I visited Cloudehill Gardens in the Dandenongs for the first time last year. It occurred to me afterwards that, while it’s a lot larger and more elaborate than my garden, the lie of the land is has similarities. Mine is also a tiered slope, though it faces east not south. Cloudehill also has its buildings on the middle-to-top tier, like mine. Their practical gardens are higher up while decorative ones are lower, as they are in mine… sort of.

Every corner of Cloudehill has a purpose or theme. It got me thinking about some of the ‘dead’ zones here. While weeding the upper embankment a few months back I paused to rest and realised it was a nice place to sit and look down on our yard. Since then I’ve been thinking of putting some kind of rustic seat up there.

I bought Jackie French’s “Backyard Sustainability” at Cloudehill’s garden shop and read-skimmed it over the following weekend. (You know, where you skip the bits not relevant to your climate/garden/ambitions.) I’ve been filled with inspiration and enthusiasm for growing food plants since. Growing more food plants, that is.

After looking through my gardening scrapbook, updating my garden plan on the computer, and plotting future projects, I made some changes to my garden ambitions.

The kitchen garden:

Jackie advocates planting veges all mingled together, forgetting about succession planting and filling the gap the moment something is removed so that weeds don’t get much chance to establish. She claims to spend only about two days a year, bar harvesting, on the garden. I suspect that also doesn’t include making compost, applying it and mulch, buying mulch and seedlings (or raising seedlings), watering, making and applying powdery mildew spray or other natural remedies, putting shade cloth on and off during searingly hot days, and writing blog posts about it all. But still… ways to build a garden with the philosophy of less work are worth noting.

Having successfully grown veges in my wicking beds for just over a year (let’s ignore the failures) The three square cheapie wooden beds we put in the cat run for Slinky to poo in are the most abundant part of the whole block, overflowing with herbs and unintentional potatoes (I added the soil from the old potato drums when I filled the beds, and despite me removing all sign of spuds they sprang up the next year. Don’t worry, the cat only uses one corner of the beds and we cook the spuds well!) I’ve also been growing radish, basil, parsley and peppermint in polystyrene boxes filled with potting mix, as well as two metal drums of mint and another big post of parsley.

Despite all this, there’s plenty of gravel-covered ground in the cat run that could be used to grow more food. So I’m going to add another two square cheapie beds to make a ‘U’ shape herb bed and move the parsley, chives and mint from the polystyrene boxes and metal drums into them. Then I’ll grow spinach and radish in the boxes. When the weather cools I’ll get another wicking bed.

On top of all that, I want to grow pumpkin out near the lemon tree next spring. But tha’t a while away.

The poolside and shade garden:

All the plants I put in the shade garden are going well. Seven of the ten creeping boobialla plants I put under the trees in the poolside garden are still alive, though not growing as fast as I’d hoped. Still, the faster they grow, the sooner I’ll have to start cutting them back.

Down at the end of the house, where the pool pump is, is another ‘dead’ zone. It floods during heavy rain. The ground level needs lowering. The grass there grows through the fence into the gravel driveway, too. I want to replace the grass with a lower gravel area and a higher garden bed behind a retaining wall, containing cannas. Or ginger.

The native garden:

The day before the hail storm I printed a copy of the plan I used to plant out the native garden and crossed out anything that had died. About 20% has gone. Which is not surprising when I planted them into mulch-covered clay with just a bit of gypsum and native fertiliser, and no watering after the first three months. Only two species died across the board however: correa reflexa and chamomile sunray. Others died in one spot but lived in others. The dry spot under the tea tree had the most deaths, but two plants there are thriving. So I know which plants to add more of – and which to avoid. I’ll get some more in next Autumn.

The front garden:

This year we should (hopefully) be able to connect to the sewer system, which means we can cut down two sick trees, plant their replacements, make the garden beds they’ll be part of and finish our driveway. Just waiting for the go ahead… yeah, well they said it would happen in two weeks six months ago, so I’m not holding my breath. If they haven’t given us permission by the beginning of March, I’m going to tackle the tree removal and replacement part.

Also, when the soil is wet and soft enough to dig again we’ll join up the lower garden beds. And some point I’d like to get a barrier type of garden edging in rather than a ditch, but there is so much of it to do that even the cheapest option will be expensive overall. That’s a winter task, anyway.

Since I wrote this post… we’ve put the two new low beds in the cat run and I transplanted parsley and chives. I bought a new mint plant, as the old was looking sad, as well as tarragon, dill, italian parsley and spring onions. I also put a pumpkin plant that was growing spontaneously in a vege bed into one of the old drums, hoping to train it up the cat run supports.

I’d have done more, but it’s been too bloody hot!

At this time of year having an acre to look after is overwhelming. Though most of the landscaping is done, and I’ve designed for easy maintenance, there’s no such thing as a no-work garden. Especially in a wet and sunny Spring.

When it comes to weeding for most of the year, I go around in circles anti-clockwise: kitchen garden, then poolside garden, then courtside garden, then front garden, and back to the start. But lately we’ve had a lot of rain followed by enough sunshine to send plants into a growing frenzy, so it’s been more a matter of tackling what seems like the most out of control area or, if all areas need urgent attention, whichever interests me most.

Kitchen garden:
I regret not getting our wicking beds made and filled before we went overseas, but it took a while for the company to assemble the kits and those last weeks were hectic. We’ve only just finished them, and I haven’t yet planted anything. I also wanted to plant some citrus trees, but I should have done that in early spring. Now I plant them now there’s a chance summer will kill them off. Oh well. Next year.

Poolside:
Aside from a spectacular display of bottlebrush and some unexpected lilies springing up, not much is happening here. Now that I’ve removed the ivy and defeated the blackberry, onion weed had sprung up. I’ve been cropping it to the ground, because if you pull them little latent bulbs left on the roots are activated, and next year you get many more plants. Cutting them gives them no chance to draw energy back in.

Courtside:
The natives plants are doing well. I’ve been fighting onion weed here, too. The embankment belonging to the neighbour has been getting weedy, so I’m spraying it. They don’t do anything to maintain it. The alleyway on their side is an absolute mess, with weeds up to my shoulder. We’re spraying that, too.

Front:
Now that the ‘back’ garden is tamed we’ve been tackling the front. It’s mostly trees and grass, and I’m keeping it that way for now. We’ve been weeding and mulching under the trees, and trimming the lower branches. It doesn’t sound like much work, but the scale of this place is deceptive. What I think will take me an hour takes three with two or three people. Fortunately, we have a friend who hires herself out as a garden helper, who is happy to settle down and get weeding.

For the smallest bed, we tried digging a “Victorian” style garden edge – which is just a trench cut straight down on the grass side and sloped on the mulch side. I like it, so I’m going to put one around the rest of the front beds.

The biggest tree we have is a huge Chinese elm. It puts on leaves rather late, so the extra sunshine underneath means it gets pretty weedy. So far we’ve spent over 20 hours, with the help of our weeding friend, weeding, pruning branches and mulching. This was the pile of branches before we mulched them:

To get the mulch under the tree we put down a ‘slip and slide’ of builder’s plastic weighted down with bricks:

We need a lot more mulch under there, so we’ll be doing a lot more mulch sliding and raking in coming weeks.

In a month or so it’s going to be too hot to work outside and the ground too hard to dig. Then gardening will be mostly a matter of keeping everything alive (well, except the weeds, but their growth will slow down too) and maybe harvesting some veges from our new beds.

When I planted out the Unexpected Succulent Bed I found a lot of my potted succulents were very root bound. So I set to repotting or rejuvenating the ones that didn’t end up in the ground.

This used to be a bonsai, but the main plant died and the secondary one took over. I decided I liked it, so it only needed trimming, topping up of the soil and some cuttings added:

Lot of plants were simply moved to bigger pods. However, I did get a bit creative with this one, putting three pots together to make a tiered arrangement:

And, of course, I planted lots of cuttings:

I have lots of empty pots now, too, but with my love of succulents I expect I’ll eventually fill them up.

It’s been a mad year for mushrooms around our place.

(More craft posts to come soon. We’re very busy at the moment!)

Paul finished his Batchelor of Photography a few weeks back. During the final few weeks he was franticly busy and I had a head cold, so when it was done we spent a few days relaxing and recovering.

Then we got stuck into all the things we’d been putting off. Like chasing up the concreter, who still hadn’t filled the ‘moat’ between the old tennis court slab and the new garage foundations. The garage went up in January, so we haven’t been able to put our cars in it for coming up on six months.

As I expected, the concreter didn’t turn up. Again. But Paul had also got the inspector in to see if he’d give us the offical go-ahead to use the garage anyway, and he did. In the meantime, I’d done some careful calculations and reckoned we could get the kitchen garden tidy-up done in time for spring. I’d hoped to be growing veges last spring, and didn’t want to wait another year. I invited the landscaper around to quote on the construction work, and when he heard of our concreter problems he offered to quote to finish the job. The price was very reasonable, so we’re going ahead with both projects.

All this means we had a lot of moving of things to do. For the kitchen garden that meant clearing the space. The contents of the gardening shed went into the garage:

The succulents went onto the deck, sheltered from frost. The herbs were set aside, ready to go into the herb beds when they’re in. Pallets and a trestle table were moved, lots of plastic pots were cleaned and, if of the right plastic, thrown in the recycling bin, wood for the fire was moved into an old rustic shelving unit that was in the gardening shed, and scraps of wood too big for the old garage were moved to the new one.

When you move things, you find things you’d forgotten about. There was an old terrarium in the garden shed. A friend’s nine-year-old daughter, Miranda, is a bit of an expert of these, so I invited her and her mum over for a ‘Terrarium Day’ so she could teach me, and the result was fantastic:

I also found seven pavers, which was exactly the amount I needed to put stepping stones in a topping pathway, so we didn’t walk as many stones into the house or garage.

The clean up has given me some other ideas, but I’m holding off following through with most of them. I still have lots of other garden jobs that need doing, including lots of plants in pots that need to go in the ground and a couple that need moving, which ought to be done in winter. I’m sticking to a general rule that I can’t buy any more plants until I’ve planted what I’ve got.