One of our other interest's is gardening, which considering that the rear garden is 120' X 45' and that the front is 30' X 45' is quite a good thing. When we first moved here it was a jungle with thigh high grass, loads of overgrown shrubs and hundreds of bulbs growing under & between the various plants. Our first priority was for our fish, and fortunately there was already a small 4'X 3' X 2' pond, which the previous owner kindly emptied of rubbish (it hadn't been used as a pond for some time), and filled with water so we were able to put our fish straight into it. A lot of work went into getting the garden into some semblance of order, mainly grass cutting and pruning, so that it looked reasonably tidy.
After a couple of years we decided to have a larger pond put in, this ended up as an oval 10'X 7'X 2'6' deep which was dug by hand by my brother and myself, and fibre glassed by a friend of mine Mike Elliott of Shotgate Koi. The new larger pond allowed us to add some more Koi which we purchased from Mike. We spend a lot of time in the garden, and the initial hour's gardening usually turns into three or four hours. Many of the original shrubs remain, although somewhat more controllable, and over the years more bulbs and bedding plants have been added. Most of the bedding plants are from seeds that I grow in the green house, in fact my wife takes trays of plants into work, as we tend to have far too many even for our garden. The bulbs are mostly Daffodils, Narcissi & Tulips, which over the years have multiplied, so when they flower there are huge clumps of them, our neighbours comment on how lovely they look.
In 1996 we decided to install a larger pond as the Koi were getting too big for the existing pond. This ended up as a elongated kidney shape adjoining the existing pond, 26' long shelving from 3' to 6' deep and containing 4000 gallons of water. The earth dug out was piled up along one side, and will eventually (when we get the time) be covered with rocks, gravel, alpines & other ground cover plants, To date I have had a water fall put in, this runs along the back of the rockery and back into the shallow end of the pond. Hopefully we will make a start on the rockery later in the year. Its an ongoing project, and I have several other projects in mind for both the front and rear gardens. The first job the day after we moved in, was to erect the small cat run we had brought with us from our old house as a temporary measure, this lasted about a year, by which time we had erected a large 18' X 12' X 8' high run, which took up a part of the garden between the green house and the house.
At long last the conservatory has been built, it was finished in December 2000 just in time for Xmas. The cats love sitting in the sun and looking out at the birds and the fish in the Koi pond and we now have the room to sit and laze around.
