Living on the edge

I’m convinced that growing in my front garden brings a sense of community to my neighbourhood.  The mornings I’m out in the garden I hear a cheery “Good morning neighbour!”  from across the short expanse of road. “Lovely day for gardening!”

My husband has a theory that the introduction of water restrictions has caused a decline in neighbourliness. He thinks back to when he was younger and people used to stand around on their front verge, with a tinny or a glass of West Coast Cooler in one hand and the hose in the other while they watered their verge lawns. It would be a good time to catch up with the bloke over the fence and you’d know if something wasn’t right with your elderly neighbour across the road if they weren’t to be seen watering their verge for a couple of days, so you’d go and check in on them.

When I’m in my food garden or on the verge planting natives, drivers slow down and wave as they pass. In the past week I’ve met two neighbours who drove up their laneways, then came back on foot to introduce themselves and have a chat about things.

Yesterday, while waiting for her husband to drop something off, a woman got out of her parked car and wandered right into my garden and started chatting. She was most impressed with my herb patch and told me all about the exotic fruit trees and vegetables growing in her backyard not far from here that she inherited from a previous owner. She spotted my Thai basil and gave me some tips on how to use it. She was cooking bolognese for her two boys that night, so I sent her home with a bunch of sage, basil and thyme and she was delighted. How often can you make a stranger happy by something so simple? She told me she’d pop back and drop off some sugar cane for me to plant.

And you know what? She did! The next evening, she ran down my driveway with a bag of sugarcane. She also brought some seeds from a fruit in her back yard that she said was delicious, but she didn't know what it was called. She said if I had any success with the seeds, she'd love me to drop one of her plants back to her!

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!

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.