**This is a collaborative post

Around this time last year I wrote about our garden makeover plans… and if I’m honest we’ve done absolutely nothing to the garden since. Until this week! But more about that in a minute. Last summer we did hire a gardener to come and cut the grass every couple of weeks – we have so much of it that we could never keep on top of it.

I’m not a big fan of loads of grass in a garden if I’m honest. In our old garden we just had a small circular lawn which was easier to mow, but even that small amount of grass just ended up full of weeds and moss. Keeping a lawn looking nice is a really hard job. If we’d have stayed in that house then I’m pretty sure we would have got the grass replaced with Astro Turf – it’s so much easier to look after than proper grass and it always looks green, unlike all the brown grass we’ve got at the moment in this heatwave we’ve been having! The other bonus of artificial grass for me is that it doesn’t give off any pollen either so no hay fever issues.

As you can see there is a lot of grass in our garden now, and a lot of big trees. I mentioned at the start of this post that we haven’t done anything with the garden in the last year, until this week. Well this week, after saying he was going to for ages, my dad brought his chain saw round and started cutting down trees!

You can sort of see here some of the progress he has made in this picture – he worked very hard in the baking heat…but secretly I think he really loves it! He’s cut down the row of leylandii that were along the bottom edge of the garden (which is good but means there is now nothing to stop the boys balls rolling into the stream), and has also removed about half of the massive bush/ tree thing that Barry had made a start on last year.

There’s still a lot to do – the eventual plan is to level out the bottom of the garden, and probably build some sort of decking on stilts so it isn’t affected if the water level of the stream rises, which it is prone to do in heavy rain. We’ll then terrace the rest of the garden more to make different levels with steps or paths in between rather than the step slopes we have now. Oh and lastly my dad has grand plans for building a big tree house in the enormous tree at the bottom of the garden. I’m sure the boys will be delighted with that!