Final touchs to the paving plan

Sheesh! I'm tired. I've just been putting final touches on the paving plan that we have decided on. Tomorrow morning at 8.30am our paving guy is coming for a chat. I asked him to come around again before he starts next week as I want to go over a few things with him (i.e. provision for irrigation piping, job clean up, filling the storm water trench). So tonight I thought i'd get the paving plan all finished and ready for when he comes in the morning. It's now 11.30pm, way past my bedtime, so i'd better dash off to bed so i'm well rested for our day of shovelling rubble tomorrow (i'll write about that tomorrow). Before I go....here's the plan! What do you think? Add your comments.

click on the picture above to view a bigger version.

I'm feeling quite nervous about it all - excited nervous I guess. What we are planning is a very different layout to what we currently have and very different to anything else i've ever seen. But I've thought in detail about this for months so I do feel really confident that we are headed in a good direction.

This one's for you Mum!

My mum and I planted some plants in a garden bed infront of our bedroom window back in September. Mum's been asking me almost every week since then "how's it going? Send some photos". S0 Mum, here's some photos! xo

This photo was taken 9th September 2007, the week after we planted.

This was taken 13th October, only a month later!

This was taken on 18th November 2007.

And now, drum roll please, this is the same garden on 3rd Febrauary 2008:


As you can see the Society Garlic has really shot up (particularly in the last month). The Snow in Summer is also filling in space nicely. The Lamian was much better than this, but over the Christams and New Years period about half of it died in the heat. It's slowly making it's way back.
Along the left side of this picture you can see the three Hebe Buxifolia plants that I have left. I had five, but the dogs got in there one day and did something that killed two of them. I have put in a Lemon Verbena and a Rosemary in their places. R.I.P. Hebe Buxifolia #2 and #3.

Aggies or No Aggies

At the moment we have about 3 large clumps of Agapanthas in our garden. Like this:

We had been planning to divide and transplant them all throughout the garden (to help proivde greenery while other plants are establishing themsevles for the next 12 months or so). But after transplanting half of one clump to the new East-end garden bed and realising that they look leggy and messy, we are now totally reconsidering that plan. I think we'd prefer to have a barren looking garden then a garden looking like this:

Disaster Zone

With all the work that C and I have been doing in the garden for the last few weeks, the rubble and fallout is really starting to pile up. So we decided this week that we would get someone to come in, pack it all onto a truck and take it all away from us. Cool.

We found a guy who came around on Wednesday night and had a look, said "Yep I can do it tomorrow. Cost ya $170. Cash". We said "Fine".

Problem was he didn't turn up the following day. We called him, he gave some sort of excuse and said he would be there Friday.

He didn't come.

Called him again, he made some other sort of excuse and said he'd be there Saturday. We kept on the cast during Saturday with a couple of phone calls and he told us we would be coming today. At 6.00pm Saturday night I called again (mightily ticked off by this time) and he said "Na. Won't be doing it". What!!!! Was he even going to call us out of common courtesy to let us know???? THIS IS WHY TRADIES GET SUCH A BAD NAME FOR THEMSELVES.

And also why our front yard is looking like a disaster zone.

And also why next weekend we'll be breaking our backs getting all this stuff into a skip:


Read about the day we loaded all this stuff into a skip.

Preparing the Porch Garden Bed

This weekend we continued on our journey to get the porch garden bed ready for planting.

We started from this.

There was alot of rubble and fill underneath the surface so there was lots of digging and "crow barring" to get through it all. Some took to lying down on the job.

We dug down about 25 cm.


There ended up being so much rubble and junk mixed in with the soil that we decided to remove it and buy new compost and soil to fill the space. We're hoping to get the compost and soil delivered next weekend.

Preparing the East-end Courtyard Garden Bed

This weekend we wanted to get the two new garden beds (that we cut out last weekend) properly prepared for plants. This meant more digging, more lifting, and a few more arguments.

During the week I lifted out all the rubble in this garden bed. Today carmine got out the angle grinder and cut out all the reinforced wire that was at the bottom of the bed.

Then there was a alot of digging to till and airate the soil. Tough work but we got there in the end.

Then we decided to transplant a huge clump of Agapanthas from the front yard into the garden bed. It was such hard work and the results were...well...pretty disappointing. They look leggy and unattractive. Our plan had been to transplant the masses of agapathas from the front gardens into other garden bed to help provide greenery for the first 12 months or so until other plants have grown enough to look like something. But after transplanting these yesterday, I think we've changed our mind.

Planting here and there (27 January 2008)

While I was at mum and dad's for christmas, mum gave me some plants to bring back and plant in my garden beds. She gave me a pot of Arum Lillies, Aspidistras and some sort of fast and easy to grow daisy thingy. So this morning I planted them out.
The Arum Lillies and Aspergas are in the back. Some of the leaves are burned (this happened when I brought them home in the car on a 36 degree summer day). But I can see new shoots forming so they will look lush in time. In the front are the little daisies. These seem to grow really fast (they had almost doubled their size in the pot in the last 3 weeks) so I may have to dig them up and redistribute them again later. But that's OK.

By the way - this is my Ficus Pumila (Creeping Fig). I LOVE this plant (some people hate it because it can be too vigorous and too invasive - but I love the shapes it makes as it crawls up walls). I planted this back at the start of December 2007 - so it's making pretty good progress. I actually took some cuttings from this and placed them on the ground about a metre away. It's my first attempt at propagation. Fingers crossed that I have some success.

While I was in the planting mood, I also decided to plant out a Lemon Verbena and Rosemary plant that had both been in pots for way too long. The Lemon Verbena smells divine...but only when I planted it out did I read the label properly and found out that it's deciduous!! Bummer. Mum gave me this Rosemary months ago, but I could never decide where to plant it. I decided just to chuck it in the ground (in the space where I lost a Hebe Buxifolia at Christmas time) and then I will move it later on once I know where I want it.

I also planted out a large pot of Italian Parsley that I bought at Poynton's on Saturday morning. I did have some Parsley but it bolted in the hot weather and went to seed. Hopefully I will have great big bunches of Parsley again soon.

At Bunnings in Highpoint I also bought two small Ficus Pumilas (they were cheap - $2.50 each) and four Chinese Star Jasmines. I haven't planted these out yet - that will have to wait until next weekend.