Hard Slog

Autumn is the perfect time of year for us to get out in the garden and do some of the big garden projects that have been on our To Do list since we moved here six years ago.  We love the garden the previous owners created. But like most new owners, we want to put our own touch on the house and garden.  The glorious warm days offered up by Autumn, along with the promise of rain, motivated us to get out and get working  

Our garden is around two acres in size. So, we've split it into sections and given each section a name.  Just so we both know what we're talking about.  One of the first big projects we completed was in a section we call the bank.  It's basically the section of land that was left at the back of the house after they excavated to make a flat area to build the house on.  The olive grove is planted on the bank and we created a new garden at one end, called the Manchurian garden (because we planted a Manchurian pear tree there).   There is a row of red bottle brushes (behind the olives) which are on the neighbour's land.  We've added a bunch of natives at the opposite end of the bank to the Manchurian garden.  Around the middle there was a rosemary and two westringias which we decided to take out. 

This first picture shows the rosemary plant.  It was a good two to three metres across.  The second picture shows the two westringias, both decent sized plants.  In behind them we'd planted a sandpaper wattle.  We planned to keep the westringias pruned to create a view to the wattle.  As you can see from the photos that plan didn't quite work out.  Hence the decision to make a more permanent change. We are not short on rosemary or westringias in the rest of the garden so we're not going to miss out on enjoying everything they have to offer.

I don't think we quite realised the enormity of the job when we started out.  It took two days just to prune the rosemary.  Rosemaries create new plants by layering so there were three very well-established plants.   I suspect we'll be digging up small rosemary plants for some time to come.

This is what the rosemary looked like after a day's work:

After two days of slog, we had five piles of prunings to deal with:

And the bank looked like this:

I'd have taken a photo of what we looked like after all that work, but I suspect it would have been too alarming to look at!  We're not getting any younger and it's fair to say we were both feeling sore and sorry for ourselves after we'd finished pruning.  Then it took us another two days to put everything through the shredder to turn it into mulch. More feeling sore and sorry.  The resulting piles seemed way too small for the amount of effort that went in.  Better mulched for use around the garden than taken to the tip or burned though.  And it's cheaper than going to the gym. I may have said that about gardening in previous blogs. 

This is a pic of one of the piles of mulch. Tiny huh. Well compared to the huge pile pre-mulching at least.  

After all the hard slog we got to do the fun bit, put the new plants in.  I did take a photo of the bank after we'd put the new plants in.  It looks just like the photo of the bare bank above though.  The new plants fade into the background.  So, I took photos (albeit not great ones) of the individual plants we put in.  

They're all grevilleas but I'm not completely sure which ones we put in each spot.  Anyway, we planted a Grevillea Molly, Big Foot, Apricot Tingle, Molonglo and Winter Delight.  We've added a few other plants since.  I can't wait for them all to get bigger so I can post some pictures of a stunning looking patch of garden.  Guess I'll just have to.