Garden Update: Planting weekend has arrived! The Snook and I started on Saturday by pruning the lilli pilli trees to create a bit more sun on our garden beds. Then today, we got up bright and early and headed – IN A UTE! – to Gardens R Us. We came away with about twenty punnets of seedlings, and handful of seed packets, potting soil and compost, a pot, and a couple trees. (I also got a very special little tree – shown here – which I’ll tell you about in a minute.) We unpacked it all at home and set to work planting it out. We were guided by the plant density suggestions in Square Foot Gardening. Man, the “Mel’s Mix” sure makes planting easy! We were just digging things in with our hands. It didn’t take long to get everything in place.
Here’s the bed along the side of the house. This one has two savoy cabbages, cavolo nero, baby cos lettuce, leeks, and some rainbow chard.

Two new trees: a lime tree and a bay (i.e. laurel) tree. We’ll never pay for limes and bay leaves again!

Our lemon tree got moved to the corner by the sliding glass door, which gets lots of sunlight. It’s got so many blooms right now; we should get a ton of fruit off it this year.

Here’s the small bed beneath the bottlebrush tree. This one is dedicated to salad and herbs. We’ve got basil, coriander, lettuce, parsley, rocket… and petunias. (We got a couple flowers for colour.)

We’re giving strawberries another try. Snookums has planted four different varieties in the top two troughs. We’ve also got a trough of coriander and sage, and a couple pots of cat mint and cat grass. (We’ll bring those inside periodically and drive the kitties wild.)

This bed is waiting patiently til next weekend. It has lavendar and rosemary, but the Snook has grand plans. We bought four potted kangaroo paws (all in different colours) and we’ll plant them out next week. I think they’re going to look fantastic.

Here’s the big garden bed. The tall climbers are all along the back and side so we can build a frame for them. We’ve got four different varieties of tomatoes (including black Russian), broad beans, snow peas, jalapenos, cauliflower, red chillis, beets, broccoli romanesco (the weird one), capsicum, beets, ORANGE PUMPKINS, and snapdragons in the corner. Oh, and the four squares on the right have been planted with asparagus crowns, which apparently can take a couple years to start producing.

This is the narrow bed along the fence. We’re trying sweetcorn again! We’ve also got two types of dwarf bush beans (butter and snap), and more basil, beets, leeks, and rainbow chard. The Snook also planted some shallot bulbs with a couple petunias. (He was singing some song about being a “lonely little petunia in the onion patch” the whole time.)

And lastly, next to the front door is my Wollemi Pine. I was thrilled to learn that Gardens R Us sell them. These amazing Australian trees were only discovered fifteen years ago, and it was the botanical equivalent of finding a herd of living dinosaurs. They were thought to be extinct for hundreds of million years before Steven Noble, a “modern day explorer,” found some near Lithgow. Less than a hundred trees survive, and they’re obviously critically endangered (to the point where the exact location of the trees is classified). However, a few years ago they started a cultivation program and it’s now possible to buy your own Wollemi Pine. (Proceeds go to the conservation effort.) They’re not cheap, but I just couldn’t resist. It’s the coolest thing ever. I’m naming him “Coelecanth”.

Expense Report:

Again, this doesn’t include our time going to the nursery to pick out plants, nor does it include the ornamental (and expensive) stuff like the Wollemi Pine and the kangaroo paws.