With the warmer weather seemingly just around the corner, your thoughts may be turning to enjoying some more time in the garden and, if it's anything like ours was, it'll take some imagination to enjoy it.
We gave our front garden a makeover but if you're thinking bigger then the principles remain, you'll just need to upsize your budget accordingly. And if you don't have a bottomless budget, you'll want to keep a tight grip on those purse-strings as the costs can start to run away with you if you're not careful!
1. Think about what you have and what you want to end up with
This sounds obvious but before we so much as cleared the ground we made sure we had a clear idea of what we wanted, measured the space we wanted to transform and spent the next few weekends traipsing around garden centres pricing everything up so we knew whether or not our idea could be made a reality.
2. How much can you do yourself?
If, like me, your first thought was: "How hard can it be? It's mostly manual labour which just requires effort!", take a step back and think practically. Our front is split either side of a path from the front door to the pavement. I started clearing the narrow strip (about 2 square metres) and before I'd done half of it I wondered if I'd ever stand up straight again, not to mention that our green garden bin was now over-flowing. While I was determined to do most of it myself, disposal of the garden waste was going to need more thought.
Even by filling the car with everything and taking it to the recycling centre, it would have taken a few trips, at a time when you had to book in advance, if the recycling centre was even open (this was during one of the restricted periods last year).
We opted to bring in a professional - we engaged a local landscaper who, for around £100, removed all the foliage from the front garden and took it away. It took him, a seasoned professional, the best part of half a day to clear it all, which means it would have taken me at least a whole weekend and I would likely have been a broken man by the end of it (don't judge me - I'm just not used to such intense manual labour). His flatbed truck was also full of our front garden. When you factor in the roots and all, plants can take up so much more space than you realise, but now we didn't have to worry about disposing of all the waste.
3. What do you actually need to transform the area and how will you get it?
We wanted to get rid of all the foliage and put down white chippings, add in a box hedge and perhaps frame the door with some small trees.
In our naivety, we thought half a dozen bags of chippings and a dozen hedge plantings would be sufficient, until we worked out the actual area we were working with. That's when we realised our little garden makeover project was going to cost more than we thought!
All told we ended up buying 18 bags of chippings. Fortunately, if you can say that, our local garden centres had an offer of 2 bags together for slightly cheaper than 2 bags separately.
But how would we get them? At the time of the work we couldn't get the quantity required delivered. We could get a bulk order of around 850kg, but that was way too much for our needs. So getting them in the car was our only option. I have an Astra, nothing big or fancy, so getting half a tonne of stones in my car just wasn't an option! It took us three trips to get all the bags required to start the work, and a fourth trip for a couple more to cover up some thin patches
We also had in mind an adorable little box hedge that would grow through the year and we could clip back into shape. We then found out that the box hedge we wanted (buxus sempervirens, if you're curious) is the slowest growing plant EVER! You also need to buy quite a few for a hedge that's, say, 3 metres long, and their cost varies markedly depending on how big you want them at purchase. When I say there's a marked difference, per planting there isn't much - maybe £1.50 extra between the small, the medium and the large, but when you're buying 15-20 plantings, that small difference soon racks up. So we opted to play the long game, accepting that we wouldn't have a delightful box hedge for a year or two, and decided on keeping costs down by going small. At least we could watch our garden grow over time.
When taking on a home or garden project, the key is to plan ahead and make sure you understand the work and costs involved. It's a very lucky few who can just crack on with a project and pay little attention to the costs involved but we found that, while we stayed relatively on budget, perhaps going over a little to finish the job, it was still going to cost more than we initially thought and the final cost was more still. Going in blind would have meant the costs would have been seemingly running away, leaving us with a choice to keep paying out, not sure when the expenses would end, or to abandon the project halfway through, leaving us with an ugly, barren front garden.
I'll share a post of what we actually did, along with pictures to give the work context, but that's for another day. Happy gardening!
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