The caravan garden

 I'm so pleased with the way the garden here at the van is turning out.  Husband went with the artificial grass in the end.....I'd rather have had real turf, but it was his choice, he's had to do the bulk of the work digging up the weedy excuse for a lawn and levelling out all the many lumps and bumps and hollows.  He wanted to cut down on future work - not having a proper lawn to mow constantly - and I fully understand that.  And I must say the garden does look lovely and neat now.  It does mean that I can't really have many plants directly in the ground (I could cut holes in the artificial turf, I suppose), but I can of course have lots of plants in pots.  The basic structure is now there, along with some planted up pots - plenty of room for more though.  Husband put trellis all along the bottom of the van, to improve the appearance - it does look nice.  We've got a spare length of trellis, so I'll get him to fix it to the fence at the end of the garden and I'll plant a clematis to grow up it, I like the big flowered purple (of course!!) ones.

We made a start yesterday on taking up the awful monster hugely overgrown jasmine at the front of the van - well, husband was tackling it, cutting bits of it down, I just held the bags open and helped him shove the cut off bits in.  There's so much of it, and it's so overgrown and has such thick stems that he's decided it will be much easier if he uses his electric hedge trimmer to cut it down, we're going to collect it from home today.  We'd assumed that the jasmine is planted in the ground....it appears though that it was actually planted originally in a pot, but over the years has grown massively and runners have rooted everywhere in the ground, so it's now a full-blown big hedge that is totally out of control.  Behind the bits that husband has so far managed to cut down, he found a long wooden trough, which fell to bits as it's so rotten, and several stone pots of varying sizes, thankfully all in good condition and looking very nice when cleaned up.  I'm pleased about that, I can reuse them all.  We were going to have a raised bed at the front planted up with (small!) flowering shrubs and a couple of pots of flowering annuals, but there are so many thick stems and roots from the blasted jasmine that husband reckons the ground will be very poor indeed.  Plus it'll be hard to get out all the roots.  So we're going to put specialist weedkiller (root killer) on the roots and then lay paving slabs, and put the lovely stone pots on top.  I've got a hebe, some French lavender plants, a couple of ferns and some ornamental grasses to go there.

I will of course photograph it all and put the pics on here....before, during and after.

We've had some lovely weather this past week here at the van, and more forecast for the coming week, so it's great to be able to get stuck into the garden in the mornings, then relax in our lovely new comfortable recliner chairs in the afternoon/early evenings.  Although it's been warm (too hot the other day) during the days, it's noticeably cooler in the evenings and early mornings - distinctly autumnal.  We've had the electric fire on in the lounge a couple of mornings when we've got up, it warms the lounge up quickly.