Pondguru - Garden Tour May 2011

Hello, this is early one morning, about six o'clock or something. Birds are all singing, it's quite a nice dawn chorus. I just thought I would give you a quick tour of my garden seeing as I tidied it up the other day for my daughter's birthday. This is coming out the house, bit of decking, going up to my workshop up there, tatty old van, polytunnel where I grow all the aquatic plants, big aquarium outside that I haven't found a home for yet. This is my so-called vegetable garden with no No vegetables in at the minute. Been busy doing other things. There are some of last year's vegetables there. But it's basically a terraced garden on different levels. Plenty of last year's potatoes in there as well. Not the world's greatest gardener. It's not as far as vegetables go. Not too bad at landscaping. This is the main part of the garden. Reasonable quality lawn there. It's not too level now, but it's not too bad. It's green, you know. Reasonable size as well. Good for playing football. Play plenty of football with my son and my daughter when she can muster the energy. More decking. I put this in, oh man, must be about 10 years ago now. Still pretty much as good as the day it was put down. Hot tub, which is knackered at the minute. I left it switched off with a little bit of water in over winter and I think the heater's knackered. The ice must have expanded and knackered it or something. Keeps tripping out. I need to fix that. Behind me is the dam wall. I've got a big pond behind there, which you'll see in a minute. And this is a big clay bank. Which I've planted up with acers and, well, conifers and all sorts of things. It's quite a nice contorted hazel behind me. No idea what sort of acers they are. I know the little mushroomy things are palmatum dissectum, but God knows what the other type are. I just buy them because they look nice, you know. This is kind of finished with a dry stone wall with vertical capping stones, which I haven't cemented on yet. But it looks the part, you know. So we'll go up the steps. Actually, no, we'll not go up the steps. We'll go around this way. And I was going to make this lawn, but I actually ran out of turf, so I decided just to sow it with the wildflower seed that I got from the garden centre and just cut a path through it. So there's all sorts of wildflowers come up in here throughout the year, and then at the end of the year I just thrash it down with a strimmer and just kind of scatter all the seeds around, and it's grown pretty well. This is my mega tree. It's, I don't know, 100 foot high maybe. Maybe it's more, it's probably one of the biggest ones in the whole valley and it's only about 60, 70 year old. Those marks on it, all those black stains, are from screws going into it. I screwed in some of those climbing holds so that the kids could use the tree as a climbing wall. But unfortunately as the tree grew, the screws snapped off and I had to take it down. So all the screws are still in the tree, which probably doesn't do the tree a world of good. I just hope it doesn't fall because it's more or less leaning. Towards the house. It's like living under the sword of Damocles, you know. Right, go up the steps. I've literally just put gravel on these. Up towards the pond. I put the pond in about, oh, I don't know, 10, 11 years ago. Fishing platforms on it in various places. Not that I really ever use it for fishing. That's a little boathouse with a little boat in, a little plasticky boat, which is at the minute full of water. And this pond's approximately 30 metres long. By about 25-26 metres wide, spring fed and clay lined, surrounded by woodland, which is full of life. And up here is a log cabin, which I bought off some dude I did a job for, just before Christmas. I think it was about 160 quid or something. Basically, he just wanted rid of it, so I thought I would put it on stilts and sit it on decking. I just finished the decking a few days ago, so we'll go up and have a look at that. That's a big plastic dinosaur that I bought off some fella. It's all sectional, it comes to bits like a... Like a 3D jigsaw. Actually before we go up and see the decking I'll show you the playground that I made. There's a sand pit. Probably is full of cat crap. Because the kids never put the blooming top on so that never gets used. Some monkey bars there. I made them. In fact I made all of this. There's a split level playhouse there. It's all just made out of waste wood that we've had in the shop. That's a little underground house that I made. We sometimes have fires down here. I put a zip wire up. The kids go up here to the platform. Jump on the zip wire. And slide all the way down here and that big cushion thing stops them slamming into the tree. It does hurt quite a lot when you hit the tree if there's no cushion there. As when I was testing it, I actually dropped the bottom end of this about two foot and WD-40'd the whole lot, i.e. lubricated it. I went slamming into the tree and broke my ribs and sternum which wasn't a good look. Hurt mightily. So these are the Steps and decking that I've literally just put in a couple of days ago, leading up to the summer house, stroke log cabin. That's an old seat that I made about 15 or 20 years ago. Hasn't rotted away yet. I wouldn't like to sit on it if I was over 20 stone though, it might collapse. I've put the decking smooth side up, so that it's easy to clean. We're surrounded by pine trees, and I'm sick of trying to scrape the pine needles out of the ridge decking. Very difficult to clean. You'll notice this front part of the handrail is actually set a bit lower. This is because when you sit down, you can see over the top of it, see into the pond, so you get quite a good view off the top of here, see right down to the house, the garden, you know, you can watch the kids in the garden, make sure they're safe while they're up in the log cabin having a barbecue or whatever, and this is the log cabin, the white wood there, and that's new bits that we had to put on, they're the only new bits we had to put on, all the rest of it was still sound, I haven't put a proper roof on yet, and it needs paint, so at the minute, it's just got visqueen, which is like a cheap crappy plastic on, It keeps the water out until I can afford to get felt shingles to put on. That leads out to the fields where we go for walks down to the river and so on. So that's about it really. It's a reasonable size garden full of wildlife which is nice. Whoops, daisy. So it's taken me quite a few years of my spare time to make it because when we first moved in there was no garden at all, no pond, no anything really. Just weeds and muck and horrendous waste. So, it's been a bit of a labour of love, but it's still a long way off being finished yet. Thanks for watching.