Act your age!

Occasionally I feel like I live an overly sedate life for someone in their mid-twenties. For instance, last weekend there was the choice of bee keeping workshop or the offer of some tickets to Parklife.


I'm happy to say the bee keeping workshop was able to be put off for another weekend, and instead I wandered around a freezing cold festival site, still feeling older than my age because I had decided to opt for jeans and a jumper rather than hot pants and a crop top on a day with a top of 16 degrees. But at least I saw some awesome music! Lykke Li in particular was one to get excited about, but others I liked included Kimbra, Gossip, Santigold, and Example.

Photo by Karen Roe

Landscaping with Pallets

I'm normally terrible at taking photos before I start a project, which is always somewhat disappointing because then I don't have a reminder of how far a garden or any other project has come since I started it. So this time I'm going to try to show the start as well, and while it might not be pretty, hopefully it will at least be interesting to watch a guerrilla community garden changing and taking shape.

So this is the view as it was on Saturday morning:


The closest garden box is ours, but I'll give more details on it another time.

We had decided to build a second entry point to the garden down at our end, and luckily someone pointed out that a ramp was far better for wheelbarrow access than the stairs I'd been happily plotting. So one friend did the major grunt work and dug out part of the bank to make a rough ramp.


But another friend and I were too excited to leave it at that, so we decided to build a retaining wall from pallets, which is the main building material at the site. So we cut a pallet into three sections of varying sizes and then dug a trench area for them.

We whacked them in place, chucked in some plastic lining and scoria, gravel and earth, and voila! The perfect start to our ramp and beautification of our end of the garden.


The same view, but with a ramp!


And the great thing about a community garden is that others continue to chip in. When I went to drop off our compost this evening I noticed that someone has driven in star pickets in front of the wall, and used some astro-turf that was lying around to cover it.

Snowballs

On the weekend we headed up to CERES to buy a stack of seeds for our new garden bed. The walk home took us close to the railway garden which I abandoned after getting spooked about soil quality, and it looks like no one has been harvesting much there. I couldn't resist pulling these up, because I've never grown them before.


They're called snowball turnips, and it's a great name for them, isn't it?

Now I just have to weigh up just how worried I am about heavy metals possibly being present in my food...

A riddle for you all

What's a gardening gal to do when she has spent a year getting an empty garden to a point of overflowing abundance...


...only for the landlord to insist that every single sliver of green be removed from the property upon departure? (And we are talking bare concrete and dust here.)

A) Be heartbroken for a little while and instead spend time in Ikea kitting out the one bedroom flat she now calls home, trying to fill the silverbeet-shaped hole in her heart with meaningless consumerism/pretty birch veneer products.

B) Cultivate a ridiculous houseplant per square metre ratio.

C) Look after a friend's railway-side guerrilla garden patch through most of its growing season but then freak out about heavy metals in the soil just as the winter harvest rolls around due to concerned words from friends who test soil for a living.

D) After despair and despondency find another guerrilla garden closer to home which has abundant community and potential, talk about it non-stop for weeks and then plunge headlong into it, forcing her poor boyfriend to spend entire weekends dawn to dusk helping her knock together garden beds, source soil, etc.

E) All of the above.

I think you folks know the answer. Which also means I feel excited about blogging again! (Not that it's just a garden blog, but let's face it, gardening is the backbone.)

Looking forward to chatting with you all again.

Here's a shot of the railway-side garden before we broke up. It was fun while it lasted!

Don't you hate it when the bath feels too small?

Or when it feels like someone's rushing you out of the bathroom?


Chooks love having dust baths, and because our clay soil was staying too wet for them to have a dust bath during winter we put our largest pots full of soil in their pen with them, hoping that they would dry out more quickly and be able to serve as something of a bathtub for them. Turns out they might have preferred a few more, and something a little bigger!

Bucket of Broccoli

During our Weekends o' Weddings month our broccoli went bonkers! We were able to pick a bucket just about every night. It tasted much more floral than shop bought broccoli.


After some heartbreak at the jaws of aphids last year, this year we went for sprouting broccoli so that we could chop off any infestations without losing the whole crop. But then this year we had almost no aphids and those that did arrive were promptly eaten by ladybirds, which I think were around because we have so much parsley.


The only downside was that it went to seed very quickly, I'm not sure if it went quicker than normal broccoli or if it was just due to the wacky weather at the time.

Some updating to do

Due to popular demand (Hi Mum) I'm not going to let this blog just fade away entirely as it was threatening to do.

The past month has been an absolutely crazy month of weddings, I've spent my weekends in Newcastle, South Africa (that was work rather than wedding),the Huon Valley of Tasmania and Ballarat.

It's been wonderful to watch friends and family make such an incredible commitment to each other, each wedding has been amazing for its own reason. The Newcastle wedding had the most heartfelt, beautiful vows I can possibly imagine, the Tasmanian wedding was such a celebration of the entire lifestyle the couple have embraced together, and the Ballarat wedding was a completely accurate reflection of the couple's sense of humour - they had a giant novelty wedding certificate and their vows were hilarious.


So look for some updates starting now on our chooks, vegie garden and more.

These photos are from the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town. I spent three hours there on the day when I was leaving South Africa and I took a huge number of photos. And then forced Tom and my parents to sit through a slideshow of every shot when I got home - lucky them!