To pay someone to do this?

[6onTheHappyFarm]

We recently moved house. Our garden is just under an acre in size, there is no greenhouse or anything. The previous owners have planted lots of low maintenance shrubs that don't seem to flower. There are about 30 trees around the outside of the property, but not a single fruit tree.

It's very green, with not a lot of other colours.

I'd love to get some colour growing and would love to grow our own fruit and veg. It does have to be stuff that's quite easy to grow and doesn't require constant attention. I'd really like to get some fruit trees in.

I'm not terribly green fingered though. I planted two cherry trees in the summer and they both died .

I'm wondering if it's a better idea to jusy get some sort of gardener in to start me off? I spent £60 on those two trees and they did nothing. I don't want to spend more money on stuff that just dies! I'm also not one of those people who has an eye for or enjoys design. I'm worried whatever I do will look a bit rubbish!

We have another baby coming in May, So I can't dedicate loads of time to it. I know it isn't a big problem, but our old house was bought off an older couple who had been keen gardeners, and the garden amazingly colourful and pretty. Our new one just seems so drab in comparison. We have our own chickens for eggs, so I'd love to get a bit more out of the garden food-wise too. I just don't even know where to start.

Would it be unreasonable to just get a professional in to plant it all out? Would it be very expensive?

If you dug the cherry trees properly, most reputable nurseries will replace them.

Our first cherry tree didn't take, and we did everything 'right' ... they replaced it and the second one did just fine and is now quite big!

For such a big garden, I agree getting some help might be a good idea.

A gardener would be a good idea. They can give you tips on companion planting and how you can support native birds/bees/butterflies.

I have a small garden and paid someone to do the digging out etc. I did the planting research and it takes up a lot of time. I watched all of the gardening programmes, which isn't any different to employing a Gardener.

Growing fruit and veg can be very time-consuming and hard work digging the soil over and weeding regularly.

Be careful not to turn a low maintenance garden into a high maintenance one, if you don't have the time or skills to look after it.

Hiring a gardener is probably not going to cost less than £60 per month even for a couple of hours per week. Make a stab at the cost using minimum wage and number of hours you need/want/can afford.

yes, i would get someone in to get it started then may be a gardener once a week to keep things ticking over afterwards, gardens and vegetables plots aren't low to maintain if they are to be done properly, ignore those few weeds for a couple of weeks and you've soon got a jungle.

Do get a gardener and not one of those people that mows grass and does maintenance because a lot of them just pant things and mow grass but don't know about actually growing and planting and will decimate the insects and wildlife with chemicals and hack stuff down like the team that do some of the gardens round here.

The cherry trees came from B and Q. Maybe that's where I went wrong?

Perhaps I'll stick to fruit trees and berry bushes. Plants that don't need much attention once they are established.

I am so envious, sounds like a lovely blank canvas.

I used to grow vegetables with my mum when I was young.

I'd have a nice rectangular veg patch with a border of lavender and marigolds dotted with wild garlic (insects hate the smell, keeps a lot away) plus an apple tree in one corner, water butt for catching rain water in the other with a waiting watering can sitting at it's feet. Then I'd have a couple of rows or little rectangles each of easy growers: carrots, parsnips, beetroot, onions, leeks, radishes. A few rows of potatoes because even though they take a little more effort, the flavour of freshly dug spuds is wonderful. We even grew brussel sprouts which tasted gorgeous, nothing like shop bought ones when just picked.

It's really not hard to grow vegetables, no where near as tricky as soft fruits. You just have to dig the soil over well and pick out the stones before planting. If you don't pick out the stones, you end up with carrot mens legs with carrot willies such as can be seen online or in newspapers from time to time. A lot of veg is just poke an impression line with a stick to a depth they tell you on the packet and sprinkle a few cheap seeds in. Leeks you buy from the nursery looking like blades of grass clumped together, poke a hole with your trusty stick, separate out a single little leek and drop it in the hole then fill the hole with water.

The warm memories of gardening with mum are gold dust.

Sorry, I seem to have nostalgiaed all over your thread.

Hi, the problem with the cherries is likely to be planting in summer, most trees are best planted in autumn/winter early spring. It was such a hot summer, even with watering lots of new planting has failed. You could probably just find a few accent plants and trees to start and build up each year. A good designer can help, not just a maintenance gardener. Good luck!

OP if you have space for a wild flower area it is super easy, just turn over a couple of beds throw some seeds down with compost and they grow whether you look after them or not! We have quite a big garden and have given a corner over to this, so much colour, bees, butterflies etc, I'd never had a garden of my own before we bought this current house a couple of years ago, so don't really know what I'm doing. I've also found some fruit and veg very easy to grow in pots (we do live in the SE though so it's warmer than some areas), this year I grew peppers, chillis, more tomatoes than we could eat, a variety of herbs, cucumbers, radishes, spring onions, strawberries, blackcurrants and baby carrots. I spent a weekend planting in big pots which I've put on a patio near the wildflower area, then just watered stuff and it nearly all grew easily. I planted a lot straight from seed and some from seedlings in case the seeds didn't take (how I ended up with so many tomatoes in every colour you can imagine), the books tell you you need a green house lots of planning germination then planting out etc. I just chucked a load of stuff out, used good compost and hoped for the best, the things that didn't take I'll leave, the things that flourished easily I'll keep on with. It's not a scientific approach but it's made our garden prettier and more useful!

Go for it! A good gardener will be able to create a beautiful garden for you that you’ll be able to keep up with a bit of help and enjoy for years. Fantastic thing to spend a little bit of money on imho. As you say, you don’t have loads of time and not everyone has the eye for creating a fabulous garden to start with.

Most "gardeners" are interested in trimming lawns and hedges, keeping the garden "tidy", which after all is what most people want. You would have to pay a lot to get a gardener to give you expert advice (which after all they have gained through years of study and experience). I'd go for a maintenance gardener to do boring work, and think about joining your local horticultural society to learn what you need, or maybe an on-line gardening forum (think MN has one).

I agree with the poster who said growing veg is time consuming - it's not so much that it's time consuming, it's that you have to adhere to the timetable. Get the seeds in in time to give the crops a decent growing season, keep up with the weeding. I find fruit is far more forgiving. Soft fruit like blackberries, loganberries simply require pruning once a year, which can be done any time between September and March. If you aren't committed to maximising crops, apples can get away with just pruning - but choosing appropriate varieties is crucial. I have 8 trees, only one is a variety you'll ever see in the shops, and they take me through from August to March. By the way, apple trees aren't self fertile - you need two, flowering at the same time, so they can each pollinate each other.

I suspect your shrubs will flower at some time. Standard advice with a new garden is to give everything a year before you grub it out so that you can see what's there. You may for example find you have lots of spring bulbs.

I grow lots of fruit and veg in my small garden. I mainly use raised beds which my dh put together from old decking. It’s cheap and a great little hobby for me and my kids. Go to the library and get out a book on growing food and start from there. The first year I only grew tomatoes and lettuce and went from there

Fruit bushes are easy to look after. Get a gardener to put some in and you'll get fabulous fresh fruit every year.

Veg needs to be looked after, but we managed when we had four small children, so it's doable. Nothing better than picking some mange tout and eating them warm within minutes!

apple trees aren't self fertile - you need two, flowering at the same time, so they can each pollinate each other.

who knew!

I would be standing under my apple tree in a year's time complaining that it hadn't given me anything.

I rang a gardener with excellent reviews and qualified in horticultural...things... in our area -£1k a day!

I agree betty, I'm very aware that some green fingered folks would love to be in my position.

mrsstrowman DH is in favour of a wildflower garden. We really want to do our bit to support bees and other insects.

Have I missed the best time to plant fruit trees or should I try and get some in asap?

Autumn is the best time, they can grow their roots a bit before winter. They can either be sold "bare-rooted" (usually from specialist nurseries), in which case they'll be sent out in autumn for planting straight away, or "container grown", when they can be planted any time of the year, but as you've seen with your cherry trees, they need watering for their first summer.

Wherever you buy them from, start by doing some research on line. Look up the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) website, and look up some of the good suppliers, Keepers Nursery for example have good information to get you started.

Don't expect fruit in the first year from apples and other tree fruit, but once they start fruiting they'll produce steadily more as they get more mature.

Things like strawberries, raspberries, loganberries will fruit the first year.

If you have young children you need peas - part of a good childhood is picking and eating peas off the plant when your parents aren't looking.

And every garden needs a clump of rhubarb - it's compulsory!

Definitely get a gardener. I did this summer after 15 years of faffing about, reading articles, killing lots of plants and never really getting the 'real' garden of my imagination. Already it looks pretty good, next year it's going to be great and I wish to high heaven we'd done it as soon as we moved in. We pay gardening rates of £17.50 even though she planned it for us too, so very affordable.

I think you can buy fruit trees with 2 varieties grafted onto one rootstock, so they pollinate each other.

Tackle a small area at a time and when deciding on what to plant bear in mind your garden needs to have child-friendly (and robust) trees, shrubs and flowers.

Planted half an orchard with cheap fruit trees from Aldi and Wilco...with great results!

Apple variety Katy comes highly recommended too.

Raspberries - easy and a good crop

Worth getting the Dessayon? Book on orchards perhaps?

Some very low maintenance ideas for the next year:

• Create a "naturalised" raspberry patch (buy cheap canes in bulk, just dig them into the ground horizontally and spread granulated nitrogen fertiliser on top - they will colonise the space in no time in the spring). Great fun for the kids to hunt for the berries too. I have a 2x2m zero-care patch in a shaded corner of my tiny suburban garden (grown from Poundshop canes) and kids have raspberries in their lunchboxes each day Jul-Oct, and I make several pounds of jam.

• Pumpkins. Very low maintenance, and they will kill off (with shade from their leaves) the grass within a year - plant them in the place where you plan your future veg patch, and you will not need any weeding or herbicide. You will have a supply of ridiculously shaped pumpkins to carve for the next Halloween too!

• Get a couple of pounds of (normal grocery) dried red kidney beans, a stick half an inch in diameter and do the following:

1. make a hole in the ground with the stick somewhere around a vertical support, i.e. a tree, a bush or a fence;
2. drop two-three beans in;
3. stomp with your foot.

(my kids obviously volunteer to do it for me - it's their favourite gardening activity, "planting beanstalks for Jack") This will give your garden a huge nitrogen boost for the next year (legumes bind nitrogen from the air), kidney bean plants are actually quite decorative and your chickens can be let loose next autumn to pick up the bean harvest.

• Plant perennial veg now. Artichoke and rhubarb - you can consider asparagus, but it is a bit more tricky and requires more preparation. Just dig a hole and drop in the crown, these plants are strong enough to fend for themselves.

• I'd plant a mixed edible hedgerow around the perimeter now- a mixture of rambling roses (for rosehip harvest too), cobnuts, cultured brambles of various types (blackberry, loganberry and other hybrids), elder trees (there are very decorative cultivars, with golden and black foliage too), cherry plums etc. Here, I'd also sneakily take advantage of the last year before Brexit and order them in bulk from a wholesale Polish nursery @ a couple of pence per plant, and contract in someone with a tree planter / power planter for a day to put them in.

• Various currants (black, red, white, pink). These are self-sufficient, and strongly scented blackcurrant bushes will also keep some pests at bay.

• Sunflowers. Again, a huge plant can grow with little to no attention from seed. Consider exotic varieties such as Mongolian Giant, it will add structure and colour to your garden, and your chickens will go CRAZY over the seed heads.

The best time to plant fruit trees will start in a couple of days :) They are already dormant, but still will have time to establish before the first proper frost. Any respectable nursery will be very happy to help to plan your garden (in terms of pollination groups etc) for free, if you are placing a sizeable order.

Consider planting a couple of nut / chestnut trees as well. Maybe some more unusual trees too - a quince? a medlar? a sour cherry?

If you are concerned about bees, a couple of European lime or black locust (if you are somewhere in the South, otherwise black locust won't bloom) trees will have the same nectar / pollen load as several acres of wildflowers. You can also buy white clover seed by pound (around £5) - also a great native honey plant and adds nitrogen to the soil, just spread handfuls around liberally to add to your lawn, you need around 2-3 pounds for your area.

Ooooh, I wish I had an acre to play with :)

I think you can buy fruit trees with 2 varieties grafted onto one rootstock, so they pollinate each other. Yes, called "family trees" But not much choice of variety. OP has 1 acre, and so the luxury of being able to have more than one tree, and around 400 varieties to choose from.

Worth getting the Dessayon? Book on orchards perhaps? Dr Hessayon. Good series of books aimed at the beginner.

Lots of good ideas from silvercuckoo. Quince and medlar are wonderfully trouble-free trees, both attractive with big white flowers, followed by golden brown (medlar) or huge golden (quince) fruits. Mulberry is another unusual one to try - takes a few years to come into fruit, but thereafter is covered with luscious black berries which explode into taste. Make sure you get the black mulberry, not the white mulberry which is the one the silkworms eat. Also figs - Black Turkey does well in our climate. Restrict roots to improve fruiting. This year we got about 200 figs - with fresh figs costing 60p each, that was a crop worth having.