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Clearing the Front Garden - February 23d 2020
I have a dream for the front garden where it is full of plants, with bright pinks and yellows, and grasses and succulents, and a good tree on one side of it. Before I can come close to achieving that, the front garden needs to be cleared. That meant: removing paving to make space for plants, digging out the two box shrubs, removing the ugly yellow concrete planters on the sides, and getting rid of the bindweed (Dutch: haagwinde) as much as humanly possible.
In the front you can see one of the cut down box shrubs, and in the back you can see a double layer of the concrete yellow planters.
In spring of last year we cut down the two box shrubs that were alsmost completely eaten by box moths. However, they still had to come out roots and all. Furthermore, the yellow concrete planters on the sides of the garden also needed to be dug out. The first step was to remove the planters and pots and then the top layer of the yellow brick planters. We enlisted the help of my sister and her partner to take out the brick paving. Together we took them out brick by brick, removed any roots, and then stored them behind our shed in back garden (which is now functioning as a temporary storage/dumping ground). We removed as much of the bricks as needed to still have a path of about 0.5 meter around the house. Then we dug out the remainder of the brick planters, and dug out the box shrubs. Digging the shrubs out was tough; they had quite elaborate root systems!
Brick by brick everything came out! They old adage applies: "It has to get worse before it gets better".
Of course, this means we now had a pile of bricks and concrete planters we needed to get rid of. We gave away the large round concrete planter. We tried to give away the yellow ones as well, but it turned out other people also didn't want old yellow concrete planters. So one weekend we took out hammers and safety goggles, and hammered them down to small pieces. We proceeded by putting all the pieces in a big bag, and had the big bag hauled off. We still have the paving bricks, but will probably give those away if anyone wants them.
Now, we have bare soil in the front garden where the plants need to go but there is still the issue of the bindweed. If you let bindweed go ahead and do its thing, it will cover most of your garden in one season. Removing it is tricky, because the tiniest bit of root grows into a new plant. It also happily selfseeds, but we have managed to prevent that. Before I go on planting I want to remove as much of it as possible. I already dug out many of the roots, but there is also bindweed underneath the remaining pavement, and it creeps out by the walls of the house. So the plan is to spend this spring and summer fighting the bindweed. We got an electric tool for heatblasting weeds and their roots, we hope that that will help to weaken it. I will also sow a tough weed-suprressing annual grass in the bare soil. If successful, I hope to begin planting in the fall of 2020, starting with a tree.
A screenshot of part of my planting ideas for the front garden.