Growing your Zen Garden

Still not a picture of my garden but these are freesias I picked from my driveway garden this morning.

Fressias were one of my mums favorites and they smell heavenly.

Oh I LOVE a riot of colour too - I guess I mean more than anything the overall main frame of the plantings will be white and purple (for serenity) but I cannot imagine that I would never plant a border of riotous colour from time to time too!

I have never grown any cruciferous vegetables (in fact never planted out for the late harvest at all) - I LOVE brussel sprouts. Will have to try growing and I eat alot of cauliflower, about a half a head of cauli a week - so it is a staple for me. I will have to research the growing times and length of time to maturity so I can stagger the planting.

Well! We must have wires in the universe, i took a cutting of a lovely plant from my Mum's last week to take to thegarden shop for identification so i can put it in the 'spreadsheet' of plants for the purple ad white themed garden refurbishment and guess what that cutting was...

hardenbergia!

Do you have a white one and a purple one planted together? I iddn;t know they came in white too. I love that both are showing here @chookmojo

@chookmojo wrote:

I dont have a picture of my yard on the tablet that I am using, but this is what hardenbergia looks like.

Ok brace yourselves for a phot post inundation. I have written a HUGE post with all the pictures in one, then the internet ate it so now I am going to break it up into several smaller posts. Anyone not wanting to see LOTS of pictures of my garden, now is your chance to leave........

Ok here is a before//during of our backyard which we pretty much stripped back to a blank canvas, not being fond of the general theme of spiky semi tropical plants failing to thrive in Melbourne. Yuccas everywhere and palms. Not my cup of tea at all.

You can see all the stumps in the pic and the baby hardenbergias just starting along the fence. We kept the kangaroo paw, gumtree (it later fell down in a storm ) and the grevillia, mostly so the chooks would still have somewhere to hang out. Planning to get rid of once the other stuff fills out a bit. It was very bare and kind of gross for a while so we wanted to keep SOMETHING bushy. There we lots of volcanic rocks just sort of randomly blobbed about, so we piled them all up to create a rockery area.

How it looks now - we planted dwarf eucys, silver princess, abutilon, hardebergia and there is a fair bt of nasturtiam which escaped the herb garden... I'll be replacing that with pigface down the track. there is a lovely little bottlebrush just starting to flower in the back corner, and once it is big enough the grevillia will come out. We'll be putting in a lot more kangaroo paw in the front area. Oh and there is a native mint (prosthentera rotundafolia) between the trunks of the dead gumtree...

My herb garden - this is where you see just a lot of stumps in the first photo.

I took these last week and it has actually filled out even more. Springtime is amazing!

On the right hand fence you can see the last of the bulbs flowering and right against that fence I have a couple of espaliered fruit trees just starting. To the left of the shed is a little self sown fig tree that has a LOT of figs on it this year. We might even get some before the possums and cockies.

The hardenbergia when it was in flower - we have a mix of purple white and pick and the overlap a bit, so yu get blocks and blends of colour.

the pink hardenbergia

My vegie garden looking bit tatty and bare - chook run in the background, Hello Float!

When we moved in this area had been used as a sort of private tip by the previous owners who had a concreting business, all rubble and shards of glass and rubbish and pieces of rotting timber and weeds as tall as our heads. It was vile.

I'm trying to grow passion fruit along that fence but I don't seem to have the knack with passionfurit and I am probably going to pull out the sad remains of the one I planted and try again. These fruit boxes have all been turned into self wicking beds.

The transformation of a driveway. Yuccas again, of course, and Agapanthas which I hate, and those african irises that are so beloved by council landscapers.... Out it all comes. A pick axe and MANY hours of hard work yielded FIVE cubic metres of green waste from a 25 metre driveway.

How it is now - still a bit bare, I have planted out much yet. Bulbs along the edge, some allysum at the front, blueberries next to the fence (just little twiglets at this point, but they will be pretty when they fill out). I will be doing more bulbes, some hydrangeas, ore blueberries (I'm testing varieties right now ot see what likes it there) and I am not sure what else yet... I'd like to do Hazelnuts but I think they need more sun, the centre part gets a LOT of shade from the house...

At the back of the drive we have more bulbs, strawberries and raspberries - I still need to set up the wires for those. I wasn't sure they would like the location but they seem happy enough.

So really now I am focussing on the vegies, driveway and moving to the front garden once we get a fence sorted out.

Oh, @chookmojo, you ahve done such a beautiful job of it all, looking awesome
Thanks for sharing all the pics and your patience in stripping back to bare bones and growing everything in new. lovely.

Wow ... thanks for showing us all that.

Is gardeing something you can share with the hubster or are you at it by yourself?

@Appleblossom I have done virtually all of that on my own. Hubs is happy to enjoy the garden and patiently listens to me wittering on about it, and doesn't mind me spending considerable chunks of money on it, but is not so hands on shall we say.

Since moving here I have personally shovelled out 19 cubic metres of soil, 12 cubic metres of mulch, 1 metre of pebbles which was by far the hardest! (for the wicking beds) moved those fruit boxes myself and built the wicking system, and built all of the timber framed side beds from sleepers, moved countless pieces of scrap timber, logs, scrap metal and junk, tree branches, pavers, loaded about 12 cubic metres of hard rubbish into skips, planted everything and I do all the mowing and weeding too.

Hubs did help me weed the vegie garden area when we first cleaned it up, dismantle the woodshed (truly horrible job), build the chicken coop and move the boulders.

I often say I don't care about help with things I can do myself, only when I CAN'T do it myself. He steps up when I need it but mostly I try to get stuff done on my own.