Thirty (one) days wild – SJB Teaching

I started 30 days wild a day early.

I was filling in the garden watch survey for Springwatch and one of the questions asked how much of your garden is paved over. I thought about it and decided the answer was rather more than needed to be…so I decided to give our patio area back to nature.

Luckily Ian is used to my impulsive decisions by now so he was happy to go along.

Phase one has been digging up half the area (which included digging up a whole pile of concrete that we didn’t know was under there), replacing the hole where the concrete used to be with a mix of soil and compost, and scattering grass seed to turn it into a lawn area.

When the grass has established itself, phase 2 will be to move the picnic table across to the grassy side, and then to take up the other half of the slabs and to turn that into a wildflower area.

Hopefully the birds will enjoy having this extra area of grass to look for food in and other wildlife will find a welcoming environment below the grass to thrive in.

Patio area with some slabs lifted. Lumps of concrete showing through at the front. — Starting to take the slabs up….

Patio area with all slabs taken up on the rightt hand side. No soil and big lumps of concrete. — All the slabs are up so now to tackle the concrete. Aaaagh – it goes down a long way!

Patio area with table and a pile of slabs on the left and grass-seeded area on the right. — Area filled with a soil/compost mix, levelled off and scattered with grass seed.

Patio area with picnic table on slabs on the left hand side and grass-seeded area on the right. — Paving slabs gone (thank you nice couple who took them off our hands!) and Phase One is complete. Now we just need to keep it well watered.

small patio area with table on left and new lawn on right — This is what we had at the end of our 30 days. It took a while for the grass to get going, and then it shot up all of a sudden!

UPDATE 24-07-19
We’ve been rewarded this evening with the sight of 4 young blackbirds hopping around in this new area of grass. They must have found plenty to eat because they stayed for about 20 minutes.