I started my design implementation outside my caravan door, according to the principle 'start locally & work out from well managed areas'. The new beds I created were made on meadow grass which contained a lot of dock, nettle & buttercup in particular. In order to give the new plants a chance, I first mulched the ground with cardboard waste from local shops (which in time decomposes), then on top of that I placed a mixture of homemade compost, soil (mainly clay), plus some sand, gravel & manure to give it some structure. The manure was a very local resource being heaped only a few yards away.

 The bed edging was made from fencing post offcuts, which along with the bark chippings from the same source were free of charge, although I did have to collect them. The straw for the paths came from spillings off the floor of the barn & most of the first plantings were surpluses from friends' gardens.

The main project of the first year was to erect the decking, in order to provide a better growing environment for younger & more delicate plants, enable the better use of vertical space & of course provide a bit of Peoplecare too! It was constructed using new timber for the framework, but recycling pallets for the decking surface. I had discovered a lot of pallets, all the same size, going for £1 each at the local buiders yard & they looked ideal for the job. They were such a size that I could make the decking two pallets across & a whole number along the side & across the front, so I designed the framework to fit the pallets.

  The slats were quite a long way apart, but I could see that if I dismantled a second set of pallets, I could use those slats to fill in the gaps of the whole pallets I was using, overlapping the other joins. When it started going down I could see that it was going to work very well & so on the through the summer, the decking progressed. The other important job was to create some water catchment as it was clear that the mobile home roof was a good size & helpfully already had good built-in guttering. The space behind the caravan was both dark from being north-facing & out of the way where the blue barrels wouldn't look unsightly either. I put them up on blocks & pallets, so that I could get my watering cans under the taps & joined them together using cheap plastic fittings intended for use in dairies. Two old downpipes were ideal for diverting the water from the guttering into the barrels & I bolted the lids down for safety, in case children were ever around. A fourth blue barrel with a better lid has been installed here as my comfrey liquid feed container. It's clearly the obvious place for it to go, as it is right next to both the comfrey bed & the water catchment barrels.

 My compost bins were also made from completely recycled materials. I used old fence posts for the front corners & old pallets for the back & sides (making three bins in one). The fronts are made from pallet slats dropped down in between a couple of pieces of recycled battening, allowing me to get right in & dig out the contents when I need to. I cut back into the hedge a little here to fit them in & still have room to get past with a wheel barrow (essential for distributing the finished compost back around the garden). The hedge is very thick at this point & has some large shrubs & trees in it, so there is still a lot of growth behind the bins.

 By the end of the summer, I had finished the decking & was making a lot of use of it for growing. It had totally transformed the space, just about doubling the living area in the summer months & being pretty much slug proof & (as I was later to discover) frost free too! An added bonus has been that it really has made the mobile home more stable in high winds.

 In the first year some work was done on developing behind the mobile home too, but limited to the beds in the picture on the left. Again I used fence post offcuts to edge the beds & a mixture of mulching materials, topping off with wood chippings. At this time, the hedge was very low here behind the caravan, but I have allowed it to grow up to give much more privacy. Comfrey was planted as a useful green manure crop in the shadiest spot against the mobile home, where it has since thrived. I planted other vigorous plants in front of the hedge, where they would have to do well to hold their own, but that was OK as I was just experimenting at that point.

 The area in front of the shed was at the time swathed in bramble. It was clearly making the most of a sunny south-facing wall, but how easy was it going to be for me to turn it into a bramble-free bed? By the autumn, the bramble had been cut back & was being mulched in order to try & eradicate it from that area.

 By the following spring I was already feeling a real sense of progress. The decking was finished (& the steps were much safer!), the water catchment & composts bins had been sorted out. Plus, I had extended the original beds I had made at the front with a couple more, adding to the other new ones I had made at the back. As you can also see, the simple act of painting the mobile home green has helped it to blend much better into its environment. Straw spillings (shown here) were tried as a path base, but rotted too quickly. The latest experiment with wood chippings from treework done on the farm is turning out much better.

 Having painted the mobile home green I decided that the decking needed the same treatment. I wasn't sure how much treatment the pallets would have been given as they are essentially temporary things & so I bought some 'eco-friendly' wood preserver & gave the decking a couple of coats of it.

 By the end of the spring I had yet more plants to fill out some of the gaps & the garden was really starting to take shape. It was great to see the perennials I had planted returning stronger than the year before & I was also bringing on more seedlings in the greenhouse.

 I was utilising a lot of the space on the decking, using pots to grow more vulnerable plants & I had installed a bench to catch the morning sun & a table & chairs to enjoy many of my meals outside, often with visitors. The local birds were perching on the decking handrails regularly & pheasants occasionally wandered through the garden. It was nice to have the vertical space too now & I put up some hanging baskets, experimenting with various water retaining techniques. Later in the summer I planted two honeysuckle plants in the ground, one at the base of each pergola upright. I looked forward to having the structure covered in plants!

 I was still using straw spillings for the paths, as it was the only local free resource that I had available to me for the job. It seemed OK during the summer, but it had got quite mushy over the previous winter though & I was wanting to try something else as soon as I could.

 Behind the caravan, the hedge was thickening out, which was good for the extra privacy, but it was also invading the bed that I had made next to it. The Buddleia I had planted the previous year started to fill it's corner & I put in six raspberry canes, which were surplus to requirements in the Manor garden where I was working. They had suckered & I figured that if they did the same in my garden then I would have a nice clump of canes in years to come. The comfrey was also starting to establish itself & I took my first crop of leaves to wrap around the potato tubers I was planting in the house garden.

 By the end of the year, some of the bed edging wood offcuts were starting to rot & I used up all my surplus pieces, filling gaps that were appearing. I needed to find something more durable to use for this purpose & so I turned to using empty bottles.

 I wanted to extend the garden around the front of the decking & to fill in the space between the mobile home & the shed at the back, so I started making new beds. Again there was plenty of cardboard & manure available & this time the bed edges were made using these recycled bottles (& no I didn't drink my way through them first!). I had noticed that people often left boxes of bottles by the local bottle bank when it was full, so I started collecting them. I timed my recycling trips for the morning before the bottle bank was collected & I soon had enough to make all the beds that I wanted.

 The bottles are remarkably strong & have been tested in this way for safety before being used at busy tourist attractions like the Centre for Alternative Technology & the HDRA Organic Gardens. As it was a damp January, I was able to just push the bottles into the soft ground. I also decided to let nature deal with the labels rather than spend a lot of time getting them off first. I then got started on digging the pond out.

 I had bought the most logical size of liner for economy reasons (4m x 3m), knowing roughly how big I wanted the pond to be & then worked out the exact dimensions that I could manage for the pond. I dug down in terraces, having decided on a pleasing shape that increased edge without reducing surface area too much & dug down to two & a half feet at the deep end. Because it was a damp & mild January, the ground was quite easy to dig (one of the reasons I decided to start) & so the digging & lining was done in a day. I used an old hessian backed carpet that I had pulled out of a skip to line the hole, before carefully placing the plastic liner & filling it with water from my water butts (via a hose).

 The mound of earth (mostly clay actually) from digging out the pond was heaped up & spare large stones from a dismantled wall used to create a rockery. The same stone was also used to edge the pond, hiding the edge of the liner. Then I planted out around the pond & sprinkled flower seeds that I had been given all over the rockery..... & waited.

 As the spring progressed, the beds & the pond gradually began to fill up with the new plants & various creatures appeared in & around the pond. One end of the pond has a gravel beach to allow birds to come & drink or bathe & small animals to get out again if they fall in. It has also proved to be a favourite sunbathing place for all the tadpoles hatched from some frogspawn, rescued from a ditch early in the Spring. Already it is a popular place for birds bathing & much wildlife has set up home, including a large blue dragonfly, which likes to rest upon the irises.

 Wire trellises were attached to both the shed (which was also by now painted green) & the east side of the mobile home for climbers. I planted Jerusalem artichokes at one end for a perennial crop & to provide a bit of a windbreak & I underplanted with Sweet peas & Morning glory to climb up them. In the middle I planted a Loganberry which I trained up the trellis & at the other end of the bed I planted Nasturtium, Sweet peas, Borage & Fennel, as I knew between them they would soon fill the gaps & help suppress the bramble even more.

 In the spring I also inherited a lot more pots (with plants in). My parents work for the Cats Protection League in Worthing & an elderly lady had died & left her entire estate to the charity. My parents had to clear out the house & there were so many pots in the garden, that I was able to collect all I could put in my van in exchange for a donation to the charity. Many of her beautiful plants now live in my garden, where many more people will get to appreciate them now.

Maintenance

 The maintenance of the garden mostly centres around keeping the pots on the decking watered. I probably could set up a watering system with pipes, but I have no water supply to the caravan & the routine of watering takes me around to keep me in touch with what's going on. There is a certain amount of bindweed & grass in the front garden beds & it may be worth me remulching them this winter to cut this back. The other area where grass still grows strongly is on the path edges, particularly in the back garden, but I keep pulling it & putting more woodchip down & in time it reduces. I have to clear the pond of duckweed every couple of weeks, but this makes a good nutritious mulch on the garden beds, so nothing is lost there. The decking can get a little slippery in the winter & so I have to keep an eye on that & scrub it occasionally. All in all though, there is very little work involved in maintaining this garden, especially when compared with a traditional one (& I should know because I still earn some of my living working in one!).

 There is very little else to do except to go out & pick my salads... & then spend my spare time arranging them into beautiful patterns.

 An evaluation of this whole process can be found on the Design Review page.