Sunday, December 22, 2013

Progress in the garden.

HI to all my readers who are still reading!! Merry Christmas and happy happy New Year!!!

 I know I've been very slack since coming up here but so much has been happening. So here we are it's Christmas again!!! OMG! I cant believe it was over a year ago that I came up to Cairns to look at properties. It just doesn't seem that long. I've done a lot in the garden since coming up here and I must say its a real joy to work in a garden where things grow so beautifully and so fast. When I bought this little house there was virtually no garden just lawn and palm trees all around the fence line. So it was pretty much a clean slate. Over the months I have had some wonderful WWOOFers come and stay and they really have helped so much . My first big change was to cut back many of the palms and I used the dead fronds for mulch. We pruned them back quite a bit and ended up with two huge mounds of waste one on either side of the garden. These where then covered with plastic and allowed to rot down. Every now and then I would add lawn clippings or compost to help them break down. It looked pretty bad but gardening takes time and patience!

One of my Facebook friends asked if i was after the "mass grave" or "air disaster" look! I must confess he's got a point.
We had lots and lots of boxes left from moving up here so we dismantled all of them and laid them down where I wanted to widen the garden area and stop the weeds.  Then I bought a truck load of soil and with the help of our WWOOFer managed to cover most of the cardboard boxes. Every time we mowed the lawn I would put the clippings on there also. We also started collecting compost so that went down too. The mounds with their blue plastic over them sat there for most of the year just breaking down while i added to them. My aim was to create larger garden beds & kill off the lawn underneath without too much hard work! Nobody likes digging when they dont have too!



Then I discovered a place that had horse poo for sale, not just your average 50 litre bags, more like 100 litres for 2.50....the guy works at the race track. So off I went and bought 5 bags of that.  It was great! With the help of another WWOOFer,  we tipped it all on the two mounds spread it out and covered them for about a month, that was just what was needed to help everything break down nicely. The weather was warming up and things were coming together.When I took the plastic wrapper of a month later after adding some lime and potash also during that time, I had two almost new garden beds. So I started planting things. Got some cuttings, moved a few things from other places in the garden and they started to resemble garden beds.



Then in late November we started to get a bit of rain and things just started growing, and growing and growing!! Then a dear friend of mine helped me get some mulch last week and then i had 6 cubic mtres of mulch to cover it all before the rains come. Thanks Graham!!! and its made such a huge difference! I also got a new client who runs a lawn mowing business. Steves Lawn Mowing.... so he mows the lawns and trims the edges now and I must say they look magnificent. Thanks Steve.

So getting back to the garden, someone I met up here gave me some cuttings earlier in the year and add to that the plants I have bought or others I have propagated from other plants in the garden and the garden is starting to fill up. I've also bought a few trees. A beautiful Crepe Myrtle which has its first flowers on it; and two Frangipanis, a Jacaranda (well 2 Jacarandas coz I managed to kill the first) and a couple of others.




So Finally here are some before and after shots!




No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting on my blog its great to hear from whose reading and i do love getting the feedback! Enjoy your read!

Please do not add a link to your own blog in your comment. If you comment under your blog name the link will show in the name. I won't publish comments made with commercial usernamesor, and please do not use the comments section to promote your business. If you wish to be a part of this community, please use your private username, not a commercial one.