Our unproductive back lawn transformed into veggie gardens.

This is just a brief post to show in photos how our back lawn has changed from unproductive grass play area to productive veggie gardens and fruit trees.

Firstly the before pics:-

(above and below - lots of grass, a small bit of garden with a runner bean frame and a couple of citrus trees - The lawn used to be great fpr the kids to play football and cricket on, but now that it's just the two of us living here it was time for the lawn to go).

Next pics below are during the transition......

The round, Buxus hedge has gone as it was, like the lawn, unproductive. The Lime tree which was inside the hedge was absolutely riddled with Bora so it was cut right back to a short stump to see if it would come away again. So far so good.

And a little further along the time line.....

And finally, as it is at the moment.....

Most of what you see above was achieved in the last 8 weeks.

Initially we had circular gardens around each fruit tree but Lizzie quite rightly pointed out that if we (I) squared them off we have less wasted space.....so I squared them off.

The other garden beds, the ones without fruit trees are deeper bed (raised bed) gardens.

I made these by digging out small squares of turf and using those squares as building bricks to make a raised surround to which Lizzie added our own compost from our compost heaps. We then both planted an assortment of seeds and seedlings, watered well and the sunshine did the rest.

Due to the water restrictions in place over the height of the summmer, we hand watered by hose every other day, but if anything needed extra water we would use watering cans filled from our rainwater butts.

The majority of the fruit trees we have are less than 2 years old and are on dwarf root stock so as not to grow to a height that we won't be able to manage the older we get.

You could say that we're future-proofing the garden as we develop it.

Now the back lawn is all but gone so it's time to start on the front lawn.

The photos below show the beginings of converting the front lawn to garden.

You can see in the first photo how I have dug out the squares of turf to build the walls of the raised bed.

And how quickly the plants have grown in a very short period of time - bearing in mind that the front gardens were only developed after we'd run out of space around the back.