a look back at my little back yard

I’m not quite sure where to start following the sad demise of my robin babies.  It feels a bit soulless to tell you about the fab chip butty sandwiches we made or the lovely birthday party we had on the weekend with a group of our best friends.  So showing you some pictures of the little back yard at our previous house that we rented, which I transformed from a concrete square into a jungle of edible greenery, seems like a nice way to get back into the swing of things.

We rented a sweet little red brick terraced house for a year or so before we bought our first (and current) cottage together.  It was a two-up-two-down with a small yard at the back, but south facing which was a real plus and created a warm, sheltered pocket in our yard that was perfect for growing.

I’m going to practice writing shorter posts (as I seem to go on rather a lot!) and just give you lots of pictures to look at.  This is what we started with:

Looking back it’s not the bland concrete postage stamp I thought it was – but really everything green you can see we put in. 

N built me three of these fantastic wooden troughs, which look so shiny and new – they are much more worn and aged looking now!

I started to slowly fill in the space with pots, buckets and baskets brimming with plants.  One of the first things I planted in the garden was a honeysuckle that I wanted to grow up and over the shed – you can see that it did quite well and reached the top by the time we left.  N also built another larger, squarer trough that I used for growing peas and herbs:

That summer I went mad with growing – peas, tomatoes, radishes, herbs, and many many more.  I also came to love spiders…at least in the context of them living in my garden…when I found this tiny miracle of nature strung between the honeysuckle:

We enjoyed our first homegrown salads (those tiny purple and yellow heartsease are some of my finishing touches on a homegrown salad):

I started my love affair with growing cucumbers.  We had trays of tiny cucumber seedlings on our bedroom windowsill, which later developed into these beauties:

A colander full of homegrown spring onions, peas, pea shoots and parsley:

This was a very special meal and I won’t forget it.  Everything you can see, apart from the flaked fish, was grown by my fair hands (and a helping hand from mother nature of course) – potatoes, pea shoots, spring onions, herbs, and nasturtium petals:

This final photo is taken just before we left our little rented house to move into our current house, and this was the jungle I was talking about.  Everything just seemed to go bonkers (it was a very wet summer) and grow like mad.  It was so delightful to sit out here in the summer, surrounded by my own jungle, with the bees and butterflies buzzing about:

Moving our garden to our new house was the trickiest part of our move, and we got some funny looks from passers by with our troughs of tomatoes that sat on our front drive for a couple of weeks.  You would think that moving to a house with a bigger garden would be great, but to be honest I have felt a bit intimated by my larger garden – the little yard was so easy to fill, so easy to overflow with lush green plants and colourful blooms. 

Some may think that I went a little OTT and that the yard actually looked better a little less cluttered, but I loved my little jungle.

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