Herb wheels

Once the terrace was built the next step was to begin organising the garden at the front.  Herbs were a must for us here, as I use them a lot in cooking. Deciding what I wanted to grow was easy...everything, but where and how was another matter.
As the terrace was made out of all straight lines, I wanted the garden to take off the squareness. This was when we hit upon the idea of herb wheels. I wanted to build 2, one for herbs and one for spices.

The wheel was marked out with string and a piece of wood a bit like a maths compass.  This was the easy bit! Next I had to find the rocks (from the pool pile) that were flat enough but big enough for the outer edge. I wanted a double layer so that we could use them as pathways around the garden.

Following that the centre circle was marked out using smaller stones

 

 

This is the dividing lines going in, 8 segments in all.

 

 

 The finished wheel and some herbs planted.

 

Then it needed to be repeated all over again.

 

This one was supposed to be the spice bed

 



 

You can see how the 2 sit side by side with a pathway in the middle.

 

 

 

The first wheel after 2 months growing.

 

 

As I always say one job leads to another. We liked the effect so much that I decided to build paths around where we wanted to plant our fruit trees. So the next project was making the fruit tree forest as we call it. Another story for another day.

Terracing around the pool

As I have said many times before on this blog, (and I am sure I will say it many more!) one job leads to another...or 10 more in our case.
We had the pool finished in about 5 months. This meant we then had to start on the terrace so that we could actually get to the pool without breaking our necks in the process.

 

 

This was what we were walking over to get to the garden!

 

 

The first job was to dig the footings. This may seem a simple job but we came across bedrock at every step.  This made the task much harder as well as the garden sloping...the footings had to be level otherwise everything else would be out!

 

 

 





 

This was where the bedrock was

 

The next job was to concrete the footings and begin building the walls. We are not builders but we gave it a good go!

 

 

 



 

These are storage cupboards now for pool stuff.

 

 

Next step was to fill all of this with rubble and we had enough of it from all the building work, along with the rocks from the pool. We also used smaller rocks from the land for the top. This took about a month and it was as boring a job as we have ever done!

 



 

We made sure it was all tamped down ready for the massive amount of concrete it would take. We didn't really want to use this much concrete but there wasn't really another way here and we would only ever be doing this once.

 

 

This led onto the mammoth task of tiling the terrace. 114 square metres, and then grouting. We bought the tiles locally as we are all for keeping money in the local community.

 

We sloped the terrace slightly for runoff when it rained.

 

 





The final job was to build the new steps onto the terrace. We chose to have an unconventional shape for the steps, bearing in mind we were not builders!

 

 

We didn't think we had done a bad job here for saying we made it up as we went along!

 

 

Raised beds... sort of!

The first thing we had to do was to decide where we were going to grow the vegetables. Once decided we had to think about how to improve the soil so that they would grow.
We decided to make raised beds with what we had laying around the garden. We used old concrete blocks and telegraph poles that the previous owner had left.
Luckily for us, at the back of the house is a corral where the shepherd keeps his goats and sheep over night. We asked him if we could have some manure...he was happy for us to help ourselves...so we got about 60 wheelbarrows full just to make 2 beds.

 Two beds ready.

This first year we were so excited about planting stuff and being self-sufficient that we went a bit mad. We planted everything you  could possibly think of.

 

This was the brassica bed.

 

 

90 bean plants 3 different varieties

 

 

Peas, mange tu

 

 This is pop corn...we had sweetcorn at the back

 

 

 

In another bed were roots...beetroot

 

Carrots

 

These are just a few of the things we planted. We made a big mistake that year. We planted to what the seeds said on the packet (English seeds) and so the brassicas were growing through the summer. The beans lost all of their flowers when it got to June because it was too hot! I think we had about 6 beans that year! The sweetcorn grew corns but they didn't fill out. We had to water every thing twice a day just to keep them alive.

We learnt a lot that year...what not to do at least. But we did have 2 beds ready that just needed topping up every couple of years.

 

After the digger driver had been and dug out the pool, we had a surplus of rock. It was everywhere! So we decided to redo the beds and extend them along the back garden. We decided we wanted one just for strawberries, another for asparagus, one for artichokes and 4 big ones. Three would be planted every year and one left fallow that we could manure and then leave to recover.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All 4 beds done

 

Beds for permanent crops

 

We have enough room in each of these beds to add manure to them to keep improving the soil. This year we are going to shred paper, use straw on top of the paper and then plant the seedlings...we are hoping that this will keep the soil underneath moist.



Heat stroke...possibly

Our  first summer here was very, very hot, 45 degrees and above throughout August. We set up and outdoor shower to enable us to cool off  but this just wasn't enough. We had talked about having a swimming pool but it was not high on our priority list. Amazing how things change when the heat is so unbearable.
The first thing we had to do was move the fence , well take some of it down. We needed access for the building stuff to be delivered. This meant that while the pool was being built we could not go out. The dog would have followed us to where ever we would have gone. So for 3 months we were hermits!
We decided to move the fence about 30m, this would give us space around the pool for a 3m terrace.
The first job was to get a JCB to dig out the hole for the pool. This took 3 days as it was all bedrock. The poor digger driver, outside in sweltering heat. We kept giving him drinks and even cooked him dinner.  Bonus though he is now a very good friend of ours.  He also removed all of the trees that needed to come out, free of charge. That saved us a lot of work as until then we have been digging them out by hand!

 

New fence posts in.

 

 

Walls going up

 

 



 

The pool only partly sank

 

Water pipes going in

 

Tiles going on

 

 

So now the pool was in it was time to crack on with the terrace.  3m all the way around the edge of the pool. Another massive task.

 

 



The Garden, the fence and the trees.

This has been a massive task and is still on going  3 years later. These next 2 photos show you what the whole garden was like when we bought it...overgrown was not the word.

We bought a petrol strimmer and began the massive clear up. The previous owner had a thing about fencing off parts of the garden, but so that you couldn't enter those parts. He concreted posts all over the garden and we had to remove them to open the garden up.

We gathered lots of fencing that we have since used for the chicken pen (for new chicks) and the rabbit run too.
3 weekends spent strimming and this is the finished result.

 

The side of the house same as photo 1

 

 

The back of the house

 

 

The front

 

 

The entrance

 

 

Our problem was where to begin. If we wanted to grow vegetables we would have to clear parts of the garden, make beds to improve the soil and we couldn't see a way of doing this without the trees going. A 25 foot pine growing in the middle of your vegetable bed is not really the way to go when you want to produce food. This was a hard decision as we dont like getting rid of trees but we compromised in that we decided to start growing fruit trees and would be replanting more than we pulled up!



Using other peoples expertise.

The first year we were living here, everyone wanted to visit. I think some of them thought it was going to be like their Spanish holidays, complex with lots to do. They were badly mistaken!. We live 5km from anywhere. The nearest house is about 0.5km away.
We had people visiting from April to November with about 20 days off spread between visits. It began to feel like a hotel changing beds, washing sheets and cleaning in the morning for the new guests to arrive in the afternoon!
We decided that the fireplace was a bit useless to cook with as the actual burning area was a bit small. With all these guests coming I would need an oven.  A friend offered us a second hand range that needed cleaning up so we bought that. The fireplace was removed and finally I had a cooker that doubles up as a heater too. Fantastic!

My parents came out first and so the sockets in the kitchen were installed.

The white pipe has all the wires in it running around the kitchen. We had 4 sockets put in around the worktop.
2 weeks later we had a friend visiting who was a plasterer, so Kev dug out chanels in the wall to hide the wires and on his visit he plastered the walls that we were not tiling.

                   Wires hidden and newly plastered wall .

I didn't want the plastering to be perfect and the rest of the house is not, it is very rustic looking.

As the plastering friend left, that afternoon, my son arrived and he tiled the kitchen walls. This was fantastic! For about 18 months we had been using the kitchen with concrete walls and now it was truly finished.

Getting there

  Finished Kitchen with new floor too

Some where in-between all of this madness we had new doors fitted out onto the terrace. The door we had made the kitchen very dark and we wanted as much natural light in there as we could get!

 

Outside door

 

 

Inside door (we have saved these for other uses)

 

 

New doors fitted.

 

 

From inside the kitchen

Why so long to finish jobs?  When we moved here we were told that we would have 2 rainy seasons, March/April and September/October. We decided that we would work outside while it was fine and when the rains came we would work inside. Only problem being that year the rains did not come! So we got nothing done in the house at all that year other than by using the visitors that came!