In the coming posts I’ll walk you through the problems associated with starting a new garden. I grant only a small number of people are at anyone time in this position but it will illustrate how a garden develops, provides a logical starting point and even if you are not actually starting a new garden there should still be things of interest to you.
OK so you moved into your new house, the place is full of empty cardboard boxes and packaging, making the place look like an upmarket ruff sleeper’s convention, you found the kettle and your child’s favourite cuddly toy; stare out of the window and see the garden. You will in all likelihood be faced with one of three scenarios.
A bare patch of mud with a fence around it.
A bare patch of grass with a fence around it.
An existing garden.
If it the second or third option you can, for the time being, just cut the grass and worry what to do later, it isn’t going to come to any harm and there will be lots of more urgent things you need to right now like get some sleep and recover from the move!
If you look out on an area of mud and/or weeds you may have to do something soon rather than later as that mud will end up getting everywhere and the weeds, even if not present now, will soon be growing vigorously.
You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned fences yet as in all possibility the garden will already be fenced off so I will come back to that later if you don’t mind. As they say ‘Roman wasn’t built in a day’.
The first thing we need to decide is if there is a weed the problem. If there’s none or just some weed seedling which have just come through we can ignore them but if the weeds are big enough to hold the soil together you are going to tackle them before we can do anything else. A lot, no.., A GREAT DEAL has been written and said about the use of chemicals in the garden and I’m not going to dive in what is a very opaque and opinionated debate at this point. The bottom line is that to clear a garden sized weed problem in a reasonable time is going to mean using a weed killer.
