Our previous house was a bit of a do-er-up-er. It was sold to us by the son of the previous owner, an elderly gentleman and at one time clearly a very accomplished gardener. As we emptied the house, it revealed snippets of happy family life. Behind fitted furniture, we found diamond wedding anniversary cards, as well as letters from family and friends spanning many years.
Sadly the house had become too much for him, and the garden totally overgrown. Although we hadn't yet been bitten by the gardening bug, we were determined to get stuck in and so set about discovering it for ourselves. Fence panels were hidden beneath a carpet of brambles and paths had been reclaimed by towering weeds and overgrown shrubs. Across uneven ground we stumbled upon two old sheds and a greenhouse, the latter having been dangerously overgrown by a huge rosemary plant. It would all have to be removed bit-by bit in a painstaking effort to get it ready for its new family.
One shed contained plastic pots from floor to ceiling, hundreds and hundreds of them, and as I carried them I was surprised by the way they disintegrated in my hands. Thousands of tiny pieces of plastic fell through my fingers to the soil below. At the recycling centre I was directed to the skip labelled "landfill" and began to question the impact of gardening on the environment. With Micro-plastics contaminating gardens and landfills the world over I wondered if there was a better way.
At the back of the same shed lay a pile of white trays, now visible with the pots removed. They were seed trays made from polystyrene and seemed in good condition, if not a little dirty from previous use. I piled them in to the car to await the same fate as the plastic pots until a passing neighbour told me that could be recycled on the kerbside. Happy to have saved another trip to the "landfill" skip, I left them outside for collection with the other recycling.
I woke up the next day and saw they had been collected. I went to bring in the empty recycling boxes but noticed that they were still full. Slightly perplexed I thought the trays may have blown away, only to be told by another neighbour that they had taken them for growing seedlings, and that they hoped I didn't mind. Of course I was happy for them to be reused, and shortly afterwards I was introduced to the idea of no dig gardening.
We continued to work on the house and the garden. I methodically removed brambles and replaced fence panels, uncovered and pruned espaliered fruit trees, moved tons of material from one place to another, rotavated, levelled and seeded the new lawn, cut back shrubs and bushes and installed decking. At the end of this exhausting work we felt a great sense of achievement and thoughts turned to using a no dig approach to new planting and to grow our own vegetables for the children to get involved with.
As usual, life changes course and within a short space of time we had decided to move back to be closer to family. The house was sold and the hard work in the garden was for someone else to enjoy, but I hadn't given up on the no dig idea. Our new house had a garden that offered a blank canvas and that summer I set about creating a vegetable plot and installed a greenhouse. Last year we had our first bumper harvest, with most of the seedlings started off in polystyrene seed trays.