Self care by growing a garden

Ours is a mixture of overgrown-weedy and overgrown-vegs and flowers. My long term aim is to have no grass except for the front naturestrip, but as we're on a 1/3 acre town block, there's still a long way to go. And the process keeps on being interrupted by other things... ah well.

Our neighbours, meanwhile, have two small dogs, one of which is blind, and they keep their yard very neatly mown to discourage snakes... they haven't complained about ours, but in deference to thier needs, I think I probably need to at least neaten up a good strip next to the fenceline so that any slithery reptiles living at our place can't migrate too easily to theirs. Big hassle there though is woodpiles. Against the side fence is the easiest and most accessible place to stack up winter firewood, but woodpiles are classic snake habitat. Dunno...maybe I can find another spot. But I'll make it a spot for the "next stack". No way am I double handling the existing one to move it.

This is one book we had for our kids- very much reflects our garden, including the bees, dragonflies and froggies.

Will have to revisit for the image @Smc .... it’s not uploaded yet,

Morning 💕

🙂 @Former-Member

We've got one solitary chook at the moment. Need to get some friends for her, but want to improve the pen first. So your broody was hiding somewhere?

Our redcurrant bush is well filled at the moment. I'm not picking often enough so the birds are happy with me. I have picked enough to do a bit of preserving. Thinking a mandarin-redcurrant jelly or sauce, using the peels off my brekky mandarins.

And for the first time I've got blackcurrants... I think the little bush produced about 6?? And a few jostaberries are still ripening. Again not many, but maybe next year. My feijoa is flowering for the first time too.

@Former-Member, we regularly get down into minuses during winter, usually -4 is as low as it gets, but last winter we had a -7. Feijoas ripen later here than they do in warmer areas- about May-June. Neighbours across the road from us have a very well estabished feijoa hedge which produces masses every year. Really, my bush is superfluous, because said neighbours let anyone who wants them collect from the hedge, but my plant is a seedling of my parents' NE Vic feijoa "trees" (they'd be maybe 5-6m tall...) so I'm kind of keen to keep the "bloodline" going as a connection to my childhood. Theirs were planted sometime in the 1970s, but will probably be bulldozed out whenever their house gets sold. The land the house is on is worth more without the house than with it.

@Former-Member I think Daylesford is slightly colder than us, not sure how much so. I know they get snow occasionally in winter, but we're at a slightly lower elevation so we miss it. Last frost here is usually October (occasionally later) and first frost is usually April. If you don't get tomatoes in ASAP after the frosts, you don't get a crop. I planted a few in October this year, about a month earlier than local wisdom recommends. They did get one frost late Oct. which burnt off about 1/2 to 1/3 of the foliage, but most recovered well. One got taken back to ground level, and has reshot, but is seedling sized. They're flowering now, so I'm hoping for January tomatoes. For us, that's a big achievment.

Was the permaculture garden Melliodora- David Holmgren and Su Dennet? I did a PDC a few years ago, and we visited their property plus a few others in the area as part of it. Su made a cake for us. Pear, I think..??