The Garden Takes Shape.

It took all the first and most of the second year to get the garden looking reasonable and it remains an on going project. We have the veg at the bottom, then the chicken run, the next terrace has been taken over by the chickens the next is just lawn and the top two we have left pretty wild in a managed sort of way just to give the wild life somewhere.

The chicken run and the garden they now own

The chicken garden no longer looks as nice as this, it is going to have a makeover soon

Across the garden

The wild life garden

Near the pond looking behind the house

Near the wood on the top terrace

The Chickens Arrive - and so begins my chicken obsession.

We decided to get Pure bred chickens rather than Hybrid, the reason was two fold, (1) There are only two of us so we didn't need chickens that were going to lay every day of the year and (2) we thought it would be a good idea to choose something which was on the Rare Breed Survival Trust at risk list, although we are don't intend to breed them it's nice to do your part in helping to keep a breed going.

We found a local supplier to us and she invited us to go to the farm and have a look around to see what we fancied. Ooooh too much choice and so many lovely chickens. Brenda and Allan have a wonderful farm where they breed their birds, nestled in the Cambrian Mountains. They do not run it as a business but keep chickens because they love them and want to keep some of the rarer breeds going but they do sell to anyone who wants them. Brenda has been a great help to me with my chickens and remains a good friend.

We came home that day with some Silver Dorkings, Ixworth, Old English Phesant Fowl and some Welsummers. The Welsummers aren't endangered but we couldn't resist them. They were all only 6-8 weeks old so it would be another 12 weeks or so before we would see an egg.

Clearing the bottom two terraces

We decide to make the small bottom terrace our veg garden, Pete cut the grass then got the rotavator on it, it took a good few days of going over it but he got there in the end. However being Wales we do get our fair share of rain and the village we live in translates in English to "Marsh land" so we thought it was best to make raised beds. We also had a nice new potting shed/greenhouse delivered and of course as usual decided to put it up ourselves rather than pay the extortionate assembly fee these companies charge. Assembling something on a slope is a lot harder than you think it is and there was quite an amount of bodging to do but we got there in the end.

I've always wanted chickens ever since I was a little girl and my Grandad always used to bring home a box of tiny yellow chicks for us at Easter, (strangely I never wondered where he got them from or where they went after Easter). We initially were going to get a small ark that we could move around the garden but after reading vast amounts of chicken info we decided to make a big walk in run for them on the narrow terrace near our new veg garden, this had once been a greenhouse of sorts so had a good solid base and walls. Back to the local timber supplier for a load of 2x2 and weld mesh and Pete and I get back to work again.

It took a couple of days to finish it completely making all the panels up first and then putting it all together, I'm very pleased with the finished result and can't wait to get the chickens.

Tackling the garden.

We were given the number of a local hedge layer called Baz from our neighbour, and he turned up at the start of the year to lay our mixed hedge, he has proved a useful find and we have used him many times since. It took him 3 days to cut and lay the hedge and there was many a curse as his chain saw found metal posts and wire buried in the hedge. It looked good and light finally came into the garden.

At the same time we decided to remove the lovely breeze block wall that was splitting the terraces. It had been bugging us for some time as it felt like the garden finished there when in fact there were another two terraces. A bonus as well as Baz asked if he could have the rubble so we didn't have to dispose of that either.

Where to start?

Ours is the house at the top left of the picture

Its always a dilemma when you move to a new house as to where you actually start. It had been owned previously by a couple who were clearly not keen on either decorating, home maintenance or gardening. So what should we attack first? We decided in the end to leave the house as it was, we would live in it for a year to get a feel of the place before we made any big changes, apart from decorating which I would do whist my other half, Peter was back in Oxfordshire working his three month notice.

The garden is approximately 1 acre but as we live on the side of a hill it is split over 6 terraces. The bottom small terrace has grass to about my waist, and has a small narrow terrace above it which has a lovely breeze block wall running the full length of it splitting it from the next two which are laid to lawn, well I say lawn I actually mean moss with the odd bit of grass. The fifth one is where the house is cut in to the hill and also contains a sloping bank with a small pond which the previous owner has left us a note to feed Freddie the goldfish. (How they know there is a fish in there I don't know as the water is a very dark green colour). This bank also runs round the back of the house and joins up with the top Terrace which is all overgrown and borders the Oak wood behind the house. All this is surrounded by a mixed hedge to the left (where my neighbour lives) and a laurel hedge at the bottom and round to the right, these are both about thirty foot high and make the garden quite dark.

The Move To Wales

It's now been two and a half years since we moved to Wales. Tired of the hectic life we had in Oxfordshire and spending less and less time together we decided one day over a few bottles of wine to pack it all in and look for something much more simpler

We decided that we would quite like to live in Shropshire after spending some pleasant weekends there at our friends B&B but soon realised (being 2007 and peak property prices) that we were not going to be able to afford a move there. We then thought of Wales and seeing the price of property realised that this was a much more realistic option.

After quite a few discussions and another couple of bottles of wine we decided to focus our search at the end of the M4 in the area of Carmarthenshire. We booked a weekend away at a lovely hotel in Llandeilo but fell down at the first hurdle as we got up to leave and were met with 6 inch of snow; the trip was off, not a good start. A few more weeks passed and I rang the hotel again but it was fully booked, after a another 30 mins of searching I found another lovely hotel, The Ty Mawr in Brechfa and what a gem it is. Run by Annabel and Steve it is a perfect country retreat and spending a wonderful time there we realised that this was the area we wanted to live in.

It took another three trips there to find something that we liked but one day we found it, tucked away in a small hamlet in the Brechfa forest. It wasn't the most perfect house but as we stood in the Garden and looked at the view we turned and smiled at each other and knew that this was the one.