subtropical gardens

Garden work

| Jessica

In the wind-down to Xmas I have only one teeny paid job to do, plus my tax (I hate doing my tax, even though I always get a little tax bonus). This wind-down has been perfect for my mental health as it allowed me to slow my work down gently, and not crash me into boredom and frustration – is anyone like me, and very goals-focussed? If I don’t have something to work towards I’m a screaming wreck. Meanwhile, before we head south for the summer (I know, who goes south when the heat is in sunny Qld?) there are still plenty of things to do in and around the garden.

Tropiscapes have been and gone, not without some dramas for them regarding our recalcitrant arborists, who caused no end of delay and frustration. Landscaping is not cheap, let me assure you, and I made the hard decision to do the remainder of the work at the front of the house myself. I moved some granite rocks to improve the size of the garden beds at the front of the house. As previously mentioned, this is the area that gets nearly all day sun, so I wanted to put in mostly food plants with a couple of decorative bushes for funsies.

  • The first thing to do was move these teeny tiny granite rocks – minimum 6kg each, up to more than 25kg, from their old spots (you can see where they once were) to the new garden edge, which doubled the size of the garden bed on each side.
  • This didn’t take long on the high side, but boy did it take forever to dig out and move the rocks on the low side! No points for guessing that the earth had moved DOWN the hill, over the rocks, and that there were a heap of old roots encircling some of them. Fun. That was my exercise for the day. Sore for several days after!
  • I thought I would never get the earth moved from the driveway into the beds. It was perhaps the hottest, most humid day all year.

On the most humid and hot day of the year, prior to a rather large rain cell developing in the afternoon, I personally moved three cubic metres of soil off my driveway onto the waiting garden beds. Oh! And I did sweet FA about preparing the beds. The earth was so compacted I just gave up and decided to lay the soil straight over the top. Of course there was rather less fresh soil on the old bed. Y’all, I had to fill that new bed! I survived the day – just.

This was at about midday. I thought I would never finish the job, and because rain was forecast, I had to get that dirt off my driveway before it ran off the driveway into my new garden beds….
Surprising how far 3 cubic metres of soil can go – for a hot minute I thought we’d ordered too much. Amazing what a bit of rain can do to damp down the beds. As it turns out we had too much cypress mulch so we used it to spread over the rest of the front garden on the chookie side. Cypress mulch is amazing as it repels termites and keeps the earth super cool and damp.

Once I had laid the soil I went and bought some plants from our local Bunnings. Turns out they’re low in stock right now, so I ended up buying lots of different thyme, some rosemary, lemon verbena and lemon balm, a perennial basil, some oregano and sage, a chilli plant, some curry plants, even some samphire. These plants act as ground cover and low bushes and make great cover for the beds, and all are great herb plants that love full sun. For small trees I planted a miniature lime, a rosella hibiscus and a warm climate nectarine. I do not believe for one minute we will get any fruit off them before the possums chomp them, but it’s an ecosystem. Gotta live with the little beasties. For decorative plants I bought two different Coleus (love those leaf colours), some Dragon’s Breath, Dichondra, a Persian slipper and a hot pink hibiscus. Hubby was getting a little too eager to spread the remaining mulch and I had to get the plants in the ground before he went psycho with the shovel! So I flung them into the ground at speed. I removed all the Brazilian wandering iris and the grass plants prior to digging up the beds, so I put them all back to grow amongst the food plants, and I can safely say nothing has died yet. The persian slipper plant had to be moved last week – it was in full sun, and its leaves were literally burning, but even that has revived nicely now that it is in the shade. The wonky hedge thing on the right of the image below is a fun white Powder Puff tree. It was already there and makes a super cute flowering hedge, sitting in between two mature golden cane palms.

We need now to do something about the chookie side, but we’ll leave it until next year, once we have done some carpentry work to keep them confined to one section of the garden. The basic plan is to move the rocks out from the left side by about a metre, build out the bed there and plant some basic bitch plants there to support the chookies and give them some fresh plants to eat and shade under. This side as you can tell is rather rudimentary but now that the Waterhousia tree (from the Lillipilli family) has been trimmed, the Murraya hedge is going great guns and even my lemon tree (not shown) is fruiting like crazy. Let’s also of course assume the possums will eat all the little lemon buds. This is not as awful as it sounds as the plant is not yet big enough to support all the lemons it has already budded. We also have an azalea or rhododendron in the corner nearest the house – not my favourite plant – but it thrives and we’re keeping it for now.

So two weeks later and I decided to buy a blueberry bush because 1/ it was available and 2/ it’s not a raspberry bush with prickles and spikes. I planted it where I had left a big clear patch at the front in preparation for a rubbish bin plinth we hope to build next year. We have just had a week of torrential rain and it looks like summer will be cool, wet and super steamy. It was so wet that the rain moved some of the mulch away so this weekend will be about moving the mulch back where it came from and sugaring the nut grass that has decided to spread amongst our Little Dugald side hedge. I tell you what, though, the plants have grown like CRAZY since we planted them – with the the native thyme and lemon verbena more than doubling in size and the rosella hibiscus the same. Amazing.

Still too wet to mow the lawn! We will be replacing some of the lawn with stepping stones but again that’s a job for 2022. The powder puff bushes need some pruning and it’s amazing how messy it all looks after a week of rain, but also how heartwarming it is to see all the growth.

Out the back all the major work has been done, but the hubby and I have decided to expand one of the garden beds as we can’t grow lawn there – which was made very clear when the rains came this week – the area turned into a mud bath. We will be moving the smaller rocks out by about a metre, filling the expanse with new soil and cypress mulch, and moving some of the smaller plants forward. We’ll also add some more of the plants Tropiscapes selected to give that bed more consistency with the other side. We also bought a few metres of grass/ sod that has really taken, so I think we may end up adding more once all the building work has finished and all the water tanks and veggie beds are in, etc.

See the bare patch on the left of the picture above? That’s where we will expand the garden bed. Shade loving tropicals will love it there. The grass in the foreground is lovely thick sod, and the remaining grass you see (same colour, different grass, plus weeds) is probably not actual grass, so we’ll lay some more sod next year once we’ve done the building work.

So here’s the thing I’ve discovered about myself: that I really enjoy working in my garden, creating a beautiful, welcoming tropical vibe there. Here’s an image of the garden at night – we had set it up for a birthday do just a few days after finishing the front garden:

I think once all the main work is done I will buy some festoon lights and have more garden parties like this one. It looked perfect and even though I knew the grass was patchy and the working side of the house was ugly, this still looked just sublime on a perfect summer’s night. And isn’t that exactly the point of a beautiful garden?!

the garden is on its way!

| Jessica

There is some massive plant action on the way! The folk from Tropiscapes are here this week, building steps into the garden, planting beautiful tropical plants and preparing the garden beds. We will have to keep on the watering duties over the next few weeks while the plants establish – something I’m not really very good at, so please Rain Gods, rain every day for at least an hour so that I don’t have to water the newbies!!

Here’s some images of what the garden looked like before demo day: very pretty but full of weeds and rather poor soil. And, typically, the agent hid all the leaf litter on the ground in the photo to pretend that it actually had a lawn. Not true. Too much shade from the very important enormous tree on our boundary, which we have just had trimmed by an accredited arborist. When I say trimmed, they removed most of the satellite branches and all of the lower leafy cover, to satisfy the urges of our neighbour, who wanted it removed entirely. Which we entirely disagree with, because of the important ecological benefit it provides for the wildlife, not to mention that the world is heating up – you don’t remove mature trees from yards unless they are DEAD. There is much more light into our yard now, and certainly more viewing spots for our neighbours into our bedroom 😉

Here are some images from when the garden had undergone Demo Day:

These images are a bit fuzzy because I had to reduce their size to get them to upload to my email account. Yes, I could use Google Drive. No, I’m not going to. Tropiscapes removed most of the weeds and nearly all of the non tropical plantings – which weren’t thriving in any case, and we’re in the process of making the garden a truly tropical paradise. I can assure everyone that this is an enormously expensive proposition, but IMHO worth it. We’re not doing the front yard yet, because we have a few things to complete before we tear up the ground, so the house will have this rather odd selection of perfectly planted beds and several scrappy ones!

We had a few scrapes to get to this point – our arborist is the worst communicator ever, and had booked in to do the work just when some massive storms were predicted. Obviously they cancelled, then wanted to come in on the Monday, when our landscapers arrived – after also delaying their start, for the same weather reasons. Some minor argy-bargy chest beating ensued, complaints were made, but in the end, it all worked out, except for the bit where they need to do some stump grinding and haven’t booked that in, even though it could have been done at any time in the last month. SIGH. Here are some shots of the work at the midway point:

I love that the garden beds look so much nicer than the rest of the “lawn”… so, don’t ask me to name ANY of the plants that have just gone in – it was hard enough working out the name of my Waterhousia tree at the front of the house, which has also been trimmed beautifully and now everyone can see into our house.

In other news: have you ever thought that you’re really over social media and that you’d be very happy never looking at Facebook ever again? Well, I’ve had enough, yet again. I enjoy seeing what friends and family are up to, but most often nowadays people don’t post at all and it’s only the pages you follow – such as news and infamous folk – that are the consistent posters. Every now and then I purge myself of FB and have a long hiatus. I can’t remember the last time I deactivated my account, but it’s all there in case I need to access it again. FB and other socials are not always the best vehicle for developing good mental health – or even healthy online habits, so I’m ready to take the step and remove myself from it for a while.

That’s enough for now – we’ve lots more to do and I’ll show you the “finished” sections when they’re fixed.