i’ve begun the long, slow process of turning this garden in to a food forest. there’s a lot to consider, beside the climate, which i’m unfamiliar with – long, hot, dry summers and wet winters – and the considerations of winter sun, access, water usage and the hope of a backyard pump track for training.
so i’ve started out the front, only to discover that (presumably) spring-flowering bulbs are popping up in all the most inconvenient places. and today, with the steady hours of rain, it’s become obvious that two melaleucas are dying. they were going to be removed in any case, but not quite this soon! another couple of shrubs are slowly dying off as well, and one major neighbour-screening bottlebrush is effectively blocking most of the oh-so-valuable winter sun from the lounge and main bedroom. i have a plan to work around that, however.
i’ve been gratefully taking drops of lawn clippings from a couple of local lawnmowing businesses in an effort to get some organic matter back into the place. grass clippings can work very well if they’re mixed with leaves, small sticks and blood-and-bone (with 5% added borax for termite control). it seems that for years the leaves, weeds and grass have been raked up and thrown in the greenwaste bin by the former owner, as the soil is dry, impoverished, and totally lacking in organic matter. one large area of the garden had been covered in clear plastic with a thin film of soil spread over the top, which was doing nothing to stop the weeds but quite a bit for the large black ants that had a very handy solar panel for their egg chambers. the gardens our the back have even been weeded to the point that the beds are up to six inches below the level of the lawn….
there’s large drifts of a particularly ugly succulent and several dead or dying lavender and salvia bushes. there’s a million daisy seedlings coming up in the front yard and garden beds with rubble edging. it’s a bit of a mess, really.
but… with a north-facing aspect and one rather beautiful eucalypt in the front yard, i have a structure to work around. some smaller grevilleas by the front fence will be staying while a weed tree and the succulents will not.
I’ve been fortunate that some lovely people from Freecycle have been willing to come and dig up some of my unwanted plants, and that’s left me with a bit of room to move. i’ve also removed some rather ugly besa-blocks that were harbouring snails from the back yard by simply loading them three at a time onto a hand truck and wheeling them away, after carrying the first three by hand across the yard! I’m not sure at this point whether i’ll re-plant in this garden bed or not, as we’re still deciding where to put the pump track.
more in the next post…..
Riverworks - the blog. 