Build your own Cottage Garden

Floral visions
- summer

You've finished designing your garden so now you want to get stuck into the real thing, right?

It's time build your very own cottage garden.

Yes, granted, it's a lot of work, but if you follow the step-by-step approach outlined below, you'll at least avoid the pitfalls we fell into and be able to invest your labour as efficiently as possible.

Work Guide and Plan

This is the mucky part - follow our practical guide and you'll end up with garden soil that's ready for planting. It'll all be worth it, we promise you.

• Climate and soil: Before you begin to dig out your garden layout, learn about the soil and the climate where you live, and their role in a thriving garden - as well as our opinion on what the essence of a cottage garden is.
• Preparation: Digging, clearing and re-cycling - fear not, you only have to do it once. As organic gardeners, we don't believe in disturbing topsoil unless absolutely necessary - and our backs agree too!
  • Garden Paths: Preparation and layout - part 1 of a two stage process. You laid out the contours of your garden paths while digging and clearing in the soil preparation phase, right?
  • Waterlogged Soil: How to build a drainage sinkhole system the natural way. You'll be able to recycle a lot of the stone materials you found while preparing the soil for your future garden. A very tedious job, but the result is permanent - and it works!

So What's Next?

More hard work and a lot of patience (and the odd curse or two) - let's move on and add features to your cottage garden.

At last you can start turning your design objectives into reality.