This Little Garden...

Every year I look in envy on many pretty garden blog posts and now I'm on Instagram that envy has grown.

My garden is in all honesty pretty shot.  I've tried over the years to patch it but between 6 children and 4 chickens it has taken a battering. 

However that could all be about to change...

Take a look at it as it is this evening

The shitty shed is literally falling down,  but it can't just yet as it's holding the even shittier fence behind it up.  

Fencing contractor is booked for the middle of July to replace or repair the old fence. Pots of wood stain are sitting patiently waiting for that job.

I've got a smaller shed on the patio waiting to be put up as soon as the fencing is done and the old one comes down.

If this was a design blog I would be referring to this area as a 'sunken terrace'.  Looking at it as it stands, terrace is just too grand a description so we'll settle with area!

The long term plan here is to create a chill zone for the teens, I'm starting to gather pallets to create a pallette seating area with a fire pit. The floor is pretty uneven with a mix of paving slabs and various concrete hard standings. Too expensive to replace, turf or deck I'm going for a jumbo sack of pebbles to cover it all.

On the floor down the bottom you might have spotted the big blue plastic sheet?  It's covering up the pitted crumbling ground where once the chickens lived. That is to be decked. The decking been ordered and we have a man that can coming in at the end of this month to lay a large deck to cover a multitude of crap. 

 Long term (next summer hopefully) I'll be putting my workshop on this deck.  But I have champagne taste on a lemonade budget and finding the right workshop that ticks all boxes including price will take some research and even more saving.

The patio area is with selective vision not so terrible, put your blinkers on and it's bearable.

These old cable reels were picked from the bins of an electrical shop on the industrial estate I'm now working at.  They'll be handy little garden tables!

However I'm hoping we can afford this year to deck the patio and extend that deck over the crumbling weed ridden bank...

The man that can says it's an easy job to do but I just need to finalise my budget!

And there we have it.  It will take time and no small amount of effort and saving but this is the first year that I have an actual plan not just pie in the sky dreams.

Still without those dreams the plan may never have been made! 

More work on the garden....

Well not really work on the garden but a clear out of the front shed to move the corner unit to the back garden on which Im hoping to grow a few herbs.

There's not much to show for the couple of hours it took me to clear the front shed out, sort and re-pack...out the back it looks even worse than when I stared this week as the kiddos have been out 'helping' me and this has involved a lot of riding bikes and scooters across what was the grass (its now just a mud patch)

{It gets a bit like this every year but they love going out so I learn to embrace the mud - after all mud is fun!}

So the fruits of my work yesterday in the garden are just this

before - a general mess, the corner dumping ground for the patio

And after...

You'll just have to take my word for it that it looks nicer than this, I did get rid of last years bunting which you can just see hanging drabbly on the fence.

I am sorry that it's been all garden and planning over the past couple of posts, but I am pretty excited to be working towards another long held ambition!

And so it begins...

After this sunrise this morning I was determind to make a start on the garden!

I'm not kidding you when I say the garden has endured 14years of abuse from the kiddos and only a smatter of attention from me, and certainly very little of anything good for the past few years

It is small and unruly.

(sounds like my youngest 3!)

As most of the growing is to be done in gro bags and sacks the need to toil the soil is small...which is good as the only patch to toil is a long narrow strip on the wall!

I was so keen to get stuck in that I didn't take before photo's but took a few afters...

although this a patch that will stay untouched, below the clematis and honeysuckle where our strawberries have rooted themselves

This is the little patch I hope to grow enough pumpkins to see us through Halloween this year

 And this is an idea of the after-trail little helping hands leave in the garden

I pulled out so many weeds, some skinny grass types and a few really sturdy dandilion ones.

The soil this side of the rose bush is not too bad as I used to grow Cape Daisies in it and look after it reasonably well, the other side of the rose is another story.  The main weeds have been removed and a couple of large unknown plant roots where pulled out.  There is however a tiny little tree that has self seeded and grown quite well in our neglect :)  A bit too much to pull out, I gave the roots a good old thrashing with the fork and will keep and hope we can get rid of it.

That's it for now, not much I grant you but a start.  

Thankfully the mild weather has left the soil OK to dig and I hope to get to the local dump to buy a couple of bags of compost from them in the next week or so to dig that into this little patch!

The 3 gro sacks will I hope sit on a sunny spot I have on the patio

1 for carrots 

1 for garlic and onions

and the final 1 for Butternut Squash

This will leave the patch of grass we have intact (well whatever we have left after the chooks are set free) for the kiddos and Cube.

OK I'm getting ahead of myself perhaps...next job in the garden a plank of wood down the pumpkin patch fence, to prevent the weeds from next door creeping through and give a support for the chicken wire to attach to...then to dig the compost or manure in.

There are a lot of jobs to do and I need to get them into order so I don't waste time and energy

or money!

Sew the seeds and scatter?...

OK I'm pushing on with my own personal 'wanties' for this year!

Chooks are still looking good to be here with us at the start of February (fingers crossed and all that)

So onto another long term aim...

grow your own.

Our garden is fully south facing, very hot and sunny in summer but as we are located on the edge of a small hill we get a LOT of wind.

Patio is fully in sun most of the day and strawberries and tomatoes have done well on there in past, plan is to put them onto shelves to keep them above chook height and the shelving will make an easy frame to attach net to if we need to? (that's the theory anyway)

I would like to grow

strawberries

tomatoes

onions

carrots 

butternut squash

pumpkins (for Halloween)

Now that all sounds reasonable to me, but we have a very small garden that will soon be home to that gals and must leave a bit of room for the kiddos to play out in etc.

I have 3 of these from a failed attempt at growing potatoes a few years back

Now Im hoping I can grow carrots, onions and garlic in those.  They move around quite easily and I think we could if needed make a simple cane frame to go around them for netting if needed

Strawberries and tomatoes I was planning on growing in gro bags on patio (as I mentioned above)

Pumpkins can grow on the old flower bed/wall next to fence to neighbours  - very easy to keep chooks and kiddos away from them

and that will just leave a place to find to put the squash?

Absolutely NO IDEA yet where to put these...off to check Grow Your Own Veg - Carol Klein to see what's recommended!

I figure that if I put my plans out here in the open arena then there is more chance that I wont wimp out...we'll see, we'll see!

Feeling Broody...

Oh I almost wish my mum was computer literate just so she could read that title!

I have a wicked side to me for sure...

As much I would love to add to our family I am happy to now wait for grand-children...(well just about happy to!)

So this year, 2012 will see me fulfill a long held wantie.

Yep wanties is a real word no matter what the spell checker keeps telling me!

At the end of the month I have one of these bad boys coming home to us (eeek how excited am I?!)

Ours is coming to us at least 2nd hand and in blue and will be home to our new gals.

I can safely state that I have been wanting one of these for at least the past 8years, I had always hoped that we would get the smaller eglu but have managed to get our hands on a larger cube which means more room for a couple more gals!!

Not sure what breed of hens we'll be getting, a friend of Bob's has a farm with 4,ooo and we will be taking pot luck with a few of them

For now the aim is to keep them as laying hens, family pets who will keep the slugs and lesser wanted bugs under control!

(but who knows if the welfare reform bill goes through and our income is drastically reduced it may well mean we may have to consider raising them for dinner as well? )

I'm hopeful that by my birthday (early February) we will have the hens fully settled in

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