Stage One – Edge and Hedge
21/01/07 – This morning I laid out the basic plan for stage on with some old buckets, a blanket and the 25m extention cable for the whippersnipper. The basic idea is a free form garden edge made of rocks (will be a bugger to mow around, but that’s why Jim has the whippersnipper!) with a hedge of ‘mock orange’ plants along the fence line so we don’t have to be peering into the neighbour’s pool everytime we set foot out the back door. I’ve been playing with the idea of making one end of it into a sandpit for Sarah, but we’ll see how we go. In the afternoon the rocks were delivered, 3 square meters of the stuff. I called in every favour I had with my mum, dad and sister to help haul them up the hill and into the garden. I rolled them into place along the line I’d marked out with the cable. It took a while, but already it’s starting to take shape. I’m going to need another 2m of rock to finish the edge all the way to the shed.
12/03/07 – Got a hot tip yesterday from Cassie on some Mock Orange trees. Olley’s on the Mt Lindsay Hwy down at North Mclean are selling them for $4 each. Bargin! Sarah and I took a trip down there and picked up ten of them.
15/03/07 – DadG has donated another 11 mock orange trees to the garden! That makes 21 plants in total that I’ll have to put in. I remember seeing something about that on tv once (Burkes Backyard? Backyard Blitz? something like that) that if you’re putting a lot of plants in a row like that it’s easier get them evenly spaced if you dig a trench instead of individual holes. That’s a 22 metre trench… ugh. I’m taking Dad and his trailer out to Lowood to pick up the plants tomorrow.
16/03/07 – It took a bit of hard work, but the trench is ready for the plants to go in. I’ve dropped the plants still in their pots into the trench so I can space them out (about one meter per plant) and have a bit of a sneak preview as to what its going to look like.
23/03/07 – Enlisted Nic’s help today to Sarah Sit while I went and got the mulch for the garden bed. I’m glad I didn’t try and take Sarah along – five bales of mulch only JUST fit in the car. Two in the boot, two in the back seat and another in the passenger seat! She also watched Sarah and filled buckets of water from the tank for me while I planted all the trees, filled in the trench, layed out the newspaper and put down the sugarcane mulch.
25/03/07 – Decided to put out the rest of the mulch and just hope the wind doesn’t blow it away before I can get the rest of the rocks to finish the edge. Hopefully I’ll be able to get them sometime this week.
27/03/07- Yesterday I bought a grey water diverter hose to pipe the washing machine water out into the grass to try and green it up a little. I did two loads of washing last night and already I think the grass is looking greener! I called the landscaping place this morning to order the rest of the rocks, but they are all sold out of the ones I want, go figure. He said he’ll be getting more by the end of the week and has promised to keep 3m aside for me. I probably only need 2, but I’m starting to get ideas for the area on the other side of the shed, so they won’t go to waste if I do get three.
29/03/07 – For most of the morning and afternoon Sarah and I were involved in the rather unglamorous job of weeding the lawn. There isn’t much to be done for it, but get down on your hands and knees with a bucket and little weedy fork thing, crawling about and pulling the weeds out. We got most of the suckers in the grass on the shady side of the house and along the edge of the path that runs around the back of the house. I think we pulled out about 4 buckets of grass and weed. The day’s much, much more exciting garden event was watching Sarah ‘help’ her Grandad install the pump on the water tank. It works brilliantly!! No more waiting 10 minutes to fill the watering can. Sarah and I even *gasp* hosed the grass for a few minutes!
8/04/07 – Well, thanks to our neighbours the garden edge is finished! Jim went over and picked up the last of the rocks this afternoon – which was no mean feat either. Those rocks were big and HEAVY – and our driveway is pretty steep when you’re pushing twice your body weight in a wheelbarrow. Pardon fuzzy photo, I was holding a wriggly Sarah when I took it. The plant in the corner of the fuzzy photo isn’t as dead as it looks. It was one that Cassie gave me that had grown too big for the spot in her garden. She gave it a good hair cut and I adopted it. I thought I’d killed it, but if you look closely there are some new tiny green leaves starting to sprout. WooHoo! You can really see the areas of the lawn that have been watered with the washing machine grey water and the areas that have missed out so far.
There’s some cleaning up to do of the garden bed near the garage door to be done, but for all intents and purposes, stage one “Edge and Hedge” is finished!!
