lighter and we looked out on our little lawn full of weeds, we realised we didn’t know where to begin. We’d never trimmed a hedge or grown so much as a bean. We didn’t have any tools – not even a pair of gloves. And shouldn’t we run our grand plans by our landlady before pulling up her paving?

So we’ll be taking it one step at a time. We’ve got permission from our landlady to make changes, we’ve borrowed some tools and we’ve bought some gloves. The first task we’ve set ourselves is tackling the monster hedge – cutting it back should let some more sunshine in. I’ll let you know how we get on!

 

 

Emma

My family are working on our first garden, learning as we go...

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