The beginnings before the drought hit.

the drought hits.

My first garden post! Yay! It’s one of our aims is to be as self-sufficient as we can, so the garden is a high priority. Besides, I love gardening, it feeds my soul.

But making any garden here needs hard work, time and patience and then more hard work and more hard work. It’s easy to get overwhelmed:

We’ve had drought and extreme heat for many months. Around the town even well-established plants have been dying. I’ve been glad I haven’t starting  planting, especially since water restrictions came in.

There’s the old bones of a garden that was planted thirty plus years ago when the house was built. So there are old and tired hydrangeas, clumps of agapanthus and straggly daisies, all struggling and clinging to life. The previous owners were not gardeners so it’s long neglected. Needs a lot of loving!

But, the big obstacles, apart from the weather, are the way the garden was set up.

Strong black plastic was put over all the beds to kill the weeds. It killed the weeds but also cooked any living organism in the soil. The plastic’s now  tangled in the roots of the old plants. I don’t know how we’ll get rid of it.

In many places, someone has spread gravel over the plastic on the bed and on the few plastic-free beds, thickly. So the soil is full of gravel.  Getting the picture?

But that’s not all. The next- door garden is even older and more neglected than this one. It has had a big area of the backyard cultivated, I’d guess, for vegies. It’s become a wonderful place for sticky beaks (farmer’s friends) to flourish. They are such splendid seed spreaders this garden has its own crop. Pull them out then the crop next-door seeds and we are re-infested.

I don’t mean to complain, but rather to set the scene so you can picture the garden and share its progress. I’ve had time to watch sun and shade and get some ideas about where to plant. I can see abundance in my mind- flowers, herbs, vegies, fruit trees…a pond for frogs, birds…why have lawn?

Emma Goldman said” I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds round my neck.” Happiness is going out  picking  what you need for the meal and the flowers for the table.

The other evening, hand watering some pot plants, the gift of

one, small, perfect, green frog.

One small, perfect, green frog