Gardening trivia

Here are some of the tiny gardening things that we have been up to. This is mostly for Dad, I don't think anyone else is very interested ... other than me! It will be the only way I remember what I've done, although my husband is keeping an any year diary of what we do each day. He's already making entries under old entries, which is very exciting ("this time last year we had already pruned the buddleia! What we were thinking!" etc). 

First up is the first (and so far only) planting in our new garden cage, and it's in a pot, so probably cheating. A woman at quilters brought in some "planting garlic" so I snaffled a couple of heads and planted twenty fat garlic cloves in this pot. They should be ready in February, and require very little care until then, allegedly.

Here I am sweeping the rocks. I don't plan to make a habit of sweeping the rocks, but I'm in the very very slow process of clearing this overgrown garden bed. We didn't know there were rocks in there, and they are actually quite lovely, and form natural tiers. So I'm sweeping them off this once, to see the shape, and then we will contemplate planting around them in the fullness of time. It was completely overgrown by rosemary, so I've cut that back to almost ground level and we will see what survives.

This is something I'm calling "baby's first formwork" because this is, indeed, the first time I have ever prepared formwork for a concrete pad. We're getting the floor of the lavender shed reconcreted so we can store things in there, which requires a concerete truck, so we may as well get some other little things done too. This is under the clothesline, which was worn into bare dirt, and it took a fair amount of swearing, digging for tools in the shed and googling youtube videos. But you have to start somewhere and it is level (despite appearances). My husband provided guidance but he has been busy with his compost beds (on the left hand side, fabulous colorbond, nobody's burning those down).

I also cleared off the front of the garden shed to put a path in there, but there are water pipes half way down and electricity conduit near the shed, so we have decided against concreting in case we need to get into it at some point. Of course we discovered this after we'd sledgehammered up the old concrete path and made a big dirt mess ... we are thinking of putting concrete pavers down. We have some from the old house and they're robust enough; it's just a bit more work. At least it was a good job to have tidied it up.

I also used my weed tea on the new bed before putting mulch down. It smelled like the very breath of satan but I diluted it 1:10 as recommended on the internet and poured it over the bed, to improve the nitrogen. Does my bed need nitrogen? I don't know. I put the decomposed weeds on what remains of the compost, where apparently they will not spread weedy seeds, and I made more tea with new weeds. 

And lastly we have a truly terrible bird photo - there is an owl in there. A very lovely, very well camouflaged owl, that watched us carefully but didn't fly away. That's its favourite spot and he's quite obvious once you see him ... but you can't. Not in this photo.