a bit of green space to call our own

My maternal grandmother is 90 and lives just a 10 minutes walk away from my parents' house (aka, my current dwelling). She has a gigantic garden which, now that she's older, she rarely, if ever, uses it. The garden itself is divided into two sections: the lawn and flower beds (closest to the house) and, what was once my grandad's vegetable patch at the back. Although my nan has a gardener who cuts the lawn occassionally, the back part of the garden has pretty much been abandoned and, helped by the fact that there's a big tall dense hedge separating these two sections, left to grow wild.

A couple of weekends ago Mitch and I had an idea that, with my nan's permission of course, we could clear away the jungle of thorns and weeds and restore the old veg patch. Perhaps, we could even have a go at growing stuff again...

My nan said yes. So, last weekend we began.

This is what it looked like. Most of the brambles were around knee-to-waist height, some were up to my shoulder! We started to cut the hedge back too as it's crazily overgrown. Whilst clearing up, we found tonnes of weird insects (an orange neon woodlouse-type bug!) and terrifyingly large spiders. Largely thanks to Mitch making a start single-handedly on Saturday, by Sunday we'd cleared most of the plot, including a v.stubborn, seen-better-days, pampas grass plant. Here's how it's looking at the moment.

We're hoping to work on it once a week and I'm aiming to track our progress. If it's a success, it might be fun to look back on. Watch this space!