How does your garden grow? Doorway to a secret garden

We’ve been working on our garden all summer: we’ve put up a fence and painted it, moved my caravan workshop, laid a patio, built raised beds for a veggie patch, installed a greenhouse and planted a herb garden. And now, I want to enclose the garden and make it into the extra ‘outdoor room’ I’d always imagined it would be. So we have put up a fence and gate at the front of the garden for added privacy and so that we can easily come and go from the garden without having to go through the house to get in.

A quick sketch of what the gate ‘might’ look like was drawn on our shopping notepad before hubby set to work measuring and sawing. Again, my jobs were painting the wood compressor so it was an easy job once the frame had been built and the whole thing probably took half a day to make. We’ve just attached an old fence panel at the side at the moment, until we can get hold of some more fencing. A latch was important so that we could come and go from the front to back garden easily, and we’ve added a bolt at the back so that we can lock it up if we’re out or away.

In other garden news, we’ve had an attack of potato blight which has withered one of our tomato plants. Next year we’re planning to grow our tomatoes in grow-bags rather than straight into the ground as this should minimise the chance of being infected with potato blight. Also, I forgot to mention that we’ve got a compost bin. It was being sold second-hand on Gumtree, in a village nearby and it was perfectly clean so we snapped it up and popped it into the corner of the garden.

Finally, the pea plants that we thought were turning into sweetpeas when they started growing coloured flowers actually turned out to be Shiraz Mangetout purple podded peas so we’ve harvested a handful and have tried them in a crunchy salad, which was delicious. Some other ‘normal’ pea pods are growing now so we can breathe a sigh of relief that we didn’t buy flowers instead of vegetable plants, phew!