Spring Joy

The lawn is almost complete, flowers are blooming and the little-uns are enjoying the longer daylight hours... 

Burn Off

How lucky we are to have the firies.  A huge thank you to Mt French Fire Brigade: Bruce, Gary and Peter.  Great job.

Wild flowers in bloom!

It’s a suuuuuperb time of year on our little mountain. The Stylidiums (Stylidium graminifolium) are in flower and they are just beautiful!  They look like hundreds of miniature, pale to hot pink butterflies suspended above the masses of brushy green shrubs.  I just love them! 

Speaking of superb…

- Our lawn patch number two is bristly and green! Hooray.  Patch number three…. watch this space.

- And 70 of the 75 natives plants are in the ground… yewhhhhh! 

- And the olive tree up near the pool which I thought I'd killed with fresh horse poo has burst to life with a flush of lovely new leaves and shoots!

Also, Sebastian started work on a totem pole today… I think it will be a work in progress.  He had fun painting “off piste” and trying out some aboriginal art techniques (There’s nothing like cultural fusion!).

Stylidium graminifolium

 Stylidium bording lawn patch number two (it grew up the bank all on its own).

A row of little lillypillies along the edge of lawn patch number 2.

Olivia's not dead!

A totem pole, a boy and his dog.

Let's get cracking!!!!

Took a trip a couple of days ago with Grammy and the little-uns to Paten Park Native Nursery in The Gap (Brissy) to purchase a heap of new plants for the garden.

Had a cracking day with the team.  Purchased 75 plants (tube stock) for only 2 bucks each!!!  Sebastian was very helpful at the nursery ferrying plants to our trolley.  Petra was less helpful and found a Petra-sized mud puddle and plonked herself right down into it.

After we'd loaded the car with our haul, we headed off to the park for some Paul-Napthali-Slice and a run around.  Sebastian invented the term "imbulator" to describe a piece of play equipment, a bit poly-pipe which he used for "imbulating" various sticks, rocks, leaves etc.  (?!!!)

We now have the job of getting all our babies into the soil before they die/outgrow their tube pots.  It's going to be a busy weekend... I've spent today (Benji's Friday off) digging out the garden beside the south facing verandah and adding gypsum and mushroom compost.  Benj was the raking maniac (raking like he's never raked before) in preparation for the next patch of lawn to be seeded.

Also finished all the firebreak work.  Just waiting for Bruce and the fireies to give the call!

Yes!!!! Things are happening.

Oh and we've started seeding patch number three of lawn.

Budi wielding the grass seed disperser.

Spin it little dude.

Taking a well deserved break.

Westringia (coastal rosemary) ... fourteen of them in a row (!) eventually they will form a hedge along along the south facing verandah (hopefully).

More natives... Austromyrtus dulcis (midyim berry), Phaleria clerodendron (scented Daphne) and a type of native voilet I think! Bad photo.

Lillypillies along the southern bank.

Sebastian and Benj filled the raised bed with veggie seedlings and seeds yesterday:

• tomatoes
• kale
• broccoli
• silver beet
• carrots (seeds)

And tonight it’s raining!!! A lovely surprise top up for the tank and watering in of the new garden and lawn patch number two (on the northern side of the house). Hooray!

PS….and then last night Molly dug a bloody great hole in the middle of the garden bed trying to get down to the compost layer!  We’ve had to erect a temporary fence to keep her out!

Raised Garden Bed

We positioned this new garden bed, hopefully the first of about 6 or more raised garden beds, along the same EW linear axis as the house to try to get the best of the winter sun.  Not sure how it will go in the summer - we may need to provide some shade but we’ll see how it all pans out.

I got Benj to chainsaw some of the trees from one of the piles (from the original clearing for the house) to the right lengths to give us a nice workable sized bed.  It's about 4m long and 1.5m wide.  I then banded the logs together with metal roofing straps.  Next I prepared the site.  This really just amounted to scraping a bit of the barely existent soil into a flattish bed with shallow trenches for the logs to sit in.  The usual rock removal was required and then we were ready to fill it!  

It took about 14 wheelbarrow loads to fill.  I started off with three loads of compost which although is not fully broken down, is teeming with earthworms and should hopefully be broken down fully by the time the plants roots get down to that bottom layer.  Then some of Joe’s clay soil mixed with the bought in sandy soil and some gypsum for good measure.  Then finally a mushroom compost/sandy soil mix of about 3:1.  


I had a great little helper for the whole process.  He was very excited about the earthworms and insisted on transporting as many of them as he could find from the compost heap to the garden bed in his own little wheelbarrow.

And when we were finally done… it began to rain!!! Perfect for the final prep of the bed!
Now we just need to add veggies!

Look at all those wonderful earthworms!

Checking to see the earthworms moved in ok.

Balancing act.

Spreading the soil.

What a team.

It's raining!

Finished and waiting for veggie plants!

Hardenbergia - What a find!!!!

I've got a list of plants that I am in love with and would like to have in my garden... most of them are natives... and I just happened to stumble upon one of them growing in our bushland! YES!!!!

Hardenbergia... sometimes known as Happy Wanderer.  Not exactly sure of the species type, I think it might be H. violacea.   In any case I've transplanted it down into one of my garden beds.  I hope it flourishes!