So now I've got a blog, what do I do with it???

I really started this as an experiment to see whether I could actually work out how to do it - sad, is'nt it!? However, my friend Pixie suggested that I could record my progress on my new garden, especially as I am going to attempt my first proper veg garden; and I am doing an art foundation course with the Open College of the Arts and they are very encouraging of blogs as a means of getting your work online and to chronicle your progress - so, here goes!

This first post is mostly about the garden - it has been snowing a lot here on and off for the past 4 weeks or so, and I haven't even been able to get outside - but it has given me a chance to sit down and plan what I want to do, and then pore over the seed catalogues and work out exactly what I need to order.

At the moment the back garden is rectangular and almost all grass. The left-hand boundary is a delapidated fence which is the neighbours' responsibility, and which should get replaced at some point in the next year or so. The back boundary is an open chainlink fence, with a line of the neighbours' trees immediately behind it - mostly sycamores. The right hand side is a bank leading to a high hedge of something evergreen with large shiny leaves (as yet unidentified - you can tell I am not a gardener!) at the house end, and more open and scubby at the far end. About one third of the way across, nearer the left hand boundary, is a concrete path leading from the back door of the house to the back boundary.

The plans, roughly, are as follows:

To the left of the path will be the 'working' area of the garden. Here, there will be 4 raised beds of 1 metre square, alongside the path. There will be enough space between them to mow. The top one will be for Matthew's asparagus (he's been going on about growing asparagus for about a decade, but we have never been in the same place for long enough before - they take a couple of years to get going) and the other three will be for veg and my beloved sweet peas.

As it is possible that the neighbours will remove some of the trees if their plan to turn the area behind our garden into parking for their house comes off, I would like to plant some small trees - their height is very limited as they need to be more than 1 1/2 times their height away from the house, and the garden isn't very deep. I would love a silver birch, but even small varieties grow to 12+ metres, so that's not going to work, sadly. However, rowan (mountain ash) and spindle would work, and also I would love a quince tree (mmm, membrillo!) and as they are self-fertile you only need one, unlike apples etc.

Wildlife is a priority, and I want to turn the top left hand corner of the garden into an untidy area, with a log pile, perhaps a hedgehog house if I can persuade Matthew to build one, and some stones and leaf piles. In the top right hand corner I would like to make a small pond - my friend Val has a very successful and froggy half-barrel pond in her garden, so it really doesn't need to be big to attract wildlife.

I would like to plant the bank with sort of woodland species, and would start with foxgloves, and in a garden in Dorset last year I saw dark crimson Knautia (a kind of scabious) against lime green euphorbia (spurge) which was very effective, so we'll give that a go. Next autumn I will think about bulbs.

I have an arbour in pieces in the garage, ready to be built in the spring, and would like to grow a climbing rose and a honeysuckle up that. It is going to go at the end of the path, on the right hand side, facing diagonally back towards the house and patio. On the patio itself there is a bench and some chairs and a table, and already some pots which I brought from the last house, and I would like to have some more including two roses and some container veg.

So - that's the plans, and next time I will write about the catalogues, and what I have decided to order.