My Garden Diary

It's been a lot of work to spread the mulch about - the weeds had become enormous! Pity we can't eat them. There's still a lot of mulch left, so after I've finished this part of the garden I'll use what's left outside the fence to tidy it up while the renovations are happening.

Following on from my efforts with a small home mulcher, I continued on with the program of pulling out all the old ornamental garden to make way for my new all round food garden. With large piles of plant material in a pile, I had to work out what to do with it. I didn't want to get it tipped, because it represents nutrients having been taken out of my soil. If I throw it away, I either have to accept a more impoverished soil, or I need to import replacement nutrients. Neither is consistent with a sustainable horticulture approach. I tried a large well known tree removalist company and I was promised that my mulched up material would be left behind for me to put back on my garden. When I returned home from work however, the pile had gone and nothing had been left behind. Roll forward another year and another large pile of material had accumulated. This time I was determined to keep my mulched material. I don't know how many firms I rang. None would touch it - "we take the mulch away - we never leave it" (Why!?!!?) In the end I rang an equipment hire firm in Bulleen, and explained what I was trying to achieve. He gave me a phone number to try and thankfully, this time the chap was prepared to help me. Not only was his quote less than half that of the tree removalist, he left me my pile of mulch, which took 3 hours of heavy moving to get in off the nature strip, but is safely waiting for me to weed under the fruit trees before distributing it. Amazing. I left the larger pieces of wood out of the mulching program, because I want to experiment with turning it into charcoal, for terra preta

My brother has built these fabulous new compost bays so I can process all the waste that comes out of my garden. In return, I am to sew his curtains for his house.

This is my next project. I bought a mulcher and have been chopping up the cuttings of plants removed from the first stage to spread over this area. It used to be lawn, but in recent years degenerated into compacted earth with a few weeds. I intend to get my gardening friend to help me build raised gardening beds. There are some great ideas in Earth Garden magazines for constructing these so that they are easy to work and water.

My small fig tree and some capsicum plants. Apparently you can get 2 years out of capsicums if you look after them. Let's see.

My grape vine is still small but I have high hopes. I would like to get a couple more for the western side of the house

A huge peach tree with 3 kiwi fruit vines (2 female and one male) some blue berries, raspberries and boysenberries

Here you see my snow peas (mange tout) a cherry tree, various herbs and a couple of carrots that were all that resulted from a row I planted. Also in the top left some cherry tomato plants

Here you can see 2 different oranges (navel and valencia), my grafted kalamata olive, some small chillie plants, tomatoes and some rogue pea plants that grew from seeds that came with the peas straw I've used to mulch my garden. At first I was pulling these out, but then I decided to leave them and see what happens. At the very least they can fix some nitrogen in the soil with their roots. I might even get some peas out of them! There are also 2 (only 2 of the 12) green climbing beans I planted to grow up the pool fence. Next year I'll start them in pots and transplant them when they are big enough to resist the snails. There are also 2 passionfruit vines. One has been eaten away by something and the other is its replacement - lets see if it gets eaten too.

Here you see parsley, cucumbers, egg plants (aubergines) zucchini (courgettes) a mandarine tree (satsuma), a lemon, a lime, a new olive tree (with olives) a bay leaf tree, a male junioer, a rosemary, cucumbers and more tomatoes

Here we see aballerina apple (rear right) sweet corn, carrots, green climbing beans, silver beet and there are capsicums behind the sweet corn. There are also 2 more apple trees at the back in front of the pittosporum hedge but they are still to small to be seen

The last of the broccoli has gone to seed, so I'm leaving them to save seed for next year. There's beetroot, dwarf yellow beans (producing like topsy) some cherry tomatoes, an apricot tree, the trunk of my orange tree that I have successfully nursed back to health and the trunk of a huge olive tree that produces no olives and I plan to cut down for firewood. The hose you can see is connected to my water tanks so that I can water when ever I want. No point having a garden like this without tanks. It would be a waster of time and money

On my balcony overlooking stage 1 of the vegie garden, I keep pots with herbs and things I'm growing from seed. I also have my strawberries since I was failing to keep the snails away from them

The best of my cauliflowers and one of my cabbages. They were wonderful, but I did have trouble with green caterpillars.

This is the same view as below but with the potatoes up and thriving. The cabbages and cauliflowers have finished, so have been pulled up and replaced with tomatoes.

This is the site where our old green house used to stand. After we came back from England, I dismantled it and gave it to my parents. Originally I thought I might put our water tank here, but we ended up putting a bank of slim line tanks behind the garage. My next thought was to keep chickens here, but then I decided to try to grow winter vegies here. I dug it over in the Autumn and dug plenty of chook manure and gypsum through it. Then I covered it over with pea straw and left it for the winter. In the right two beds I have planted cabbages, broccoli, beetroot and cauliflower. In the left two, I have just planted seed potatoes - two rows of Desiree (on the left) and two rows of Coliban (on the right). This is very much an experiment, since the site is not in full sun, but we'll see. My next task is digging over a bed of ornamental plants to make room for a summer vegie patch.