This is my first blog so bear with me! I'm Kay, married mother of three: and I'm fourty nine years old.
I live at brook cottage, which is in west wales. I live with my hubby and two very helpful sausages and a rather large ragdoll cat. I started gardening five years ago, after a bout of ill health. My husband persuaded me to create some flower beds and things quickly escalated from there. When we first moved to our little home, the garden was totally bare. The front garden was entirely concrete and the back garden was all grass, not one plant or tree. It was neglected for quite a few years as we had young children and full time jobs and a house to renovate and quite honestly I wasn't into gardening!! it's all very different now. I have well and truly caught the gardening bug. I'm diabetic, so found the physicality of gardening helps me stay fit and control my blood sugar levels.
I have fully embraced the cottage garden style and love the wild look, thankfully!!!!
Our garden is a U shaped garden and is approx 120 ft long x 21 feet wide. It is sectioned into different zones, the front garden leads onto the garden shelter which in turn leads onto the shady garden which then leads onto the back garden.
next weeks blog will be about how I started to create the shady garden
Our first little greenhouse
We added our little greenhouse to the back garden last November. She's our first greenhouse and although she's tiny, she's a Victorian walk around 3'x4' greenhouse, she was perfect for the space we had available.
Prior to having our little greenhouse, I had a very laissez-faire approach to sowing seeds. I would only direct sow mainly because I didn't have any other option and I didn't want the entire houses windowsill's to be taken over with seedlings, I obviously wasn't that dedicated 😂 so to have a little greenhouse has been a real treat and does give me a lot more options in what I can successfully sow, and has inspired me to purchase our first raised veg bed.
I still direct sow as much as I can, I have direct sown poppies, cornflowers, foxgloves, pansies and kale this month, and will continue to direct sow as much as I can. Considering she has been in just under a year now, she has nestled in nicely and has made gardening much more pleasurable. She was super easy to prepare for, we just levelled the ground, popped a thin layer of sand down and then fitted some slabs we bought locally for the base. We created a semi circle of gravel at the front of her to tie her in with the rest of the gardens. The gravel runs throughout the front garden and makes up all the little pathways. She has two olive trees at the front of her and a vintage chimney pot which we use for keeping our bamboo canes in. She's currently housing, Ammi and larkspur seedlings and some tomatoes.
if you were thinking of adding a greenhouse to your garden, I'm sure you won't be disappointed, there is such a huge range to choose from, and as you can tell from ours size doesn't matter!!!!!
Greenhouse
Not sure if I have mentioned this before, but here in west wales we do get rather a lot of rain!! We try and harvest as much as we can, so we have a plentiful supply for our planters, house plants and topping up the ponds when needed.
We have an old vintage whisky barrel (as seen in the pictures) which we use to harvest the rainfall off the garden shelter. It works well, having said that if I had known how heavy it was I might not have added one to the garden!!! So if you do fancy one, it's definitely a two person job. We had ours off Facebook market place and paid £40. We knew it was water tight as it had liquid in it when we collected it. Once it was in place,we removed the lid by drilling it in four places and then used a jigsaw to go in between the drilled holes. Once the lid was off, we drilled another hole near the top of the barrel to fit an overflow pipe, thankfully we had some flexi hose left over from another water butt we had fitted which worked well. (As seen in the pictures) you can barely notice the pipe but it does the job well. The guttering pipe sits on top of the barrel.
As you can see from the pictures I keep a watering can hanging above the barrel and use this for dipping in as the barrel has no tap. When the barrel isn't in use, I keep
it covered, just to protect any wildlife falling in. I use the barrel lid, it was cut down a little so works well and is easy to remove and slot down the side when needed.
Shady garden
We created the shady garden three years ago. It was a very wet and muddy strip of grass that lead onto the back garden. As you can see from the before pictures it wasn't the most pleasant walkway to the back garden!  we get such a lot of rain here (west wales,Uk) and as this part of the garden is on a slope, it made the decision to remove the grass a relatively easy one. I knew I wanted to create a feature linking the shady garden with the back garden, so we decided to build a gate. I was very kindly gifted an old unwanted door which we took apart and then used the wood to make the gate. It was relatively easy, especially for me as I merely watched the handsome one (my husband!!) build it! Once the gate was built, I then went onto fit the gate posts. I just used fence posts as the gate is purely decorative it didn't really need to be anything heavy duty. I dug out for the posts and then concreted them in just using a bag of fast set concrete. To soften the look of the gate and make it look like it had been there a while, I  planted some ivy to grow up the fence posts and planted some hardy geraniums around it, which has worked well as they're such hardy plants when the gate is closed on them they soon bounce back. once I was happy with the gate, and after I had removed the grass the stepping stones were the next to be done. They were bought from our local b&q. They were super easy to lay. I just dug them in, laid a very thin layer of sand and then placed the stepping stones on top of that. The most difficult part was making sure they were sausage friendly (we have two mini dachshunds!!) who's little precious paws cannot go on muddy ground!! Thankfully they were delighted with the banished muddy grass and delighted with the stepping stones, they use them all the time! Once the stepping stones were fitted, I wanted to make sure the grass would not return. So went about planting. I will pop a list of all the plants at the end of the blog. I wanted to do it as cheaply as I could. So went for a lot of plants that I had divided from our back garden. It already had a few established plants so it only needed smaller plants. Once the planting was completed. I put a bark mulch down as I wanted to suppress the weeds and give it a woodland look. It's worked well I mulch it every year with bark and it does keep the weeds at bay. These are the plants we have in our shady garden. It's quite sheltered and as previously stated we get a lot rain, so if you're looking for something that loves damp, shady conditions these work well for us!
Introduction to Brook cottage
This is my first blog, so bear with me 🙈😂 I'm Kay and I live in a little cottage in west wales. I'm fourty nine years old, married, mother of three.