Garden layout and design: new moves

I mentioned earlier that we were planning out our garden beds, and have also bought some sleepers to set these up further. This image below shows how the beds were first off:

Our first effort was a basic tidy-up. This second image shows some changes we're working on:



Some slight differences. First we have cut out the Oleander (bottom left corner shrub) in favour of more productive, less toxic choices. Second, we have a second passionfruit, a Nelly Kelly, (to the right) planted to replace the aging one (to the left of the existing one). We've been wheeling in extra soil and mulch to start to build up bed #5, the new one to the right of the path (red dotted lines). This will be in full sun, so sun-hungry plants will go there, along with a couple of citrus trees (in half wine barrels). Oh, and the black dotted line is the clothesline's new home too. :o)

With this 5th bed, we hope to have more garden space for vege production and won't have to worry about mowing the little grassy patch anymore!

Cool climate gardening guide

ABC local radio (666 Canberra) personality Genevieve Jacobs has started a gardening guide for cool climates; a must-see for all Canberrans! These guides a short vodcasts available from the ABC local radio website.

If you have a feed reader like Bloglines, you can keep track of newly available vodcasts. The URL is available on the gardening guide homepage (the one ending in .xml).

It's just the sort of pep-talk we need to jump into action in our garden on a sunny Saturday! Thanks Genevieve and the ABC for these great little resources!

[image: ABC Canberra]

Spring cleaning: bye bye brocolli and caulie!

Spring cleaning: broad beans and garlic
Originally uploaded by margoc

We pulled out the brocolli and caulie plants today, as they've both finished (the caulies never really started). We kept one of the caulies that was going to seed, to see if we can get some decent seed from it. I'll have to ask my Dad about that one. I remember as a kid Dad keeping the caulie seeds in the coolroom until he was ready to plant them.

The clean-up has given the broad beans and the garlic a bit more room and less competition for precious water. The mulch from winter is still pretty good and probably only needs a little top cover. I was wondering if it was worth keeping one or two more brocolli plants going just to trap the slugs, but I think they were actually attrtacting them and giving them coverage, because we hadn't really noticed many slugs before.

Next door, the onions are ready to burst into flower. The onion bulbs are starting to form too - looking forward to our own homegrown red onions, in time for lovely fresh summer salads! Yum, bean and onion salad!

Spring cleaning and mulch mulch more

We have a long weekend this weekend (hooray), so have been making the most of it out in the garden (despite the wind).

We took a drive down to Queanbeyan today to the Wholesale Sleeper Company and ordered 20 sleepers (A grade, well-priced), 2 x half wine barrels and 4 x bales of sugar cane mulch. We brought back 6 bags of potting mix with us too!

Do you get the feeling Spring is in the air? :o)

Remember this diagram? Well, we are about to dismantle our current backyard and put in garden beds made of sleepers. We'll start with beds 1 and 2, plus the worm farm area and the small area between the worms and the passionfruit. Currently this is grassed, so we're planning on putting a bed there -- it gets all day sun and we think perhaps there's a pipe below that keeps things moist(ish), as the grass is always green!

It's definitiely warming up. We put some strawberries in around the plum trees (Red Gauntlet variety) to see how they'll go. Companion Planting says that the strawberries act as 'an alterative host for a parasitic insect that preys on oriental fruit moths, a pest of peach trees' (1995, p.146), so we thought we'd see how they went with plums too. Borage is said to assist the growth of strawberries too, when interplanted.

We then drove a little further to Bungendore to the antique-recycling place there, and picked up an art deco(ish) style screen door on which to hang our jasmine - it's just taken off since the weather's warmed up! It sits next to our half-finished pond in the front garden, by the loungeroom window. Adds some height and perspective to the garden too. I'll pop a pic up soon!

Reference:

McClure, S. & Roth, S. (1995) Companion Planting. Lothian Books: Melbourne.

Springing into spring with broccoli

We've just got back from a two-week holiday overseas in the US, and were so pleased to see the garden still in tact and progressing well (somewhat slowly due to the cold)...

We were pleasantly surprised to see our broccoli doing well and were able to cut two heads for dinner!

The caulies however seemed to have fed the local possums - but I'm thinking in true companion planting style this benefitted the broccoli no end! :)

The rocket, coriander and parsley have had a burst of growth too, and the dwarf broad beans have copious flower buds (rubs hands with glee)! We have some red onions in too and have been thinning them to use as spring onions before they form their bulbs - love a plant that multi-tasks! :o)

Nice to have had a bit of rain too in the last couple of days - let's hope there's more to come.

Roll on spring, so far so good (and with very little insect damage to boot)!