minustheagent
Jodie Kelly
I recently bought a new home & want to do gardening in front of the home entrance. Please share some lawn Gardening ideas.
My suggestion won't be to everyone's taste, but we love it and it was very easy.
We have a fairly large, flat front lawn. We're in one of those newish streets where the gardens are all open plan.
Last May, my husband created 5 small raised beds out of timber - they're only about 4 inches high. Two large L-Shaped beds at the front, enclosing 4 4x4 beds. We put paper and cardboard on top of the grass and then around 4 inches of compost on top of that. At the start of June we planted it up with summer bedding and a few perennials.
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This is how it looked by early July (so just two months after we started the project). You may notice we snuck a few beets, cabbages, potatoes and leeks among the flowers - they're hard to spot, but I think they look great :
ERM_7779 by Paul Roberts, on Flickr
ERM_7798 by Paul Roberts, on Flickr
ERM_7773 by Paul Roberts, on Flickr
We haven't taken photos this year (yet - I'll get some), but it's come on in leaps and bounds. We like a cottage garden look - so it's jam packed full of flower and veg of all heights, colours and shapes. We've got black eyed susan, cone flowers, blanket flowers, calendular, marigolds, sweet peas, nasturtiums, cosmos, borage, dwarf sunflowers, lupins, corn flowers, various alpines and carnations, poppies, globe artichoke, potatoes, cabbage, dwarf beans, leeks, onions, beets, climbing courgette. You don't really notice the veg - it's just a mass of colour.
It's been EXTREMELY easy. This was my first gardening project and I really didn't have a clue - I just stuck things in the ground and nature did the rest. A bit of dead heading and weeding, and a layer of compost spread on all the beds over winter kept it looking neat. (I also popped in some winter pansies and wall flowers).
I've been in this house 14 years and always wanted to do something about the front garden, but it's solid clay and I'm not up to digging. This was trivial. I did it all myself apart from the wooden frames to the raised beds, and I'm not really very fit or able bodied.
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