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We moved to this house in July 2008. It is in a valley with a very steep garden that overlooks the sea with views to France. On our first day the garden was looking glorious but somewhat overgrown being untended by the previous occupants since they left in February. There were large clumps of blue and pink geranium and montbretia dotted about the garden but it was soon apparent that everything else was hugely overgrown and that we had a lot of work ahead of us. Our first job was to cut down and remove many overgrown bushes and hedges along with many weeds and we filled upteen bags for the rubbish dump. After the first clearing we could see that the original occupants 25+ years before had planted some nice trees and shrubs and these were well established and gave the garden a framework to work with. Unfortunately none of the previous occupants had built any proper paths or steps and other than 12 steps to the first part of the garden the last 2/3rds were just very steep lawn that was very difficult to walk up or stand on let alone get a fork into to dig. We certainly noticed this in our calf muscles and our buts and realised that things would have to change! We decided that we needed to make the garden safer to move around in and that we needed some flatter areas. During our first week it was very warm sunny weather and the apple tree started to shed large green and red apples that would fall and roll down the garden. We managed to catch most of these and discovered that they were good to eat and to cook with. The rest of the summer 2008 was spent digging out areas and pruning overgrown bushes. It was then time to start work on some of the structures and framework of the garden. My OH set to work creating another set of steps. These led to halfway up the garden. He also created a pergola structure over the original steps that would act as a safety fence from the first high planting area. He then moved on to creating a area with a flat lawn and building a seating area around from decking boards. This seating cleverly was built over quite a steep part of lawn and was perfect for disguising this. He needed to build a curved retaining wall that we backfilled with soil. We then moved turf from other parts of the garden and scattered grass seed to create a flat square of lawn with the wooden seating area around. We spent a few days on our local beach collecting shells that we arranged on the curved wall mosiac style. The first high section of garden was planned as our future veg patch. As this too was steep we decided that raised beds at different levels with steps down to would be perfect for this. We also inherited a 'green cone' composter and this was sited in this area.
As it was now mid autumn we started to think about getting a greenhouse for the next growing season. We initially looked on ebay but could not find anything that was being sold in our area. We then found one from a local ad and went along to dismantle it and transport to home. I had only ever grown annual flowers from seed and a few tomato plants so this was to be a challenge to see how productive we could be with our new purchase. I sowed some cornflowers and poppys in November and these grew well through the winter and were planted out in March 2009.
