Growing, Month by Month
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A Little Patch of Lawn: Seed, Water and Dog-Proofing
The ground in front of the new raised bed gets levelled, seeded and watered using rainwater from our water butt. There’s just one final challenge: keeping the dogs out until the grass has a chance to grow!
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The Raised Beds: Tools of the Trade
From impact drivers and circular saws to a trusty spade and spirit level, here’s a look at the tools that helped us build our raised beds – and why you don’t need a professional workshop to get started.
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The Raised Beds: one weekend, changed plans and tonnes of effort
It was time to start putting the plan into action. Over the weekend I tackled the first part of the great raised-bed relocation and expansion project. This involved dismantling things I’d previously built, rebuilding them in a slightly different configuration, moving approximately a tonne of soil and generally discovering that nothing is ever quite as…
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Teaching AI to Design Our Garden: What We’ve Learned About Prompts
We’ve already admitted that we’re using AI for more than just designing the garden. It’s helping us write about the process too. But we’ve discovered something important: the quality of the advice depends heavily on the quality of the information we give it. What worked well? The biggest improvement came when we stopped asking general…
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The raised beds are getting a makeover
We already have two raised beds in the garden. We bought them a few years ago, during the Pandemic, when growing our own vegetables seemed like a very sensible thing to do. They’re both six feet long by four feet wide and were positioned on the lawn beside the garage, with enough space between the…
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From a sketch to an actual garden design
I’ve already established that I have a garden, and that I have rather a lot of ideas about what I’d like to do with it. The problem is that ideas are easy. Getting them all to fit into an actual garden, with its awkward corners, existing buildings, access routes and rather unhelpful dimensions, is considerably…
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Before: The Garden as it is right now
Every garden project needs a starting point, a moment where you stop, look around, and take an honest photograph before you get carried away with ideas. This is that moment. These pictures were taken on the same evening, walking every angle of the garden with my phone. No staging, no tidying. Just the garden as…
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Designing Gardens for Your Family and Climate
Before choosing plants, colours or deciding what goes where, there’s one thing to understand about this garden. It has opinions. The soil is thick clay. Winters are getting wetter, summers are getting hotter and drier, and the garden needs to cope with both without becoming either a swamp or a dust bowl. So the design…
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Documenting the Garden: Successes and Surprises
Eventually, all the plans, schemes and clever ideas have to meet their biggest test. The garden. And that’s where What’s Growing comes in. This is the bit where we stop talking about what might work and start finding out what actually does. Plants, plants and more plants There will be plenty of them. Some carefully…
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Transforming Garden Ideas into Reality with AI Assistance
I have a garden. I also have ideas. Quite a lot of ideas, actually. The problem is that not all of them fit together. Some are impractical. Some are probably ridiculous. And some sound brilliant until you ask the most important question: Where on earth am I going to put it? So I recruited some…
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Blooming Lovely Chaos: Real Garden Adventures
It started with a conversation with ChatGPT. A few questions about the garden turned into ideas. Ideas turned into planting schemes. Planting schemes turned into layouts, plant lists, colour palettes and increasingly ambitious plans. And somewhere along the way, I realised that ChatGPT wasn’t just helping me think about the garden. It was helping me…
