A garden update

It's been a frustrating few weeks in regards to the garden. We've been busy on the weekends and I've been sick for the last few days so outside has really been left to fend for itself!

The side we spent so long clearing over Easter is still exactly how we left it...



but Sim picked up a couple of bags of manure down on the Bellarine Peninsula last week so we plan to mix in some of that soon. It's a mix of cow, chicken and sheep and the farmer said it was quite potent so we're hoping the two bags will go a fair way. 

The small bed that we planted out with a seedling 'Winter Harvest' selection from Bunnings (just to get us started) is going strong ... you can even see a cauliflower forming



- and that's from the plant that the dog dug up. Something has just started eating the leaves so I'm going to head out one dusk and see if I can see any little critters having some dinner where they shouldn't be.

We've started planting a few seedlings ... we have made the mistake of not labelling them as we go though so in some cases it's a surprise as to what we're going to get. We do know this punnet has sugar snap peas, oakleaf lettuce and leeks:



This punnet is a bit of a mystery...pretty sure there is parsley and pak choy but as for what else...Sim can't quite remember!



We've tried to plant a couple of scarlet runner beans, although I think it might be too cold, and not much has happened yet. I'm enjoying the surprise of not knowing quite what we're going to end up with but I think when we start trying to plant more seriously, it's not quite going to work. 

We have since invested in some labels for future plantings.

Hopefully we can get back out there soon...

The Great Easter Garden Clean-up

Four days stretched out before us, four days of getting the garden sorted, de-cluttering the house, baking bread, cooking delicious homemade meals…before those four days suddenly flashed by in the wink of an eye and I'm once again facing my concrete wall at the office before I'm quite ready to.

I realise now that our list of tasks was somewhat ambitious…but we did actually achieve quite a bit:

One part of the garden went from this:

To this:

To this (all ready to get some no dig beds prepared):

We started a herb garden around our pond:

We built a gate (don't look too closely it might fall apart!)

And next weekend's job will be to hang it.

It was probably one of the first long weekends that we have spent the majority of it around the house or out getting things to use around the garden...and it was entirely enjoyable, I don't feel that we missed out on anything and besides, there's still plenty on the list to keep us occupied.

The garden bed is undone!!

We came home today to find our small vegetable garden that we planted out on Saturday dug through and the cauliflower and cabbage dug up. I'm here to tell you that bird netting does not work as a dog deterrent...especially one that is addicted to Dynamic Lifter. 

So I'm trying to maintain my positive attitude which was a little shaky anyway when I walked through the door with my train home LATE AGAIN after an eight hour day looking out the window of my corporate office onto a flat, gray wall of concrete. And it's not like the dog did it on purpose...

I guess we may have to move to plan B, and build a gate before we get too carried away with planting too much more stuff. We managed to work out how to join redgum sleepers together so perhaps a gate will not be too much of a technical leap...and I can slowly erase the painful memories of wood working class in year 7 when I tried to make a truck out of wood and it turned into an uneven crate with uneven wheels held on by match sticks...interesting the things we hang onto from our childhood.

I don't know if you can see from the picture above but we have ready made posts with a pergola exactly where we need the gate so anyone got any great gate designs for a span of about 2.5 metres and some unhandy people?!

The first garden bed is done!!!

It's been a few months coming but finally we finished one garden bed today! It's a small step but a significant one in that it is a move in the right direction.

We have recently bought a house with a little bit of space out the back and we have been talking (a lot) about doing something constructive with it. We've been reading so many blogs .... the Greening of Gavin and Down to Earth are two that have particularly inspired us...and last weekend we actually stopped talking about it and made a start - sometimes the hardest part. 

We have decided on the no-dig vegetable garden so we headed off to Bunnings (while not the ideal choice we feel like such newbies we wanted to be able to ask advice if we needed to) for some redgum sleepers, some coach bolts to hold the beds together and a drill bit to get through the hardwood. Our original plan was to make two beds of 2.4m x 1.2m  as a beginning, but we discovered almost too late that 2.4m length sleepers were not going to fit in the car! Desperate to make a start we quickly rethought the plan and went for two beds of 1.2m x 1.2m. We do have space for more but we have to clear some room and we figure that we can use these first couple of beds as a bit of trial and error.

While I would like to boast that we put the framework together quickly and easily, the truth is that the first bed took us an hour and a half . We discovered that the Bunnings Man had advised us to get the wrong size drill bit and so we scrounged around at home and found the right size bit in a cheap set found in the shed - a lesson learnt that $11 on one drill bit is not necessarily the way to go nor is blindly taking advice from the Bunnings Man.

The second bed took us half an hour so I reckon we 'll get it down to twenty minutes easy - eventually. This is what we ended up with:

Today we filled one bed. We started with a layer of newspaper, then a 5 cm layer of sugar cane mulch. We added some concentrated dynamic lifter pellets and watered it in well. Next came a layer of cow manure, and then a layer of mushroom compost. We started the layering with the mulch again, dynamic lifter, cow manure and compost. Our sleepers are only 100m high so that was enough to almost fill them.

We want to grow our stuff from seeds eventually but we bought a kick-start pack from Bunnings of cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower. Finally we topped off our bed with a protective layer of bird netting...with two dogs who luurve rolling in dynamic lifter and birds that adore sifting through mulch for worms we figured this was the easiest way to get around both problems. 

Here's the final product. It may not look like much but we're pretty excited!