“Who loves a garden, loves a greenhouse too.”
William Cowper (1731 – 1800).
It had long been my dream to have a Victorian greenhouse. Big enough to take afternoon tea in – should the fancy take me – but more importantly to house all my gubbins and still have room for seedlings, tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.
The first thing we did when we moved in was get a quote. The following January work started.
We had a small paved area at the front which continued round the back handy, as it turns out, to hide spent bulbs, sickly plants and those impulse buys that don’t yet have a permanent home…
Mum foolishly offered to help with the raised beds – and then fill them with barrow-loads of top soil excavated from the greenhouse foundations. An exhausting week! Starting to take shape.
When we moved in, the garden was teeming with rabbits. It was instantly apparent that a vegetable garden stuffed with succulent plants wouldn’t last the night. Anti-bunny measures were called for…
April 2012 was very wet but that wasn’t going to hold back the start of the growing season. Time was of the essence. Across two sodden weekends we concreted in posts, dug a 12” trench and buried a barricade of chicken wire. That was almost the most knackering of the big garden jobs we undertook ourselves. That handsome man there btw is My Lovely Husband (MLH) Terry.
A gate, a tonne of gravel, shovelled and shifted by MLH, and the greenhouse and vegetable garden are complete.
