2012/2013- the gardening bug begins!

Last year I took my interest in gardening from a couple of hanging baskets to trying to be a little bit more adventurous.

Living in this house is the first time I have had my own garden to play with & I love it! 

This year will be our 3rd summer in the house and as I am on maternity leave I intend to have a good go at making it look great this year. 

I am definitely no expert on gardening and everything I have learnt so far is from google & watching the Alan Titchmarsh series: how to be a gardener on YouTube.

Just found some pictures of my attempt the first year we lived here, I just concentrated on tubs in the back garden then, and we didn't have rolo trying to eat everything and knocking things over so it was a lot easier to do that then:

I also gave growing some tomatoes a go & they grew really well, which spurred me on to try growing more vegetables the next year! 

Here are a few pictures of last years attempt, I mainly concentrated on getting the front garden sorted, and left the back garden pretty plain as rolo was a very inquisitive puppy at the time and couldn't keep his nose out of any pots I tried to put down lol.

When we moved in the front garden was just an overgrown jungle with a few half dead small trees or bushes and lots of rubbish mixed in with rubble, loads of weeds & dried up old bark chippings. We chopped down the dead trees, generally tided up, bought some new bark to put down & dug out a couple of plant beds:

The plants I tried growing in this bed were mostly perennials: a hydrangea, a fox glove (which I pulled up as I hated how big the leaves got), a lupin (which I loved, but It does over the winter), sweet peas at the back and a few little annual plants.

In this bed I mostly went with bright annuals, although I was not keen on the overall look in the end as it got very crowded and was hard to weed! I Used lots of pansies and snap dragons (my favourite plant), I also planted a couple of fushias in here not realising that they were perennials! 

I did have some pots again along the sides of the front path, the weird gunk you see in some of them was some watering crystals, my husband decided to go stupid with it and just throw it in the top of some of the pots eww:

This is the vegetable plot we made, in the early days:

And this is how it looked a bit further along:

We did fill it eventually, but for some reason I never got round to taking anymore pictures apart from these:

The vegetables we had last year were: strawberries, potatoes, broccoli, tomatoes, peas, chives, sweetcorn, bell peppers (one of the only ones not to work out), salad leaves, spring onions, carrots, parsnips and runner beans (These also didn't work as they didn't have enough space).

I also planted lots of herbs such as mint, corriander, thyme & lavender - I can't remember the others but there were more! 

Well, that's the round up of summers 2012 & 2013, I am looking forward to seeing what I can achieve in 2014!