The morning after

Day 2. The bobcat has been replaced by pallets of limestone.

While doing our best to make our front verge look nice, we may not be making ourselves very popular with the neighbours. The bobcat managed to sever the phone line. Not just ours, the one that connects our entire half of the street!!

Demolition time!

In the bright light of morning and the sheets of rain in the afternoon, the machinery demolished our front yard and verge.

The landscapers roped off the asparagus with orange construction webbing to protect it!

A neon pink line in the sand

It's amazing what a can of neon pink spray paint can do for a garden!

In my case, it has turned months of rough sketches, pages of notes, hours of flicking through books to get inspiration and many moments lying awake at three o'clock in ther morning rethinking all those plans, into an actual possibility.

We are a week away from spring here in Perth, so my priority is getting my food garden started. Some would find that a little bit odd. When most people move into a new house, they would generally fix up the rest of the garden, and a patch for edibles would be something tacked on at the end.

But I'm doing something a little bit different. My food garden is going in my front yard. There are two reasons for this. 1. My front yard is north facing. 2. I have a pair of delightful, vegetable-loving beagles who could munch and dig their way through a vegetable patch in an afternoon if they found the inclination to do so. (I once lost an entire crop of cherry tomatoes and jalapeños to these two innocent-looking beasts).

So, we drew up a plan that we thought would look attractive, even when it is scrappy vegetable season.

Using a laser beam, he measured the slope of our block to calculate the amount of earthworks and retaining we'd need to do. Then I'm not sure if he just did this for my benefit, he pegged it out with a string line and spray painted the ground to give me an idea of what it is all going to look like.

So it's all happening in our front yard. The neighbour walked past us yesterday evening as we walked around our imaginary string-lined garden beds with a cup of tea and asked us if we were 'surveying the estate'!

The demolition team moves in tomorrow and our limestone and pavers arrive the following day.

I might yet get some veges in for spring!

A long-term commitment

When we decided to sell up and move house a few months ago, I lost a lot of years of my garden. The  enormous passionfruit vine that had just started producing the most delicious fruit, an avocado tree that will probably start fruiting this year... as well as four dwarf apple trees, a nectarine, peach, two plums, a fig... the list goes on.

One thing I was not going to leave was my asparagus. Asparagus is a long-term investment. You plant it and watch it grow and have to resist the temptation to eat the spears for several years! I'm not joking. So the real estate agent was given strict instructions to tell any prospective buyers that the asparagus (I had to show him the ferny growth in the corner of the yard) was not part of the deal.

When we moved, I used the only spare hours I had to go back to our old house, carefully dig up the asparagus crowns, lug them back to my new house and plant them in quickly prepared rows.

The good news is, it survived!



Yesterday, I saw the first spears sticking out of the ground! My investment is paying off! Now my dilemma is whether I should harvest this year... Or leave it another season to settle in and regain its energy!