How to turn a pile of dirt into a garden!
What really complicated our gardening efforts was the fact that we did not have any possibility any more to get behind our house a bulldozer or bobcat for any earth works or earth moving. So whatever we wanted to do had to be done by shovel and wheelbarrow.
Another challege (we are not referring to problems cause it spunds too negative!) was a huge pile of excavated material/spoil
Quarry stones, dry stone walls and basalt pavements
We used the excavated material to scultupre our landscape in the garden and create different terraces andform little banks -(some of which are better known as our "westwall" .
We did not have to digg a hole for our pond which holds 3000l of water - we simply build the pond into the excavation pile so that saved some time rather than spending it with digging a whole for the pond bowl.
We paved an area right next to the pond with basalt stone out of thebasalt outcrops for which the area in and around our town is famous for. I was paving along - regardless of the weather conditions and if really started to pour down I setup my huge umbrella that I take with me when I go fising on a lake - well the paving was pretty exhaustive and the fact that I had never done this before did not make things easier for me... .
Walls made of Basalt
To further sculpture the terrain we decided to model the area with a combination of dry stone basalt walls and to bring up solid walls of basalt.
Our town is very famous for basalt and has basalt outcropes on the higher ridges. We needed a lot of stones and spend a considerable amount of time in the quarry to select the stones, load them on our neighbours tractor drive them home, unload them in our driveway and load them on a wheel barrow and bring them behind out house.
First plants move into our garden...
All our plants have to do now is to grow, grow and grow.
Our rhododendron (Blue Peter) is in the year 2006 5 x as big and has developed into a magnificent rhododendron bush.
Generally our garden has transformed into something really beautiful - and we have even been on TV with our garden and won the 1st price in a garden contest - but I will get to this later..
Beautiful isn't it !
A convincing result!
Once we had brought up the walls, sculptured the landscape and planted our plants....the only thing we had to do was to sit and wait (and pick the weeds) ...and our garden developed into something really, really beautiful
- Lemmer's garden
- Lemmer's garden
