Garden: Five Years On

This week we celebrated the fifth anniversary of our arrival in the Hautes Pyrénées and for a bit of fun I thought I'd take a look at a series of photos of the garden from over the last five years, to see how much the place has grown and developed.  

Week One.  The plot is a south facing slope - looking up from the house.  The topsoil has been entirely stripped off and in some areas it took three years for any vegetation to recolonise.  Importing soil and sowing grass seed was prohibitively expensive.

I was prompted by watching a gardening programme on TV where a couple had turned their three and a half acres into a magnificent and varied series of gardens in just five years. Mature trees and hedges divided the spaces into distinct rooms; courtyards, paved areas and stone walls contrasted with the enormous wildlife pool that doubled up as a summer swimming pond. It just goes to show what can be achieved with determination, skill, hard work and a lot of cash. 

We have three quarters of an acre, and we too started with just a field but five years on we still largely have a field with a now fertile potager.  We weren't afraid of the hard work and certainly had the time and determination, and I like to think that we have some of the skill as well, but with only a few hundred Euro to throw at a project each year, it was always going to be a slow process.  

We put in raspberries and fruit bushes, and five tiny fruit trees in the first year, all we could afford, and harvested our first fruit from the trees in 2014.  

The raspberry trench, cut from blue clay subsoil and filled with a blend of horse manure and clay.  

2011 saw the purchase of three more fruit trees, but the focus was on planting up our new pergola with a mermaid rose, a grape vine, a kiwi and two tender shrubs that promptly succumbed to a week below zero that winter.  A terrible waste!

2012 the big expenditure was on a ginkgo biloba and half a dozen hedging plants. photinias, a couple of buddleia, nothing very extravagant.  I was reluctant to spend much after the losses during the winter.  Luckily, we are surrounded by forest which regenerates given the chance.  This hedge runs along the length of one boundary, and is now six feet tall, amd it is entirely the result of simply not cutting right up to the boundary.  The hedge is made up of blackthorn, beech, field maple, dog roses, ash, cornus mas and a few things I've not yet identified!  It had its first cut in 2014.

Early summer 2012 - compare the land on the right of the hedge where the neighbours still have topsoil and ours on the left!

2013 saw the drive finished, meaning we could get up and down it in all weather (we did have to use the snow chains once just to get down to the road which had been ploughed!), but that swallowed most of our spare cash.  We put in a pond that year, too, although  with only a few plants!  They had to wait until early 2014.

The pond and a good illustration of the slope.  The raspberries are on the left and the self generated hedge on the right.

The bank above the house had finally stabilised by 2014, and even had developed a little bit of self-generated ground cover, and I was prepared to start planting it up.  That was the big garden expenditure last year, over a hundred Euro just on plants, a terrifying amount of money when we only have six Euros a day to spend on all our food and household needs!

The bank - steps in 2013 plus a few hedge plants, with the bulk going in in 2014.  2015 will see another tranche, left of camera.

And then there was the potager, the engine of the garden and the the thing that has allowed us to live on those six Euros a day.

So this first photo was taken in February 2010 and I had got as far as deciding where the potager was going to go and marking out the ten beds, which one day will be possibly edged with sleepers as the addition of copious amounts of compost and manure is adds depth.  Assuming not too much is removed by the moles, of course.

Late summer of the first year.  Planting straight into horse manure was certainly productive, but not something we could afford to do every year.

Spring of year two and the paths have vegetation, as indeed did most of the plot.  We called it grass but it was mostly creeping buttercup, clover and poppies.

 Summer year two - we put soaker hose in which guaranteed a wet summer.

Spring 2012 and year three.  The soil begins to look like soil and not just clay subsoil spotted with horse manure.

And a very productive summer.

Year four and after a phenomenally wet and snowy winter we had a very cold and wet summer.  Late spring and we were already three to four weeks behind previous years.

Very unenthusiastic winter squash plants and lots of bare soil, usually a no-no; even the weeds struggled.

Unexpected ill health (do you ever expect it?) made work in the garden in late 2013 and early 2014 very difficult.  Most of the beds were just covered and left over winter.

But the harvest wasn't too bad, and the planted hedge between us and the neighbours really started to look like a hedge.  Most of the plants were just cuttings from the trees around us (some began life as pea sticks which rooted!) so it is hardly surprising that they have taken five years to look good.

So, we made a choice to jack in the good life and adopt a different kind of good life.  My partner thought we might be about ready to move on again after ten years.  No way - the garden won't be half finished by then.  Not that gardens ever are finished, of course!

So now I just have to decide what we are going to spend this year's garden allowance on.