Bloomin' Lovely

Well, this post has been a long time coming, but it'll be a good one - fear not! Below is a major pic spam of the lovely plants which are working so hard to make our garden a nicer place to be. I'll give you a major run-down of progress in a bullet-pointy form, in order to make up for the mass of pictures.

• The lawn arrived and we now have a patch of grass! We can't stand on it yet, but it's there. It's so nice to have a big area of garden which is no longer producing broken glass or anything of that ilk! 
• The levelling of the patio area has been completed, so we're now pretty much ready to lay it. Sort of. Once I've watched loads of Youtube videos about laying permeable patios and ordered some sand, we'll be good to go!
• We've stopped having work weekends and started having a work day every two weeks. I'll try to remember to post and let you know when they're upcoming in case anyone wants to help.
• A few fruit bushes have gone in along the bottom fence. 
• We've been eating some salad and herbs from the garden on a regular basis, and Finn has started grazing on mangetout and strawberries. We've had one radish so far, but there are plenty more to come. We're not making huge amounts of food, but considering all this was concrete just a few months ago, I'm not complaining :)
• Also, we haven't weeded once :D There are weeds, but they're not doing any harm, so I'm leaving them. It'll be interesting to see how all this lazy gardening turns out.

The lawn, with newly flattened patio bit and path to the right.

Polycultures are just so pretty.

This is a mystery squash. Courgette? We'll soon see!

The comfrey is gigantic - time to make plant food from it!

This squash has been shown to a neighbouring shrub for support.

Runner beans with peas growing up them, surrounding a perennial while it gets going.

Helianthus jungle!

Well done if you've made it this far - this wasn't even all of them! In other news, we're still trying to work out what to do with the roof and how to pay for it. This might include solar panels, and it might not, but either way we won't be doing the bulk of the work. We might paint the house at the same time though. Woop!

- Hannah

June Work Weekend Details

Having just written the job list for this work weekend, I thought I'd share it on the blog so that you can see if you fancy coming along.

So here's what we'll be up to:

Fill skip - We'll be moving rubble and possibly some top soil down the garden steps into a skip at the back.

Lift flagstones - We found some Victorian flagstones under the concrete, and they need lifting for re-use. We had a little go and didn't manage it, so if you like problem solving and using crow bars you might like this job!

Level lawn and create slope -  This is a pick-axing, digging, wheelbarrowing kind of job. We're so close to getting the lawn sorted (and therefore the fruit bush beds) and this is the last job in the way!

Dig out buddleia/brambles - These are big plants and might involve quite a lot of digging (or building a fire on top of them).

Finish shed floor - This is a job which we'll only do if the others get done.


There'll be a simple lunch for volunteers (soup, I imagine), tea and biscuits, and copious good company. Let me know if you can make it!

- Hannah

Garden Work Weekend Update (or 'Mud day!' as Finn called it)

A good sign of success is that there was a queue for the shower yesterday, so muddy and wet were we all from a day of digging, smashing, lugging and bashing. Although today was a quieter affair, we still got loads done and the garden is starting to shape up! There is much work still to be done, but making all this progress is a great start.

I'm going to spare you my usual lengthy narrative, and thanks to Toby's mad camera skills, resort to spamming you with pictures instead!

But before that, a list of acknowledgements seems appropriate, since we received so much help (sorry if I forget anyone). Thank you to Heather, Lis and Julia for the loan of tools, it made everything so much easier, and thank you to Todd, Toby and Ryan for doing masses of work. Ryan didn't even know there was a work weekend, he was just visiting for his birthday. He got stuck in nevertheless. What a legend. Thanks to Toby for taking pictures or we wouldn't have a record of all the frenzied activity. And thanks to Finn, for doing more digging today than you would imagine a 2 year old would be up for, and managing to do it in an actually useful fashion. Between that and his tendency to shout "grow more plants! grow more seeds!" I have high hopes for his future.

On to the pictures!

Day One

There was a breeze block wall on top of this stone one only hours before.

That's some of it in a heap centre-left, next to all our sexy recycled paving materials!

Lifting concrete to make a home for the compost bins.

Flick is a professional digger, and she found a clay pipe stem!

Knocking down the wall revealed next door's rubbish heap - which Toby promptly sorted and bagged for recycling :)

Victorian flagstones under the concrete show how much the ground level has risen.

Day Two

Start of day two: so much ground to level!

Marking out the edge of the patio so we can start not standing on the beds.

It's a family affair :D

Finn asked Toby to take this picture. Quite right too.

The future shed floor is now levelled!

A nice tidy garden, with newly housed compost bins!

Cleaned tools at the end of the day. Woop!

Our newest treasure - a buried shopping trolley!

Work Weekend Update

Well, what a weekend. It rained, it poured, it cleared up a bit and then it rained again. Thank goodness we weren't planning to spend the weekend wading through mud-encrusted rubbish.

No wait! That's totally what we were planning! And despite all the water the heavens could pour at us, that's exactly what we did. Here is a brief summary of what we managed to get done:

- formed a sedimentary layer of tiles approximately a foot thick in the bottom of our magnificent skip.
- put all the already-sorted-out rubbish on top of it, leaving a sort of chute arrangement in one corner for adding the bazillion more broken tiles we knew we'd find.

Hasselback Hotel :)

- dug through layers and layers of soil* fishing out even more rubbish and tiles to add to the skip.
- burnt through all the buddleia branches too big to go in the council garden waste.
- chopped up nearly all of the rest so it will fit in the garden waste bags.
- restacked the - by now, enormous - rubble pile into a slightly less scary shape.
- ate all the biscuits.**

Along the way, we received magnificent assistance from Lis, Mary-Eve, Sammie and Beth, for which we are enormously grateful. The skip guy was rather lovely, too.

Mmm, soil. Sort of.

Other fascinating occurrences include a guy stopping in the alley to chat to us. He did some work on the house under it's previous owner and said it was nice to see people tidying the place up. He also said, "that downstairs bathroom is pretty terrible", which is bizarre considering he apparently worked on it. I promise to write that blog post about the bathroom soon - I know you all love a good horror story ;)

We then saw him doing work on a property down the road, overseen by none other than the previous owner of our place, who waved and said hello. I saw him later, and he said "you're working hard, eh?" with a big grin on his face. I honestly couldn't tell what level of cheekiness he was aiming at,  but I think he must have known about the garden's hidden horrors. Again, bizarre.

NB: this is not what gardens are for, people!

We've also uncovered the top of a large metal object, but haven't had a chance to dig it out yet. I'll add a picture of it below later, in case anyone wants to try guessing what it is.

We still have loads of buddleia to get rid of, so if anyone randomly has the urge to take a bag to the dump, do let us know. There is still lots of rubbish and tiles left in the soil, but we've got rid of the bulk of it, and everything is clear enough now to do the garden wall (when we manage to work out how the hell we're going to do it). This evening we've got a finance workshop to get to grips with our work budget for the year, so hopefully the mystery of how to fix the wall will be solved.

- Hannah

* soil is a bit of a strong word for it. It's more like something you'd find on the banks of the Ankh.
** actually, that's a lie. We ate all the vegan biscuity things, but there's a foot long roll of uncooked non-vegan biscuit dough in the freezer, ready for anyone else who pops around to help.***
*** unless we eat it first.

Look at this bunch of funking legends.

Totally tipping it down and they're still at it.

All the co-op folk are or have been involved at some point in the day, and Mary-Eve and Lis have both turned up to assist.

LEGENDS I TELL YOU.

Work Weekend

So as you know, we are planning a garden work weekend on Saturday. In order to entice lots of you lovely people to join us, I'm going to give you a run down of the plan.

Jobs that need to be done:

1. Filling a skip with the rubbish we have already sorted out from the soil. This will probably involved a chain of people passing rubbish along.
2. Cutting the remaining buddleia up into bits that will fit in the council garden waste bags.
3. Continuing to dig through the soil in the garden, sorting out tiles, rubble, rubbish and whatever else we find along the way.
4. Putting all the new rubbish in the skip.

Flick will be making a lunch of some sort, and (probably) chilli for tea. There will also be copious biscuits and cups of tea along the way.

Ways in which you can help include; popping in for a couple of hours or however long you fancy, and doing whatever you feel capable of, playing with Finn when he's around so I can climb over the fence and do rubbish-involving stuff, lending us tools which may be useful (spades, mattocks, rakes, etc) or taking a bag or two of stuff to the dump at Derwen Fawr.

In the event that it rains so much people really don't want to be outside, we have a number of little jobs around the house that need finishing off, including tiling, building shelves, putting up a shower bracket, etc.

Some Golems are also planning to work on Sunday too, so if you're not free on Saturday, you can still come and join in with the fun ;)

If you're at all interested in any of these things then please get in touch either by commenting below or emailing us at golem.coop@gmail.com.

Many thanks - Hannah