Another sunny weekend and another couple of days of hard work complete in the garden. As many of you know already we have had one hell of a task to bring my garden up to a usable standard.

We've only lived in the house for five months but it seems that we have been hacking away at the "to do lists" for years. Whilst the house is completely finished the garden is going to take us months to have it ready and family friendly.

This weekend we had the mammoth task of digging up four leylandii hedges from the side of the house. We had a chainsaw to cut down many of the overgrown branches, but it was the roots that caused us the most stress.

We had to take up some of the patio and had take down our next-door-neighbours fence just to start digging. After doing all of this we still couldn't get close to the roots as we were being blocked by an old brick-wall that was left buried underneath the slabs and soil.

Armed with two spades and a pickaxe it took us an hour to cut/dig up the roots. Not only did we want to remove the leylandii roots this weekend,  we also wanted to trim the long hedge running down the left-hand side of our back-garden to a manageable height.

The huge hedge was a prickly beast making it a nightmare to cut and i am glad that i had a solid pair of wellington boots, i wear Hunters and a good pair of gardening gloves to stop the million of sharp thorns from the hawthorn hedge from causing any damage. It was tough to cut and relocate the branches so we decide to have a small controlled garden fire.

We had both of the hedges to burn so we started off mid-day and slowly adding a branch or two throughout the day.

Another task was having the large amount of bricks and stones relocated to a safe place as we didn't want our son to be running around and tripping over them... he's clumsy.

 It doesn't sound like a big deal but when you consider that we must have moved 50 large stones and bricks then you can see why i woke up with a soar-back and neck the next day.

Before the little bonfire we had our little man helping us take up some of the weeds and relocate some of the soil. He didn't stick around for long as soon after he was playing in his police car and pouring water all over himself and the plants with his new blue watering-can.


In the coming weeks we plan on having a wired fence erected around the boarders so the dog can run around carefree. Last week we worked on adding new fence posts and panels to the bottom of the garden;

Two hours later and the new fences are up! #gardening pic.twitter.com/a4yILl4g6M

— Yorkshire Dad (@TheYorkshireDad) May 3, 2015