This area of the front garden was once home to a very large cherry tree and a prolific growth of weedy vegetation. During a period of about 5 years, it also provided a semi-wilderness for our 3 guinea pigs which were allowed to roam freely. Strangely, even though there was no netting over this run, cats never invaded and the guinea pigs died of old age. The cherry tree, beautiful as it was, especially when in spring blossom, never yielded us a single cherry. I even tried, unsuccessfully to net the tree, to protect the fruit from marauding birds, but they always got the better of me. The tree unfortunately was also constantly growing through the electric wires coming down from the road and as such provided a regular headache. Ultimately, I bit the bullet, took the tree down with help from a friend with a chainsaw and created these beds from recycled concrete blocks. The first step was to make terraces by digging into the bank and putting the soil aside.Then the raised bed walls were built. Inside them, the subsoil was covered with thick cardboard or even hardboard, then well-rotted horse manure was layered over and finally topped over with my own superb compost!.
This picture shows in the foreground a bed with woodruff ground cover (the odour of which, like new-mown hay, I love when dried) and a bronze fennel plant; the left rear bed accommodates my asparagus plants; and to the right of the picture, at the rear is one of my compost bins which is loaded from above and emptied by removing the front slats.
