Gardening a new hobby???

I have never been very good at gardening although I love a nice garden and plants. This year we had our drive and patio done as all the paving stones had cracked due to subsidence.Whilst the drive was being done our lawn suffered badly so we also laid a new lawn and tidied up the flower beds. Neither my partner or I have any gardening knowledge so we got some beginners gardening books to brush up on our skills. Having a best mate who also owns an allotment is really useful too as Heidi  who blogs at kitchentalkandtravels is always giving me tips and advice.

Personally I find gardening rather challenging as I really don't have green fingers at all and have a tendency to kill all house plants I have had in the past. I believe this is because I over water, something I need to pay attention to with the garden.

To keep things simple we dug up the flower beds and prepared them for planting. There were lots of rocks so a gardening sieve from Wham came in really handy to sieve all the debris out. Once the soil was dug and sieved we mixed it with some shop bought comport and mixed it into the ground.The flower beds were now ready to plant.

We also filled the cauldron pot, some small plant pots and a plant trough from Wham with the compost for the bedding plants. Wham have a lovely selection of pots, herb planters, troughs and gardening items at a very reasonable prices too. To check out their full range check their website.

We chose a selection of bedding plants for the pots and wall baskets and perennials for some parts of the garden so that they would bloom year on year without having to replace them.

Whilst the perennials take time to settle in and grow, the bedding plants give an instant colour to the garden The added advantage of growing  annual plants is that you can change the colour scheme of the garden with different types of bedding plants seasonally It is also an inexpensive way to brighten up your garden as you can get trays of 12 bedding plants for as little as 3-4 pounds.

The bedding plants also look great in window boxes, hanging baskets and wall planters. They are easy to maintain and I also discovered that once a week watering them with a plant food helps to enhance the colour and bloom.

We also chose some ever greens so that we had lots of foliage in the garden all the year round. I learn't from the gardening books that evergreens can also have coloured leaves that will help to add colour to your garden in the winter.

Gardening is certainly some thing that needs lots of love and care and its hard work too. However  its very satisfying to see the results.

Our next project for the garden is to start off our vegetable patch and herb garden. We are currently preparing the vegetable patch as the soil is full of clay and very hard to grow anything init. In the mean time I have planted some tomatoes and chilli plants in pots.I am really excited as the tomato plants are flowering and hopefully I will have my very own homegrown tomatoes to eat.

I am not sure what we are doing is absolutely correct as its a very amateur attempt, however its a learning curve for us and we are hoping that in time our garden will flourish.
I am also planning to grow some herbs  in an indoor kitchen garden, I will share this in my next post.

**This post is in collaboration with Wham who kindly sent me some pots and tubs.

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