A busy time of the year...

We are at that busy end of the year. I realised the other day I hadn't been taken a good stroll around the food garden for three whole days. I'd been out there (in the rain) to harvest some peas, beans, purple carrots, cherry tomatoes and radishes, but what I'd failed to do was look at the zucchini. Admittedly we'd been eating a fair bit of zucchini recently, so I wasn't really craving any more. In fact my neighbour was making tempura prawns for dinner the other day so I sent her home with a bunch of zucchini flowers to batter! Anything to slow the zucchini tide.

But in those three days I didn't make it out there... a monster grew. It was like something from Little Shop of Horrors! Hiding under a leaf was a giant zucchini. I swear it wasn't there the other day. You really have to keep an eye on these things!

Part of me wanted to leave it on there and see just how big it could get. But giant vegetables kind of give me the creeps. Surprisingly it was still tender and tasty all the way through and the seeds hadn't developed yet. In future I think I will stick to picking the flowers with the baby zucchini attached and eating them when they're little.



The love of gardening

One of my dearest friends found this card in London and said she HAD to get it for me. I thought I should share it with you!

Pretty in pig

Here he is:

I think he looks pretty fabulous in fuchsia pink, don't you?


This morning I woke to find another pig in my garden. My young neighbour sneaked across the wall before he went to school to put his pig in my corn patch:

Meanwhile, I've been busy harvesting like mad... the beans are producing roughly a handful a day and the peas a similar amount. And they're so tasty! You forget how flavoursome vegetables actually are, when they're picked fresh and grown naturally, as opposed to being pumped full of fertiliser to grow fast, giving them a high water content (which equates to less flavour), and stored or transported and then refrigerated before they hit your table. Here are the beans I harvested today:

 

 

Of course, that's too many beans for the four of us to eat (yes, the beagles eat beans!), so I put together a little package of peas, beans and zucchini for our neighbours and left it on their porch. (see below) They've been watching the garden with interest, so I think they'll be happy to taste the results. They said this morning that watching our garden grow has made them put more effort into their own. I like to inspire. 

Pig make-over

We have this beautiful, big terracotta piggy bank in our garden. He was all the talk of the neighbourhood when we moved in and the removalists dumped him in our front yard.

As you can see, he's seen better days and his grey paint is wearing off in the weather. So we've decided to give him a make-over! My young neighbour is super-excited about this and brought over his big papier-mache pig to show me.

Much discussion and consultation has gone into choosing what colour he should be. Tune in tomorrow to find out how he looks!

How to manage your rocket

There are a few tricks with rocket I've learnt over the years. It seems to sprout in about three days from seed, and while you just start enjoying the odd handful in your salads a few days a week, all of a sudden it rockets up and you have more than you know what to do with and it looks like its about to flower and go to seed.

I prefer to plant a small number of rocket seeds every three weeks or so, to get a continual supply of fresh greens. Then when the plants are up and getting too large, I do a big harvest before I pull out the old plants. Now, you could throw the rocket to your chickens, if you have them (leafy greens are an important part of their diet) or you could do what I did yesterday and make delicious rocket pesto!

Here's the recipe I used, from one of my favourite cookbooks; Eat Fresh: Cooking Through the Seasons by Annabel Langbein.

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Rocket Pesto

Pour boiling water over 140g rocket leaves, drain, rinse under cold water (this sets the colour so it doesn't go brown so quickly)

Squeeze out water and place in food processor with:

1clove peeled garlic

3/4 cup toasted almonds

1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 tsp salt

and Grinds of pepper

Purée until smooth.

Spoon into jar and pour a little oil on top to cover surface. Will keep in fridge for a week.

Or you could do what I do and freeze most of it in an ice block tray, then transfer the ice blocks to a labelled bag in the freezer for use on pizza bases, grilled chicken breast, crostini or pasta.

Don't forget, toward the end of rocket season, let one or two plants up the back of your patch go to seed, stake them up out of the way and when they dry out, collect the seeds... you'll never have to buy rocket seed again!

Right now I have a whole patch of coriander that looks like it's about to start going to seed too... so I think I'll be making another Annabel Langbein recipe for Asian-style pesto soon!

Progress photos

This post is a bit rushed, but I wanted to show some progress photos.

Production is ramping up in the food garden and it's really exciting! We've been eating a little something from the garden in each meal... even if it's just some spinach in our bacon and egg breakfast sandwiches this morning!

Here's how it's looking:

We now have several different types of tomatoes... my special colleague who I've mentioned before, gave me two seedlings of the yellow cherry tomato, which I'm excited about. They will join the red cherries (which are starting to turn red now, we ate the first three little ones the other day and they were bursting with flavour... tastes like a REAL tomato!)
The corn is starting to get tall as well... it's yet to flower because we put the seeds in a bit late, but it will catch up:

Here's the zucchini. People who say zucchini doesn't have any flavour obviously they haven't eaten baby ones picked straight off the bush. We're making zucchini and cheese slice this week... I've been waiting until they were big enough to harvest! If it turns out ok, I'll post the recipe.

Tonight we're having tabbouleh from the parsley you can see above. So, that's the progress. My neighbour says he can practically see the garden growing before his eyes! I think he might be right. I'm hoping to have enough produce soon to share with them!

For Remembrance...

Passers-by may have seen something a little odd on my verge the other day. That was me with a box of plants and a tape measure!

It was Remembrance Day and I was planting out a hedge of rosemary. The herb is an ancient symbol of remembrance and in olden times was thought to improve the memory.

Anyway... I got out on the verge and measured exactly 90cm between each plant and made sure it was in a straight line. Odd for me really... I'm usually much more of a 'near enough is good enough' kind of person when it comes to geometric accuracy. I was never very good at woodwork. Or Patchwork. Apparently you have to be really accurate for those types of jobs.

Although looking at this photo... it doesn't seem all that much like a straight line after all:

Anyway, six months from now, this will be a (somewhat) neat hedge that will provide a bit of a windbreak for the food garden! And of course plenty of rosemary for the lamb roast!

I'll put up some photos tomorrow of the garden progress... the corn is taking off, we're eating plenty of zucchini and spinach, a truss of tomatoes is blushing and we have tiny beans, that we will be picking in about a week!

Keeping the vampires away

You may remember that when we moved into the house we only had a very short amount of time before we went away on holidays. In that time, I quickly threw some garlic cloves into the ground, in the hope that I could grow something, at least, in my first few months here. Well, the garlic never really looked so healthy, the shoots were spindly and seemed to go brown and fall over very early.

 

Anyway, I took the lead from my wonderful Italian neighbours and decided it was time to harvest. The sight of bunches of big, fat garlic bulbs in their shed made me extremely envious. Especially when I dug mine up on the weekend and all I got was this:

The bulbs are so underdeveloped they grew as a single clove. But still, it's 50 cloves of garlic I won't be buying from the supermarket, shipped in from Chile or China, bleached and sprayed with fungicide!!

 

Back to my Italian neighbours... they knew exactly what the problem was. I planted them at the end of May... apparently I should have planted them in March. So next year, they promise to tell me exactly when I have to plant.

 

Garlic is a wonderful thing to plant, even for someone who doesn't like gardening or have time to garden. You put it in the ground and six months later dig it up and hang it to dry. And then have it on hand for cooking. The perfect low-maintenance crop, that grows quite well in our sandy Perth soils and tastes so much better than that stuff in the supermarket.

 

I'd saved the garlic from my previous garden, where I grew so much, I gave jars of it away as Christmas gifts. Obviously none of my friends will be getting home-grown garlic for Christmas this year!

The first harvest

I just wanted to give you a look at how the garden is coming along... everything is growing and we've already had our first harvests! Those are zucchini in the foreground; in the bottom right corner is my corn field; herbs in the middle; the patch of green on the left is a mix of things... including my bush beans. They are just about to flower. And up the back are the tomatoes.

The zucchini are about to fruit like mad. The average household only needs about two zucchini plants, but I got a bit excited and planted four. One way to ensure you don't have too much zucchini is to pick them when they're still flowering. Tonight we harvested half a dozen zucchini flowers and had them for dinner:

Here's the recipe:

Stuffed zucchini flowers

 

Wash the flowers gently, leaving the baby zucchini attached. Slice the zucchini end lengthwise.

Stuff the flower with a mixture of ricotta, crushed garlic, parmesan, capers, chopped parsley (from the garden) and a grind of pepper.

Dip them in beaten egg, then dust them in flour and shallow fry until golden. Serve immediately.

They are really delicious!

I was also excited a few nights ago when we used a pile of fresh coriander, mint, Thai basil and radish from the garden to make these rice paper rolls:

 

Just a month to go until I get to use my own chillies, cucumber and carrot to make these!

Coffee Break

I love a good bucket of coffee in the morning. For my garden I mean... anyone who knows me understands that I can't handle more than one caffeine hit a day or they have to scrape me off the walls! I had heard that coffee grinds were good for the soil, but of course, my one cup a day habit doesn't really produce enough for a whole garden.

 

So when my friend Michael opened Cravings coffee shop in East Perth, I had a proposal for him. Michael was more than happy to give me all his used coffee grinds! Now every other day after bootcamp I wander all sweaty into his shop with a big empty bucket and swap it for a big bucket full of coffee. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement - I get the grinds for my garden - he doesn't have to put about 6 - 8 kilos of coffee a day into the rubbish bin. When you think about all the coffee shops across Perth, that's a LOT of waste going to landfill, that could be helping our soil!

 

Here's today's bucket of grinds:

 

I was first attracted to coffee as a deterrent for slugs and snails in the garden. The beagles had an expensive emergency trip to the vet surgery to have their stomachs pumped a couple of years ago after eating what was sold to me as "PET FRIENDLY" snail pellets. Yep, I still don't quite understand what was friendly about seeing your dog almost die. That horror aside, I started using coffee around the plants I needed to protect from snails... and for most the part it worked! Luckily Chilli and Mustard don't like coffee... I think a beagle high on caffeine would be more than I could handle!

 

So, how do you use coffee in your garden? If you just have the odd cup, don't wash the grinds down the drain, fill the coffee pot up with water and pour it over your pot plants, or around your herbs. If, like me, you have access to industrial quantities of the stuff, you can add it straight to your soil.Treat it like a soil conditioner... don't add too much and just scratch a bit into the top layer of your soil. Or you can scatter a ring of coffee around your seedlings to protect them from snails, you can add it to your compost - treat it like a nitrogen, not a carbon, so be sure to add plenty of dry leaves, straw etc into the mix... and maybe a handful of lime. Also, if you have a worm farm, put some grinds in there... the worms go nuts for it... but again, not too much. Too much of anything in the garden can disturb the soil balance.

 

So there you have it... next time you pop into your local coffee spot, ask if they'd mind setting aside their grinds for you once in a while. It's good for your garden, and good for the planet as well!

A Housewarming Tomato

Today a friend dropped in with his new puppy and a housewarming gift... a tomato plant! The perfect addition to our food garden! There is a story behind the housewarming tomato. We took the beagles to Phil and Jo's house a while back and they proudly showed us their vegetables growing in the garden. As we turned our backs to refill our champagne glasses, Chilli was in there, sucking one of the four lonely cherry tomatoes off their much-pampered bush! Phil and Jo politely laughed. Until Chilli went back for a second one. The laughter got quieter and more forced, until the beagles had eaten every single tomato off that poor plant.

The housewarming tomato came wrapped in shiny paper with a ribbon and everything! Sadly the beagles were more interested in the tomato than socialising with the new puppy! Here it is in it's new home:

 

Thanks guys!

Strawberry fields forever

Have a look at this fantastic vertical garden designed and built by a friend of mine:

I always enjoy having a chat in the office with Aran about sustainable gardening and he has great ideas to share. When he showed me photos of this strawberry wall, I had to share it with you. Aran used recycled jarrah wall joists, that he milled himself. He says the slats are attached to metal support poles that are cemented into the ground. He and his lovely partner got inspiration for using the different width slats from a picture they'd seen in a magazine of an outdoor shower.

Aran says they decided to make a vertical garden for several reasons... one to hide their shed. The wall is north facing and being vertical it increases their growing space. They have planted heirloom varieties of strawberries in the baskets and Aran says he is adding another rung to the top, where they will plant dwarf rockmelons, which can then spread across the roof of the shed. Doesn't it look beautiful?!



Nature strip

 Another job completed, crossed off the list and another set of strangers stopping to ask us about the garden while we were out on the verge raking mulch and planting the natives! Check out our progress:

Originally we planned to have eight of these old stone blocks and I was going to arrange them in a spiral shape, then plant amongst them. We lugged the first three, one at a time, in the wheelbarrow and dumped them on the verge. But when we went back for the remaining ones, which were half buried under a hedge... we realised why someone planted the hedge on top of them. They were enormous! Way too heavy for the two of us to even lever out of the ground! So, we now have three rocks on the verge, but I think they still look attractive, nestled among the red pine bark and surrounded by native plants.

We mixed in soil improver into the planting holes first, as recommended by Beyond Gardens. We planted a mix of Kangaroo Paws, Conostylis, Velleia (I don't know much about this species, I just grabbed a few at the plant sale and it looks quite sweet), Scaevola and for along the verge to spread into a nice mat of green, the Grevillea Gingin Gem.

They will have to be watered through summer this year, but after that, they should start to look after themselves. I think you'll agree it looks much better than a patch of dirt and weeds!

By the way, I'm on Twitter now, so if you want to follow me I'm @PamelaMedlen. Unfortunately, my Twitter account was hacked today and it appears I sent out messages to everyone in my list saying there were nasty rumours being spread about them. So apologies to anyone who got that message. DON'T open it!!!!

Ahhh, technology. At least in the plant world, I'm the one doing the hacking, and I know what to do to stop viruses!

The bit out the front

The average suburban garden has a patch of lawn on its verge. It has to be mowed, fertilised and watered regularly. Or it it looks like the other average suburban verges, a mess of unattractive, overgrown weeds that make a neighbourhood look shabby.

 

I learnt a lot about verge gardening from the team at Beyond Gardens. They're a group of passionate horticulturists in Perth who hold free seminars around Western Australia about sustainable gardening and food gardening. I was lucky enough late last year to have them transform my ugly verge. Sadly, when we moved house, I had to leave the verge as well, just as the grevilleas and kangaroo paws were taking off, even now I drive past just to see them all flowering and looking lovely. Anyway, I learnt enough from the team and I'm going to transform my new verge! I have native soil mix concentrate ready to go, picked up some tube stock and some kangaroo paws at the recent friends of Kings Park plant sale and I have an idea for a kind of rock 'installation' made out of some beautiful blue stone lying around my yard. (There's a nice story behind these stones, I'll have to relate later, when I can get the facts from my neighbour). Anyway, today I had a big load of pine bark mulch delivered.

 I know I should have got woodchips, but the reason I got pine bark was because it holds its colour, instead of going grey like the woodchip. While the grey can be nice in many situations, I wanted the darker colour to contrast with my 'rocks'. I hope the guys at Beyond Gardens aren't shaking their heads at this! Here's Nat attending MY boot camp. I told him, if I have to go to his boot camp three days a week, he can come to mine on the weekends! I think he'll agree gardening is a pretty good workout!

 

 

 

A place to rest

Remember my asparagus? How I said it was a long-term commitment? And that you had to leave it in the ground for several years before you could start to harvest it? Also, how I dug the poor things up from my previous house and brought them with me to give them a permanent place to rest in my new home. Well... I have a confession to make. I had to dig them up AGAIN. Yes, I've just added another year on to my harvest time frame, right there. The problem was, you may remember, that I only had a matter of hours to dig them up and plant them at my new house and that was well before I had designed the layout of my food garden. It turned out they couldn't have been in a more inconvenient spot. Even after the landscapers went to so much trouble to rope them off with fluorescent orange construction webbing so they didn't disturb them, I came along and disturbed them all. They were right at the top of the stairs. Oops.

 

So today's job was to prepare a new patch of soil and plant the crowns out (again) and hope for the best. That's me in the photo with a margarita, toasting their future success. Now I might mention the limes in the Margarita are not from our lime trees. (Thank you Laina for supplying them). We had a potting disaster with the lime tree recently, and while it's coming back with a vengeance, it did lose most of its fruit in the process. I went to re pot it because the potting mix had become hydrophobic and worn out, but when my husband pulled the tree out of the half wine barrel, the whole bottom of the barrel came out too! There was a mercy dash to the nearest garden centre to get a new wine barrel, some caster wheels from the hardware store and some gravel for the bottom of the barrel, to go with the new potting mix and compost that was waiting! Now that you've all waded through that tedious story, I think you deserve a drink too! So here's a recipe, perfected after many, many trials...

 

Nat's best margarita recipe

 

To a cocktail shaker add:

 half a dozen ice cubes

2 parts gold tequila

1 part Triple Sec

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice.

- Shake and serve in a salt-rimmed glass.

Tomorrow is a big day in the garden too... a big load of pine bark for the verge. This begins the transformation of the verge from highly compacted sand and scruffy patches of lawn, to an attractive (I hope) native strip! Stay tuned.

Herbivores

One of the most exciting things about our new garden is the herb patch. Summer isn't the same without handfuls of freshly-picked basil in our meals. It hurts me to have to buy the soggy, limp sprigs of herbs wrapped in plastic from the green grocer, when I know how different and delicious fresh herbs are. So here's the herb patch:

I do have a rule with herbs. I don't plant things I don't eat. That's just a waste of space. Here I have my favourites growing... basil (of course), coriander (I hope), garlic and onion chives, parsley, chervil, oregano, lemongrass, tarragon and chillies. I have a wonderful colleague I often go to for gardening advice who has been leaving gifts on my office desk. I'll often arrive at work to find a pot of mint, or thyme or lavender seedlings for my garden. Last week she passed on some Thai basil seedlings, that went straight into the herb patch. The mint is a special case. There are sometimes you can't grow enough, so I've planted some in pots and I dug the sand out of a patch by the side of my house and replaced it with the amazing soil and planted the mint there where it can get plenty of water... and it can't escape and invade the rest of the garden. We're looking forward to mojitos this summer!

Pamela and the Beanstalk

Seeds always amaze me. Particularly bean seeds. The rocket is always the first out of the ground, of course, coming up within three days sometimes, true to its name. Beans take a little longer, but when they do pop their little heads out of the soil, and unfurl their seed leaves, I marvel at how much material they can store in a dry, shrivelled seed. Here are some of my bush bean seeds that sprouted this week: 

 

 

Where do they hide those leaves inside a tiny seed?

 

My bare patch of soil is no longer bare at last. Below you can see more seeds bravely showing themselves. Apart from the bush beans and rocket, I have carrots (orange and purple), radish (they grow so quickly, we'll be eating them in salad in a month), lettuce of all different sorts, red kale, spinach, beetroot and cucumbers, among other things. Give it another week or two and this bed will be a sea of green foliage!

I admit I find this time of the year when everything is sprouting so exciting. I can be seen wandering around the garden with my cup of tea, bending down examining what to some people may look like mulch... but I can see the tiny seeds coming up through the mulch and get a small thrill each time something new appears. Ahhh... Spring!

Chilli

Here's our little girl, Chilli.

She once ate all the chillis off a big jalepeno bush. Seriously.

My mulch brings all the worms to the yard!

I've been working so hard in the garden over the past week, I've not had time to update you all with the progress shots... so here's what's been happening at the Pink Flamingo (that's the nickname we've given our new house. Our previous house was known as Margaritaville, so we're sticking with the Vegas theme).

Firstly we filled it up with soil... and ran the drip lines:

Then I spent a morning putting the lupin mulch on the soil. This stuff is fantastic... it matts down better than pea straw, which tends to blow around a bit. And it will attract every worm in a 2 kilometre radius to your garden! (Shout out here to GM for the awesome title to this post)

I planted my first batch of seeds on Wednesday... by Saturday the first lot were up. Rocket of course wins the race... followed closely by the red kale and radish seeds. I'll keep you posted when the rest make an appearance.

Here I cheated and bought some seedlings. I can never be bothered raising my tomatoes from seed. I planted a couple of Grosse Lisse. I'm hoping to get my hands on some some Tommy Toe or Sweet Bite cherry tomatoes... and i might even try my hand at some of the heritage black tomatoes, just for some extra colour on the dinner plate!

And finally... the fruit trees went in! About six years from now... I might be able to harvest my first avocado! We planted a Hass and a Fuerte, so they can cross pollinate, along with a Satsuma and a Mariposa plum. The plums went into one hole... according to the people from the fruit tree nursery, this helps them cross pollinate as well as keeping the trees a little bit smaller.

We also put in a valencia orange tree... I can't wait to have a glass of freshly picked and squeezed orange juice for breakfast one day. And finally we put in a Black Genoa fig. Yum. Fig trees start producing very early.

It takes two

I love it when a plan comes together! Here it is... our sculpture, finally in place in the middle of the future herb garden.

The armillery sphere was made by a metal sculptor who lives in the Perth hills. We bought it years ago, and it's moved house with us multiple times now... so we know just how hard it is to move the thing! One neighbour is constantly worried everything is going to get 'nicked'. She came over on the weekend to tell us it would get nicked from our front yard. I tried to tell her it weighs a tonne... It takes two of us, a lot of groaning, perhaps some swearing and sometimes even tears to struggle it into position. So if it IS going to be 'nicked' it's going to take someone a lot of trouble. If you don't hold it in the exact right place, it swings around and that pointy arrow at the top there... that hits you in the head! The same neighbour is also worried about our flamingo and a giant terracotta pig that must weigh 120kgs! The pig is also needs a team of two to move. (The pig is having a makeover this summer... he's going to be painted a bright, glossy colour, I'm just not sure what colour to go with... red, fuchsia pink, yellow, orange??? If you have any ideas, let me know!!)

Down and dirty

At last I don't have to sit back with a g&t and watch other people play in my garden... I got to get down and dirty! The soil was delivered on Friday. Beautiful, rich, organic soil that even had the neighbours crossing the road to ask where it was from. Of course the excitement of soil quickly waned as the 4m3 appeared to take on the characteristics of the Magic Pudding... no matter how much I shovelled, the hill didn't get any smaller. Maybe I over-estimated the amount I needed? This soil is allegedly so good I am not allowed to add anything to it for at least six months. My vegetables would be bursting out of the ground in weeks from now. I'll keep you posted about that.

 

 Then came the fun of laying the reticulation lines. I had the contractors lay the mainline and connect it to the automated reticulation system, but wanted to lay the brown dripline myself, because I know where I want it to go, and it's easier to do it myself than to explain. I had a lovely experience at the irrigation shop. I walked in and was served by a man with L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed on his knuckles. He was very sweet, extremely helpful and gave me a nice discount because I was a 'lovely lady'... even when I came back a second time because I had UNDER-estimated how much I would need. Despite what you may be thinking... for a journalist, math IS actually a strong point of mine. I must have been having an off week. Or maybe I should just get my engineer hubby to do the math for me in future!

 

 Anyway, we got the retic in as well as the soil. Some days when the sun is shining, it's not too hot and your shoes sound like maracas as you walk because there's so much sand floating around in them and your fingernails are black with dirt, it seems such a shame to have to clean yourself up and go to work.  *sigh* My 'sand shoes' are sitting by the front door waiting for me to head back out and finish the job soon. For now... it's off to my day job. 

Then there was light

The lights look fantastic!

A little bit indulgent, perhaps, having lights in a food garden, but it is in the front yard. And it means that we don't have to go out in the dark if we're cooking and search around with a torch, looking suspicious.

Almost there

I'm busting to get some soil into these garden beds!!!

Now we're awaiting reticulation and lights!

Following the red brick road...

Today I've made a pain of myself. But I'm glad I was at home to do so. The paving went in so fast, these guys are machines!

 

 

 

Then the edges started going in and I was getting a bit edgy myself. I know my plan was thrown out by a metre due to forces beyond my control... but when the edging went in I realised my garden beds were going to be a lot narrower than I had planned!

 

That's when I started making a pain of myself... asking if the paving could be made narrower so the beds were wider. The men were very helpful and before I knew it, it was all changed and I got my extra centimetres here and there. I was afraid the armillery sphere, which is going in the centre bed as a feature, would be wider than the bed.

 

 

So they've made the bed above wider too. It is odd when you think you know what something is going to look like, then it turns out different. I was a bit nervous about asking for changes on the fly... but I figured it was better to ask now before any mortar went in! And they were very nice about it!

 

The earth moved!

The earth moving men have put down conduit for the electrics and back-filled the yard with sand, so it's all ready to be paved tomorrow!

Chilli and Mustard escaped to help out. They saw dirt and thought they'd like to be a part of it. Trying to haul two beagles at 15kgs each back inside when they just want to snuffle is no easy task. The earth movers learnt some new skills that day. How to wrangle beagles.



I liked their earth-moving dingo so much, I wanted one of my own. I could have fun with one of those!!! At least I could use it to move the beagles around.

Ever feel like you're being watched?

Mustard has decided he is the unofficial site manager of the project. He likes to sit and supervise from the sunny spot by the front door. He listens to Dave and Russ singing along to their easy listening radio station and occasionally barks directions at them. Probably when they've stopped for a bite to eat. And only because he wants to eat something too.

 



Today Chilli and Mustard conducted a survey of the works. They did this by sniffing every square inch of the site, until they found and ate a leftover piece of sandwich one of the men had left behind.

Taking shape



Progress!! The gentlemen tell me they probably only need one and a half, maybe two more days to finish the limestone edging, paving and garden beds. How exciting! After they complete the final touches to retaining walls and the step over the weekend, the team will come back and fill the area back up with soil early next week.

 

Then they will put down the paving and the edges to my future garden beds.

 

 

 

My step up to the fruit tree/asparagus area (below) is taking shape. It's looking even better than I had imagined.

 

 

In glorious 18C sunshine, it's been lovely to work outdoors, they tell me. As for me, I enjoyed the sunshine with lunch and a magazine in the backyard. Soon I will be in the food garden, working in the sunshine and growing lunch.

Another Brick in the Wall

The rain has abated for the day and Dave and Russ were back fulfilling my fantasies... of having a landscaped front yard, of course!

I asked them today how much each one of those blocks weighs. 84kgs. Then, just to prove his worth, Dave lifted one up for me. Very briefly. It actually takes the two of them to lift each block into place. Luckily for them, the retaining wall isn't going to be six-foot high.

Here's the progress from today. That's the finished height of the wall at the back there, but it will be filled in with the piles of sand you can see on the verge.

I'm hoping there will be even more to show tomorrow. I've checked the weather bureau site and it's looking fine.

Frickin' Laser Beam

Here's a piece of equipment that impressed me! Just over a week ago our yard sloped in two directions. My simple view of how to fix it was 'why don't we move the soil from the high side to the low side to make it level?' seems simple, right?

Now they have removed 12 cubic metres of soil to level the yard so I don't need a retaining wall the size if my house, I can accept that maybe I was wrong!

Here's Adrian with his frickin' laser beam measuring the height differences in our yard. Incredible! It made things so much easier to visualise.