My Garden is very exposed to the road. Although that was all fine and dandy when I was growing up. It was a country road with not many cars or people passing by but now it is one of the main roads into the city and all around where there were once fields they have planted apartment blocks on every spare millimetre. It now feels like our house is on a stage and we are the performing monkeys.
Luckily the apartments straight across from us are quite nice and have many large windows which I view as different TV stations that I can tune in if I get bored. Nobody has curtains and it is inviting to spy on them.
The apartments have robbed me of my view of the sea but have replaced it with hours of voyeurist entertainment. But, I digress.
I want my own privacy, I was here first and as I have plans to do things like grow vegetables in my front garden I don't want them to be visible from the road when the unravelling of society happens. I want to secure the compound so I can have my little border to keep out the riff-raff.
Last weekend I used the extra days' holiday to rent a mini digger and do some groundwork. Playing Tetris with the soil. Renting a digger over a long weekend usually means you get it cheaper as only crazy people would want to be working on a holiday and you get a better rate because of this.
My main reason for getting the digger was to save my back while doing this little project but while I had it I cleared an area to put gravel down for a picnic table. Lift some heavy metal stoves to make it easier to get them to the scrap yard.
And, I also dug a pond which I then used to soil I took from to build some raised planters. I was impressed with what I got done even though my wife and son were sick and I had to spend Saturday night with my son in the hospital with a suspected case of meningitis. But I digress again. He's fine by the way.
I started by digging a long trench along the front of the garden. There is a retaining wall to keep the soil back because the garden is at a higher level than the road. When my father built the house he probably backfilled it to level out the plot of land. I was thinking I would find lots of rubbish and rock down there hence the digger but was happy to find ok soil to the depth I needed. I scalped off the grass sod and piled the soil along the trench.
I had been advised by my brother who is a gardener that I should line the side of the wall with plastic to stop it from sapping away the water from my newly planted hedge.
I then filled back in the trench with the soil. As I said, it seemed good like good stuff with the worms of approval but I decided to add some slow-release fertiliser to give the hedge a good start.
These are little grains that slowly break down into the soil and give it nutrients.
For good measure, I also added a few bags of peat compost. I only want to do this job once and make sure the hedge establishes itself quickly.
I then mixed everything, to turn it into some kind of super soil. I really don't know what I'm doing but this seemed like a good plan. I, unfortunately, put my back out while digging. It was my own fault because I was trying to do it while not on the newly tilled soil. So lifting the heavy shovels sideways I pulled something which made the rest of the job more difficult but I wanted to get this job finished this weekend.
Then, finally, I could plant my hedge. I went for Griselinia (Kapuka to my New Zealand fans, which is where it hails from) It is fast growing and the same hedge the apartments have across the road. I thought it would be nice to match it.
Luckily I got a good deal on it and the whole thing cost me €280 which was half the price I had been quoted. I did around 3/4 plants every meter, stamping them in with my heel. There was a storm yesterday and I was afraid they would blow away.
Finally and with great pain I got them all in the ground. Hopefully, now nature will take over and grow them into a nice little hedge. I'm sure it will take a while but I trust that by the end of the summer, we will have a bit of privacy.
I still had some plants left over and it was just enough to fill this other gap between us and our neighbour. They have a lot of crap in their garden. More than me, and it will be nice to hide it.
With a bit more broke back shovelling I was able to clear the area and plant it up.
It is nice to finally see things starting to take shape and now I need to get some vegetables in the ground. The clock is ticking. Hopefully, with the longer evening, I will have some time after work and caring for my wife and son to be able to have a garden we are proud of.
