I ♥ my garden - episode 2 - compost and espalier fruit

Hello there. Seems like I have a lot of catching up to do… Again. 

In my last post, I left the garden looking lush and green and halfway decent back in October. And then things of course spiraled out of control..#ehem 

But let's start on a cheery note first, shall we ?! Super fast forward to right now.

Hello flowers & vegs (and hügelkultur beds) ! 

But to get there, it's been a long, bleak season... Fast backwards to December when everything just looked miserable. 

 

And then in late winter,  I put some of my plans into action and ruined (what was left of) the lawn in the process…

Oops.

So here's the plan. Basically, I’m going to split up this garden into two parts with a very different look and feel. The front part (close to the house and terrace) will be a kitchen and ornamental garden, with espaliered fruit bushes and trees on the left, south-facing wall (as seen here), a big vegetable patch in the middle (so it would have been bye-bye lawn anyway)and a big herbaceous border to the right.
The second and rear part of the garden - starting at the arching hazelnut - will have a wilder, woodland garden feel. I haven’t given this part too much thought yet, as my priority for this year is to sort out the front half. Flowers and food - that’s right up my sleeve. Right!

So this first phase was all about  putting the structure and basics of the garden into place. 

The amazing gardening guys from La Ferme Nos Pilifs came by in February and started turning some of my plans into reality. I’m very grateful for the fantastic job and all the hard work they did. So if you’re in Brussels and need some help with your garden, go hire these guys !

They built this amazing composting corner from scratch, which is prolonged by a soft fruit hedge (on the left here - with wires for raspberries and blackberries to climb along). 

The whole thing is also creating a physical separation between the two parts of the garden, but with enough space to the right to easily access the back (I am thinking of adding a garden gate here - for no particular reason other than I think that garden gates are über cute. We’ll see.). 
Once the fruit and the pieris in front of the compost (plus all the other plants I’m planning to add) will grow, they will also create a visual separation from the back garden and avoid the tunnel effect that you often have in these long, narrow town gardens. Blocking the straight view to the end of the garden will give you the illusion that the space is much bigger than it already is. Or so I’ve read in some fancy gardening books.

 

Of course the kitties were eager to do their quality check. 

Approved.

And from there on, it's been all about the pretty stuff.

I ♥ my garden - episode 1 - the original jungle

Just a word of warning. This started out as a quick post intending to give you an overview of what the garden first looked like and maybe lightly hinting at some changes I intend to undertake. Hahaha. Good joke ! I ended up with a 5 page Word document (yes, I like to prepare my blog posts in Word… call me nerd) and still, I hadn’t finished.

So in an effort not to bore my readers to death, I’ve split this topic up into several posts. Not sure how many, since I’m still not finished… We’ll see.

But here we go, with episode 1 - the “before” ! Which in many ways is actually much nicer than the “during” (no “after” yet, I’m afraid). Anyway. I’ll shut up now and get to it.

One of the main drives behind my decision to move was the yearning for a bigger outdoor space and ideally a garden. Yes, my cat herd would certainly benefit from more space, but most importantly so would I. If you’ve followed along over the years, you will have noticed that I’m not much of a traveler, but I do love to visit the UK. I mean, with car boot sales and antiques centres on every corner, could there be a better holiday destination for a self-professed vintage addict ? But over time (and I’ve been visiting England for more than 25 years), I also fell in love with that particularly British enthusiasm for fine gardens and gardening. One of my greatest pleasures during my UK vacations is visiting historic gardens and assisting my brother in his allotment and tiny suburban garden. Call me freak.

So when I visited my (future) new home, I immediately fell in love, not only with the charming interior, but also with the enormous outdoor space and all the potential it offered.

Here’s another pic I took during the second walk-through back in June (I can’t believe how lush and green everything was then !).

And here are some later ones from back in October (I think I took these right after signing tthe purchase deed).

As you can see, it’s a typical, rectangular walled town garden (with the neighbors' very nosy ginger cat paying a visit). I’m still impressed by its size though: a good 6 m wide by 30 m long, so about 180 m² in total (that’s about 1940 square feet in American). It’s even the biggest garden I visited during my home search and - bloody hell ! - I can’t believe it’s mine… MINE ! Btw, it makes me laugh when I hear this sort of space called a “small” garden on shows like BBC’s Gardener’s World… I mean, come on. It’s more than double the size of my flat. And to have this much outdoor space right inside a busy city centre area? It’s a real luxury ! And by no means “small”.

As you can see on the photos everything was pretty much left to its own devices for years. Shrubs are consequently very overgrown and my building neighbors used part of it as a dumping ground for a lot of their rubbish (I’m still trying to get them to move their stuff. Arrrggghh)... There is one very lovely feature though - about half-way into the garden - a very old and massive hazelnut bush (more of a tree really) is arching over the whole width of the garden and creating a very agreeable seating area underneath.

I’m sure I’ll mention this more than once. But dude, am I looking forward for spring and summer !

Finding my new home

I finished last year’s record number of posts (ehem…) with an adieu to my old place. So let me start this year’s series of posts with an introduction to my new home. If you follow me on Instagram you’ve already been privy to some peeks into the new place. But I still think that nothing compares to (and I personally very much prefer reading) a good, old, detailed blog post to those little sepia coloured snapshots…

Ready for the long story ?

I had already vaguely contemplated moving a few years back. I even went so far as to check out a few ads on Belgium’s biggest real estate site (through which I’d already found my old place back in 2005 btw). But nothing concrete ever came of it.

A year ago I had however reached a point where I felt very dissatisfied with my living conditions. 10 years into that apartment, I think I had simply outgrown it. And in all fairness, quite literally as well, with a growing cat herd of then 8 (!) indoor kitties… It was not however until my Oma passed away in early March that I finally got the impulse to really move on. That terrible loss of one of the persons I love the most (and with whom I attach my fondest memories) made me consider some life changes.

So I did decide that it was time to find a new place. One that was a better fit for the needs of my raucous fur babies and my current more mature self. Head long and full of enthusiasm I plunged into a real estate search. I was not, however, prepared for the serious reality check that shortly ensued. Having lived for 10 years in a very nice and properly renovated flat, I could not have imagined the horrendous places I was about to visit. Over the course of the next two months, I searched through hundreds of real estate listings, visited dozens of apartments, experienced the utter lack of professionalism of the Brussels real estate agents, got acquainted with building conditions that I would not have thought possible still existed in the 21st century (pervasive dry rot all over Brussels, so called renovations that are totally substandard not to mention downright illegal, water damage that made you wonder how these places are actually still standing)… How the owners even dared to ask the sale prices that they did ?! I still can’t believe it.

And yes. I got increasingly frustrated with whole process. All the while being more and more relieved to come back to a beautiful home after visiting one disaster after another. I hadn’t seen one place that was better or even just comparable. And by mid-May I had reached the point where I actually decided not to move. Instead I would be content with what I already had and use some of my budget to do some further renovations…

And then I came across an ad containing these…

A perfect fit for ALL of my search criteria. A garden flat, spacious, but not too big, in my preferred neighbourhood and within my price range. And cherry on the cake : the place had been recently renovated, but with a keen eye on maintaining all the charm of the original 19th century features… Looked almost too good to be true.

But then I came through the entry door, and BOOM ! My heart nearly stopped… I immediately knew it was the one. I made an offer that day, I heard back from the owner that mine was the best, but she still wanted to have a few days to think about it. She then called me back and asked me to up my offer (slightly). I agreed… And that evening my offer was accepted. Just like that. In the end it took 6 days between the visit and sealing the deal. And then of course a few more weeks for my mortgage to get approved and still a few more months for all the notary stuff to be dealt with…

It still seems completely unreal. The universe aligning so perfectly. I feel incredibly lucky and blessed !

Now let me round up this already very long post with some additional pictures I took during the second visit of my future home, back in mid-June 2015. Of course, they’re pretty rubbish like all good walk-through photos tend to be…

Now that you've seen the "before" are you ready for the "during" pics ?