In the garden

The pond garden (where a pond use to be), my acacia is doing fabulously, with some lavender, capsicum, potatoes, and borage. That's lemon balm in the front.



Grevillea 'peaches & cream' - I adore Grevillea for their look and colours and bird and bee attracting abilities. 

There's been a fair amount of dedicated garden time going on.  I'm trying to get the winter produce in the ground.  I've been slowly planting throughout the garden with my major focus being on planting trees.  Planting trees in Autumn so that they've settled in by next Summer and in the long term can provide us with lots of shade.  I've been dedicated to planting natives but now I'm moving into choosing what fruit trees to plant - must get on and order those!

Produce vegies have been planted in the gaps in the existing garden beds.  The soil is not great at all, I've been adding compost and manure but it's still really poor so I'll be relying on my worm tea to give the plants lots of nutrients.  I harvested loads of purple sweet potato from one bed which are delicious! I like that sweet potato covers a lot of ground quickly whilst I'm being indecisive about what to plant and where.

 

 Mixing in the manure with half the sweet potato bed harvested.

 



 

The sweet potato haul

Winter's plan is to develop a few more garden beds for produce.  The biggest thing is deciding where and how.  Do I want raised beds or something different?  I'm leaning toward paths along contours and new beds made on the grass as it's a little more romantic and I want to mix produce with ornamentals mostly. It will be a slow process but I hope to have a few extra square metres by Spring for planting up. And I'm hoping to have some chickens before then to help me along! 

Easter

We had a great Easter weekend, spending lots of time at home just pottering around - mostly in the garden.  For me 2013 is the year of the garden and I'm loving getting stuck into planting.  I managed to do lots of weed clearing.  The last month has been warm with lots of rain so the weeds have just overtaken the garden.  

In our front garden, I have been focusing on planting native Austrlian trees as many as possible which are indigenous to our area. The aim being to plant the trees first so in coming years we will have some shade on the front of the house. 

I've planted some Sydney Red Gum's (Angophora Costata) which have taken off and have an Ironbark to plant also.  These being for large established trees. I've planted a large number of acacia's and grevillea's - fast growing to provide some shrubbery quickly.  Lots of other natives too, mostly for clay soil and full sun.  I have no design plans for the natives in our front garden except picking plants I like in colours I like.  I figure you can't really go wrong.  I have had to replace a few plants which haven't made it but mostly things have been fairly successful. 

The backyard has been more a clear out of weeds and a lot of macro gardening.  Pulling out strange structures and concrete and moving things.   We pulled down a strange greenhouse structure and replaced it with a shed.  We have moved the clothesline which was smack bang in the middle of the back yard to the back of the yard.  We demolished a strange pond and have discovered lots of wonderful sandstone bedrock buried underneath things.  Built a deck and an awning off the back of the house for extra living room.  I have planted a number of herbs and have done some small amounts of vegetable gardening with some success.  The soil is not great, either clay or dusty. 

Rear Exterior when we bought the house (2011)

 Rear Exterior April 2013

Next steps for the back yard are to build a more established composting system.  We have a compost bin which is doing nicely and I recently got a worm farm through the Compost Revolution program. I do however want to build a 3 bin system so I can do some hot composting as well. 

There is also a tree to come out and to fix the retaining wall it is pushing down, add a BBQ platform and hut, a chook house for some chickens, some raised beds for vegetables.  All in time but the next thing I'm focusing on is to plant a food forest, well, plant some fruit trees so that they can get established sooner rather than later.   

And just a note on the side.  I'm busy finishing a quilt for baby girl and have come to the realisation that I love to make quilts but I really do not like quilting.  I find it the very laborious part of making quilts.  So it's simple and machine quilted and done without much care!