Reclaiming some of the garden

Saturday
More work done in the garden this weekend, this time it was the area behind the house and as you can see it's a bit of a mess. I have had a couple of the goats tethered here trying to eat it down. This area is outside the laundry window.

Joe's workshop to the left, washing line ahead, if you look where the post and rail fance slopes up, that is the path to the veggie garden. We have plans to enclose some of this area for a dog run, the fence will go across from the edge of the workshop to the post and rail fence on the right hand side.

Looking back towards the house

Joe in his workshop fixing the mower, 'Ermm, where does this bit go?'

The veg garden tends to get buffeted around by the wind quite a bit and that's why we've had to wrap some of the beds with netting to try and stop the plants getting damaged. A more long term solution is hedging, the other week we bought some trees suitable for hedging, we got some pittisporum and ake ake, they were reduced from $25 down to $15, so a good buy as they were all good sized trees. This border is where they are to be planted, it was knee height in grass, first Joe cut it down with a weed eater/strimmer and then went over it with the mower. The bamboo was removed and will be relocated somewhere.

The border is L shaped and ready for planting

Sunday
First thing Joe wanted to do Sunday was get the trees in

Joe using cut grass as mulch around the trees

From here, it's a wilderness out there!

and from here...

The area you can see here where the black compost bin is, is where Joe will eventually build a greenhouse, there will be tomatoes planted there too, so we have out work cut out for us this week

The idea of using the grass as mulch is that the heat the grass produces as it starts to compost down prevents any regrowth underneath, it actually works really well. what you must do though is keep it away from the base of the trees, so Joe made a well around them.

And now we wait for them to grow

We have a path back

And a garden area reappears, I wont have to wade through long grass to hang the washing now

Another path emerged, this leads down to the main garden

Joe moaning at me to stop taking bloody photos and water the plants I put in!

But first I wanted to take a photo looking back! He's so bossy :D

I did some work too this weekend, I wasn't just the photographer! ;D I planted some veg plants in the veg garden and repotted some others. I'll do anoother post this week on the veg garden. I weeded this border, I didnt do the whole thing we'd made a start the week before and there were a lot of weeds. We really need a load more tree mulch, it has a tendency to slip down the slope. More plants are needed along the back to hold it back and once they have all grown they should cover the ground and hopefully then it won't need weeding quite so much...well I can live in hope.

I love the colours in this border and we can sit in our bed and look out onto this

My ever present helper! Who lies in wait under the grasses and ambushes me when I'm weeding!

I put some more lavender along the front as we had lost a few it's a different variety but it won't matter. There are also some grasses planted around the yukka (centre) they should grow well and cover the area nicely

They say gardening is good exercise and last night when we had finished I could hardly move, by rights I should be skinny! Life just ain't fair!! lol