As with the cottage garden, where I was also able to implement the design, I would have to say that it has generally all gone well. The vast difference between when I arrived & the garden now, in just it's third season is testimony enough to that. I will however highlight a few elements that came together particularly well.

 Decking: Working chronologically, I would have to start with the decking. Although it became quite a long project, it totally transformed the space around the outside of the mobile home & effectively doubled it's living area during the summer months. This has been particularly valuable when the interior has got unpleasantly hot towards the end of really sunny days & the east-facing area goes into the shade. It went up with only a few technical problems, reused all those pallets & became a virtually slug-free area to grow my salads. It's also a great place to catch the morning sun & the evening shade (on the east side) & to enjoy meals outdoors, looking at the beautiful view.

 Mulching: Not all the mulching I have done has been totally successful, but some of it has managed to create instant beds, without having any 'weeds' growing back up through later on. The use of a cardboard underlayer seems to make all the difference, because where I didn't use it, the situation is now less satisfactory (see below). Using a lot of manure as a top layer clearly keeps in a lot of the moisture in the soil & allows the plants to do well even when it has been hot & dry for a long period, while at the same time gradually dissolving feeding everything when we do get rain.

 Pond: The pond has also been a great success. I was able to dig it during January, when there was nothing else to do in the garden anyway & it quickly gave shape to a flat featureless area of grass. I had sufficient old carpet from a skip to line the bottom of the hole with & protect the plastic liner & there were just enough rocks of the right sort of size nearby to edge it & create the rockery too. Even the pond plants & seeds I used on the rockery were mostly donated (I bought the water lily), so again it was a very cheap project to complete. Everything has grown so well this year & the pond very quickly filled up with pond life & looked well established even quite early on. It brings in another important habitatalong with the accompanying species to create greater potential for beneficial inter-species relationships within the garden.

 Multiplying plants: I planted comfrey along the shady west wall of the caravan soon after I arrived & it has thrived, giving me plenty of leaves for making liquid fertiliser with & using as a surface mulch. The other plants certainly seem to benefit a lot from it's application (I also wrap my potato tubers in a leaf when I plant them out). I planted out six raspberry canes from the Manor house I was working at, where they had been suckering. I put them behind the caravan in the new bed I had created there & in their second year they are putting up canes to fill the whole bed. This will clearly be a very productive soft fruit bed next year & the use of the paths should prevent them spreading beyond where they are required. I have also had great success from simply leaving some plants like rocket & ragged jack kale to self sow themselves, avoiding the need for any input from me whatsoever. Simply sticking a selection of blackcurrant cuttings from good varieties in the ground has yielded some very productive bushes.
 

 There isn't much really that goes in this section. Pallets: I remember that fitting pallets into the decking structure didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. Having built the decking to fit around the pallets, I discovered that not all the pallets that I had were quite the same size (clearly the 'human factor' in their construction). This meant that I had to do a bit more work trimming some down to fit than I had anticipated. Dismantling the other pallets for planks to infill the ones that I was putting in, was also a bit difficult as they had a tendency to split if I wasn't very careful.

 Water catchment: Having set up three interconnected water butts at the back of the caravan & ascertained that they filled up well whenever it rained, I then built the decking. At first there didn't seem to be any effect, but it seems that the repeated use of the decking area at the southern end of the caravan has pushed the tow hitch assembly down a bit, where it rests upon it. This seems to have had the effect of making most of the roof catchment to now run to the front of the caravan where there is only space for a single water butt. This often overflows in heavy rain now, while the three butts to the rear of the caravan hardly fill at all. The back of the caravan probably needs to be lowered a bit now to compensate.
 

 I would certainly have planned the decking more thoroughly before making new beds (a priorities error), as I had initially assumed that it would only be a single pallet wide. As it happened, once the decking was done, some of the plants in the beds that I had made were several feet under the decking & so a certain amount of transplanting was required. Some mulching didn't go quite so well, I would certainly use cardboard in all cases in future. Those where I didn't are still a mass of couch grass & bindweed, all entangled with the well established plants that now also reside there.

 Some plantings I definitely made in the wrong place, particularly those that I put under the hedge on both sides of the caravan. Clearly the hedge draws a lot of the nutrients up from the soil around it, making it difficult for the other plants to compete. The eastern hedge is a shady spot that is also in a mini rain-shadow. As I find plants that do well in these beds I plant more of them, but a lot of plants I have had to relocate to other parts of the garden. I would now only plant big strong plants near the hedge, that I know will be able to hold their own there.

 I planted a pear tree & an apple tree in pots on the decking. I wanted to have some vertical growth there early on & came across some cheap trees that needed rescuing from Woolworths. After doing well the first year, the pear died the following spring. On closer inspection I realised that leaving the saucer under the pot had caused the roots to rot. The apple developed a bad case of canker low down on the stem & despite work on it, doesn't look happy. Conversely, two trees given to me by a friend (a plum & a cherry), that I planted directly into the ground, have done really well. I won't be growing trees in pots again, they are much easier to care for grown in the ground.

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