A new year's tidy garden thanks to recycled old bricks

This winter we were given hundreds of old bricks and what with all the slabs we have been given over the years it has spurred us on to organise ourselves better. 

Bricked beds towards the hut

We now have a lovely circular space ready for sowing a low growing flowering meadow, three large well defined beds for rotating our larger crops such as potatoes, alliums and sweetcorn, a well organised mulch depot and also a practical space for compost tea making and pernicios weed drowning.  

Bricked preschool and trampoline beds

Bricks on our mound by the herb spiral

A circular, bricked bed

New large beds with brick frames

The most important job in any garden is looking after the soil and getting plenty of organic matter and nutrients into it and now, finally, we have got ourselves well organised on this front. In addition to our great row of compost heaps, we have somewhere to store our fallen leaves to create a good seed compost. 

Our mulch depot

We also have a place to store woodchips so they can mature for over a year before using and a bay for storing the soil improver we get from the green-waste recycling plant and other organic matter that can be used as a mulch. Mulching reduces digging, watering and weeding, and improves the soil. However, to do this you need mulch and we are always finding ourselves short of materials to mulch with and places to store it. Our mulch depot looks very neat now. 

If you are interested in how the soil improver we get from Amey Cespa is made, here is a great little video