As is illustrated in my previous post about how, on Sunday 25th October 2020, my house was connected to mains water, part of the work involved digging a deep trench right across the front lawn. Because late October is the end of the growing season here, I realised that I wouldn’t be able to do anything to repair the grass, until the Spring of 2021. The photograph above, taken on 13th December 2020, after I had finished severely pruning all the bushes down the right-hand side of the lawn, shows the extent of the damage.
As I wrote in that previous post, there was also excess earth that needed to be taken away from where the contractors had dug the hole for the ‘shaft’.
And the strip of public land between the concrete gully and my front hedge still needed to be made good, which also involved removing excess earth and rubble.
Earlier this year, I decided that I would use the need to repair the damage done to the grass, as an opportunity to make other improvements to the front garden. I wanted to get rid of two unsightly trees, a half-dead bush and a shrub. I also wanted to remove three lumps of concrete near the house, two of which I believe were the base of steps up to the original front door, which was on the far side of the now enclosed verandah.
Believing that some of these tasks were beyond my capabilities, my friend Kát’a kindly found me a landscape gardener, Mr Bezdekovský, and in mid-April, he came to look at what I wanted doing. He gave me a very reasonable quotation and promised start work on Wednesday 5th May, providing it wasn’t raining heavily 😉
This is how the front garden looked on the morning of Wednesday 5th May, before Mr Bezdekovský and his colleague started work.
And this is how it looked a few hours later, after the unwanted trees, bush and shrub had been removed, together with the addition of a pile of fresh earth to help with reseeding all the bare patches.
But what I and Mr Bezdekovský had not realised was how deeply embedded two of the three lumps of concrete were. Here is the first one that they tried, and failed 🙁 to remove, using a pickaxe and spade.
So the following day, they returned with a pneumatic drill/jack-hammer and eventually managed to extract all three concrete lumps. Here is part of the first one.
And here is the resultant hole! However, the excess earth that the contractors never came back to take away in October/November 2020, proved highly beneficial, as Mr Bezdekovský was able to use most of it to fill three large holes 🙂 The remainder, he loaded onto his trailer, along with the lumps of concrete, and took it all away for disposal.
At the end of day two, this was how the front lawn looked with all holes filled and the bare earth seeded.
The area around the shaft seeded with excess soil removed.
The strip of public land cleared of excess earth and rubble and levelled.
Fast forward three and a half weeks and this is what the front lawn looked like after I mowed it for the first time in 2021.
And here is a more recent photograph, taken on Tuesday 20th July 2021.