After 6 months and a mere 52 hours work, does your garden look any different from when you started ? Did you take any colour shots of your garden before you started work, like we suggested ? And if you did, can you find them, take some more, from the same positions, and then compare the results? That’s the only real way to check your progress. If you’ve kept up with your project work and your groundwork, you should be feeling rather excited by what you’ve achieved.

If your garden doesn’t look quite as colourful as the picture you initially had in mind, don’t worry. Your own photos are your best guide to how you have succeeded.

With luck you’ve managed to keep abreast of all the project work and the groundwork too. However, if you haven’t don’t worry. The whole plan is flexible. Any areas you have neglected, any projects you haven’t had time to keep up with, abandon for this year. Start them from scratch next year. For the rest of this year, just keep on with the project work in the areas of the garden where you have been able to cope. Also abandon any parts of the garden that you think may be too much to deal with over the coming 6 months, and leave them too till next year.

So far we’ve been on a crash programme to revitalize your soil and bring instant colour and cover to the garden. Over the next 6 months we’ll turn these instant but temporary effects into permanent plantings and concentrate on making a garden that will look good for years to come with little further trouble.