Sunday 24 February 2013

The Makeover

So, as I mentioned, this year I am planning on turning my farm into something much prettier, for my daughter's wedding. This is a massive task, as you'll see.

Thankfully I'm being helped by Google. Even if their overhead photos of my place are pretty awful.


Believe it or not the white blob is a barn/barnyard, and the black smudge below it is a large pond. The house itself is invisible, but you can see the front drive - where that ends, obviously is the house. The curved line on the left of this picture is the stream that runs across the back of our property. We are only concerrned with the front of the property, as most of it is pasture and (beyond the stream) swamp, and the scrubby edge of woodland. 

So this is the area where the work will be done:


You can see pathways etc. I'm going to use this to create an accurate plan. I'll show you that later on.

What Google have done well is drive up the road and take wide-angle photos of the front. So these are the "before" photos.


You'll notice particularly in the second image that it's very "natural" or "rustic". In other words, there is a lot of long grass and little else. Close to the house you'd see flowers, but we want a bright show from the road, as well as all over the property. (You can click on all the photos for a bigger image). 

We also want to make a feature of the pond. It's about 40 feet across with an island in the middle. I have managed to establish a few hollyhocks on the island by throwing seed bombs, but this year somebody has to swim out there and actually do something impressive with it. As it's full of leeches we can't get any volunteers, so I assume I'll be buying an inflatable sunbed thingy. 

#1 priority is to grow things up the fence all along the left-hand side of the front. Probably sweet peas, morning glory, mirabilis etc. But it's VERY soggy there, so it'll be tricky. 

#2 is to paint the barn and sheds a nice country green. 

But there's a lot more. I'll present the ideas a bit at a time.

6 comments:

  1. How deep does the water in the pond go? Can one walk across or must there be 'an inflatable sunbed thingy' employed? If traversable, perhaps a pair of wading pants could do the trick?

    Looking forward to the updates. ~ Blessings!

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    1. The inflatable would actually be cheaper than waders, and it gets pretty deep in places, it might go over the top. When the water got very low last year at the peak of summer heat/drought the boys tried to jump it, and, yeah......there's about a foot of mud at the bottom.

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  2. Melanie, I have a canoe you can borrow.. it's small, came out of Water Bomber.. but it works. Are we having a "Paint the Barn and Sheds" Party? Hmmm???

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  3. Cosmos grow big and tall and are very colourful . When is Sian's wedding again? When I got married in mid August I spent every weekend at my parents gardening and it was very colourful the day of the weeding. I really wanted gladiolas but they were no where near blooming when we got married. My mom had tons a few weeks later.

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  4. Cosmos are on the list, because of the colours available. It's mid-September so I have to play around a bit to get things in bloom, but I had Cosmos in bloom then last year from seeds planted in June.

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