I do love lavender and I did love my lavender bushes in the back garden. Unfortunately they had been in situ for around eight years (if not more) and had got very woody and the weeds underneath them and around them were proving hard to control.
So, on August 12th and 13th (hot days) I set about chopping down and pulling up all five lavender bushes, I gathered in the the flower heads to keep and dry them but, other than that, the whole lot went into the green rubbish bin. I saved the woody branches separately with the idea of storing them and using them for kindling one fine and sunny day when I might have a barbeque. As Autumn approaches I think that plan may not come into fruition.
The next stage was to uproot the actual roots (just visible in the picture below) and then take all the stones off by spade work and depositing them on some plastic bags at the side of the perimeter. I did all this quite back breaking work in the hot sunshine and then got on my hands and knees pulling up as much of the weeds and weed roots as I could find. I had no new membrane to put on top of the old black membrane but I utilised two old cloth throws that were about the dimensions of a king size bed and the luckily the area within the bricks.
All the stones got a rigorous sieving to get all the little bits of soil and lavender wood from them. Then, sieve by sieve full. I put them on top of the throws I had tucked into the space. This took quite a long while. I was sweating buckets by the time the last sieve full got chucked into place. I left it as it was for that evening and the following day I returned to the garden. I pushed the stones around to do my best to get the throws completely covered around the edges to prevent weeds returning (they still came back!) and finished off the new design with my ceramic balls. The chair was loaned from a neighbour.
