I mentioned the other day that I had had enough of my backyard and was going to re-design it. Well, here is my really dodgy preliminary plan!

This is what the side-of-the-house-backyard currently looks like:

It was quite hard to take a photograph of as it’s quite long and narrow-ish. Not to mention a series of drop down levels that make it hard to capture properly. This photograph was taken at the bottom of the strip (I was standing in another drop down level which currently holds three apple trees). At the top there is my vegetable patch (newly weeded) and along the left hand side are two pear trees and an apricot tree. And all that green? That’s the evil, evil runner grass.

My plan looks a little something like this:

The black section are the existing garden beds. The blue patches are where I hope to put in new raised beds, and the red patches will be paved areas. The plan is to rip up ALL the runner grass and replace it with some relatively hardy ground cover that a) doesn’t require mowing and b) doesn’t send runners everywhere and spread like crazy.

Much research will now ensue to discover what would make the perfect ground cover, so if you’ve got any suggestions I’d love to hear them!

Have you planned a backyard makeover? What were your biggest challenges?