Start in the garden to make your mark on a new home

Having moved house at the start of the year, most usual leisure activities have taken a back seat. Over the past couple of months, our focus has been on giving the garden a makeover.

My wife and I engaged RS Construction to replace fencing to the rear of the property, replace and enlarge our patio and, most recently, build a raised bed for vegetables; they did a superb job on all counts.

Awbridge Arborists spent an hour or so last week cutting down a largely dead tree, grinding stumps and shredding branches that I cut down whilst they were there; they also did an excellent job and tidied up behind themselves meticulously.

We undertook the simpler tasks: painting the fences in the back garden (this freshened up the older panels as well as protecting the new ones), putting up trellis, forking over existing flower beds and digging a new one in the back garden, hacking weeds out of the front garden using a mattock loaned by a friend and, last weekend, my father  and I filled the raised bed with a tonne of soil and compost.

Having planted them out with flowers and shrubs, both gardens look a great deal better than before and we look forward to watching everything bloom during the summer.

Work like this should not be postponed when you move to a property where the garden has been neglected. New fencing improves security and, although time-consuming and tedious, weeding and restocking flowerbeds yields results quickly and helps you make your new house more tangibly your home.