After the pond, the next priority was having somewhere to sit. That would allow us to start sitting outside, share meals, and all that sort of thing. I knew where it was going to live, and I knew after de-turfing the area by the pond that a border spade was not really the most suitable tool for de-turfing, and there was no way in hell that I was going to do do that much de-turfing. Instead, I went with the laziest and simplest way to get rid of the grass.
I smothered it.
Grass needs light in order to grow, like any other plant. By far the simplest way to get rid of large amounts of grass (or, in fact, any other weed) is to cover it up until it dies. If you use something dark, the energy it absorbs from the sun also help to cook it at the same time which certainly won't do it any favours.
Covering the grass with a weed membrane would kill it off in time with no effort
In other words, all I had to do was to buy a big enough weed membrane, peg it down so it didn't blow away, and then wait for the grass underneath to die. Simple, effective, and absolutely no bother as far my hay fever would be concerned. I had enough to also lay a path down the side of the pond to where the shed used to live at the bottom of the garden, so I did that as well. It was at this point I realised that my original plan of having a turf mound wasn't going to work - firstly, it blocked the view to the pond, and secondly it meant I'd have to figure out a way to keep the turf clipped and I was not going to be doing that by hand. That got flattened out and the area between the membrane and the pond was cleared so it could be used as a planting bed.
Obviously, the membrane wasn't be the finish I was aiming for, but the next bit would involve me, a spade, a wheelbarrow, and three tons of gravel. Delivered to the front garden in three big bags by a local builder's merchant, it was cheaper than I'd expected so the plan was to use this as a base layer with some flags embedded into the gravel in the long term to give a gravel-edged patio area rather than as a base layer for the an area that would be fully flagged over. This ended up taking me a while as I wasn't about to overdo it and risk throwing my back out so I did a couple of hours here and there until I was done.
Three tons of gravel can go a long, long way
While I was at it, I also extended the flags at the top of the garden with some spares, and got hold of some wood to edge the area and the newly extended flags. It's a treated 25mm board screwed to some stakes hammered into the ground, but it acts as an edge to contain the gravel and as a border to delineate the space and separate it from the planting and the grassy areas.
A simple bit of wooden edging neatens the whole thing up
Up by the pond, I left one edge without the wooden edge so that the gravel would flow into the planting and soften up that edge so it was a little more natural by the pond. I also started to plant out some of the pots that we had brought with us, and had added an aquatic basket or two into the pond as well to make sure it had oxygenators and some habitats for the wildlife. There's also an ill-fated experiment with some squirrel grass which fell over the instant the supporting sticks were removed and refused to stand upright ever again.
That's a lot of planting area to cover
Over the next month or so I'd plant out that border a little more with some perennial plug plants, rearrange the spare rocks and stones by the pond's edge, and plant out various donated pots from my mother-in-law. I also added a specimen that I had to have called a Chilean Lantern Tree - my great-grandfather (the provider of my middle name) was born over there, so having that nod to my heritage was appealing. As an added bonus, my wife and children find it immensely annoying when my dad and I talk about our 'chilean heritage' so that gives me hours of amusement.
Starting to look like an actual planted out flower bed
We now had a nice area to sit down, and after tidying up the existing borders and planting out the new bed it was starting to feel like a nice space to be in. Our old table and chairs were placed on the gravel, and the area was usable and the planting was starting to establish itself. I still didn't really know what I was doing, but the hard landscaping was helping to define the area a bit more, and I'd removed half the grass to make my life easier. More importantly, though, my wife and kids had a space that they could make use of, and I'd taken some steps toward attracting wildlife with the pond and some of the new planting.
The combination of moving the bed back, edging the areas, and having a gravel area to sit on made a huge difference (Original Size Image)
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