New plantings and diggings

Its that time of the year again and the Australian Botanic Garden Society had their biannual native seedling sale. We picked up a few seedlings at last year's Spring sale and a few more at the Autumn sale. We went a bit crazy on Saturday and stocked up on some hedging shrubs for the new bed along the side fence - some hovea longifolia, pomaderris betulina (subsp. actensis), leionema elatius, accacia - we wanted some all year colour that would provide a bit of additional screening for our backyard and a local bottlebrush with yellow flowers (callistemon pityoides) .

We picked up some more native grasses and some flowering rockery plants to plant in our rockery overlooking the pond. Once we got home we realised we would now need a rockery to plant them in, so we did some granite relocation and built up a raised bed with the spare soil we had dug up in making our pond. Before we got stuck into the rockery, we put the lining in our pond and lay a small path to the pond and made our first use of the load of brickies' sand we had delivered with our sleepers.

On the way back from the Botanic Gardens we stopped at Yaralumna Nursery, where we added some Honey Myrtle, which is a swamp tree with mauve flowers and likes wet feet and clayey soil. Perfect for the damp spot near the side gate and is in the shade for most of winter. We also picked up another accacia for the side fence bed and a big kangaroo paw for our 'grassy knoll'.



Our mate from tai chi, Rob, also gave us some grasses which we have put with our new kangaroo paw and will use to replace the weedy, festery, straggly lawn we have on our verge. I have slowly been digging this up from our front yard and turning it in to the soil so that there is almost none left save for a strip along the side footpath. These last remnants are getting the chop this weekend, as I turn it over to, mulch the surface and put in Robbie's native grasses.