The Good Earth

This Easter long weekend was a great time to get out in the garden, and I tackled a bank that I've been meaning to plant out for some time. I was delighted to turn the soil and find it full of nice fat earthworms doing their job.

It's a far cry from when I first started four years ago, digging into shale or clay, with not a worm in sight. Back then I had quite a ritual for planting. I'd dig a good size hole with the crowbar and post-hole digger, add some water crystals, fertiliser, gypsum (to break up the clay), then pop in the plant and fill the hole with a quality garden soil from the local landscape supplier.

Rather than all this trouble, I've found it far more effective to prepare the soil beforehand. I usually cover the ground with manure, sprinkle with gypsum, cover with mulch and then leave for at least 3 - 6 months to compost. When it comes to planting, I pretty much just dig a hole and put in the plant.

I planted Grevillea Forest Rambler this weekend, a low wide-spreading cover which is easy to grow and excellent for those sloping banks. The earthworms are happy and the plants are happier.

Building the Chook Pen - Part I

I had hoped to be hearing the cheep cheeps of little chicks this Easter. Alas, it is not to be and I concede that we will not be making our first deadline from the 2012 Task List. We'd planned to have our long-awaited chook pen finished by the end of March, but OE has run into some health hassles and we've fallen behind schedule. At least we've had some pretty productive working bees with our neighbours over the past couple of months, and here's where we are to date.

This is what we started with at the beginning of the year - a cleared flat piece of earth....

We started by putting in the corner and centre posts...

Next came the purlins, then the bearers and joints for the floor of the chook house. We also dug a 30 cm tunnel around the entire exterior where we'll place some wire to fox-proof the pen.

The bones are there, but still a few more weekends of work to put up the wire mesh and build the hen house.

Creeping Boobialla

Because we've got such a sloppy block of land, I wanted a good native groundcover for steep banks. A few websites suggested Creeping Boobialla (myoporum parvifolium) and since it was available as tubestock at my local Greening Australia nursery, it seemed like a great solution. It did exactly as I had hoped in the first year...grew quickly, surpressed weeds and provided lush green coverage. But after the first year, it started to lose it's lustre and developed dead patches.

I have since found that the common type tends to have a short life span and that there are longer lived varieties. Not really wanting to remove it and start again, in the dead spots I have planted the tougher version "Yareena" as well as the native succulent Carpobrotus glaucescens or Pigface (pictured below) which I hope will eventually create a lovely patchwork effect.

I've got a little list

When we first moved in to our house four years ago, I was totally overwhelmed about where to start working in the garden. Our 'house yard' was about an acre and there seemed to be so many things to do, that I didn't know what to do first. To deal with this, I started writing an annual list of things to do, prioritising them and giving myself some deadlines. It worked a treat and stopped me from doing a little bit here and a little bit there.

As we enter our fifth year, I've found that the jobs list has slowed down (thank goodness!). There's still plenty to do but nothing seems as urgent, and we now like to spend some time enjoying what we've done instead of working every weekend.

So this year's list is done and is sitting on the fridge.

Here are our projects for 2012:

1. Build a chicken coop (Jan - March)

2. Build stairs at the side of the house (April - June)

3. Put in pathway to shed (July - Sept)

4. Build awning on side of shed (Oct - Dec).

Wish us luck!

The new security guard

Last weekend we found a novel way to protect the garden from possum attack...install a two-metre long carpet python!

We came across this guy wrapped around some timber framing built to keep the possums off my passionfruit vine. Only problem, the snake had also wrapped itself up in the bird netting.

The OE is very phobic of snakes (understandably, after a snake bite once left him hospitalised for three days), so he wasn’t keen to get too close. Unfortunately, after several phone calls to the vet and RSPCA, no one was available for a snake rescue. So our brave neighbours stepped in, and with welding gloves and a pair of scissors, cut the snake free. The lovely lady from the RSPCA recommended that we take our visitor to the vet for a check up... so the snake went into a bag, then into a box, then into the car and was delivered to our local vet.

Thinking we’d done our good deed for the day, plus rid ourselves of the reptile, we were somewhat surprised to get a phone call 15 minutes later from the vet, “the wounds are superficial, so you can come and collect your snake”.

Ummmm...we didn’t actually want it back.

It turns out that carpet snakes are territorial and need to be returned close to where they were found, so we went back to the vet, snake in the bag, bag in the box, box in the car, and drove back home.

We now have a carpet snake living somewhere down the back of our house. Only hope it does some good and scares those rotten possums away.

New Year's Eve Bush Formal

One of the best projects we've completed in 2010 is our fire pit, so it was most fitting to celebrate New Year's Eve in this beautiful little spot at the bottom of our property.


Our fire pit, commonly referred to as The Pit, came about when our neighbour suggested that it would be great to have a spot in the bush that we could meet for social occasions. So we cleared an area, built a 2-metre diameter fire pit out of retaining wall bricks, and placed some logs around the edge to provide seating. We've had some great gatherings here throughout the year, sitting around the fire, toasting marshmallows and cooking dinner on camp ovens.


Our NYE bash at The Pit was themed "bush formal". To add that touch of elegance, we put dozens of candles in and around the fire pit (we decided not to light the fire this time - Queensland summers are a tad warm to be sitting by a blazing fire), lit up the surrounding gum trees with flood lights, set the table with white linen and dined on a three course meal.

So here's to a great 2010 and many more fantastic garden projects in 2011!

A mate for our avocado

In the wedding anniversary tradition, year four is fruit...and so the OE gave me an avocado tree. We'd heard that avocados can be pretty finicky and the secret to success is good drainage. They like plenty of water, but if their feet stay wet for too long, they just roll over and die.

So we thought we'd use our steep block to our advantage, and planted the avocado tree at the top of a bank. I leave the septic sprinkler next to it so it gets plenty of water, but it's also well drained. It seems we picked a good location, because after 18 months it's now over 2 metres high and very healthy.

Since it's so happy, we've been looking for a mate, hopefully to help with polination. Avocados seem to be pretty light on at the nursery so the OE was pretty chuffed when he picked one up today.

I'm hoping that this is a match made in heaven and we get lots of little avocados in a few years time.