Gardening

So my housemate Random loves to have a veggie garden.  Winter is loosening it's cruel grip here in Melbourne so it's time to start planting the Spring garden.

I love some fresh veggies myself so I'm joining in.  I'm leaving all the cerebral "what to plant where" decisions to him and I'm just joining the fun stuff like choosing which veggies to plant, preparing the beds, and watering the plants.  And of course sharing in the eating of anything we successfully produce.

So last Saturday we spent a few hours discussing and paring down the list of items to plant to something manageable for both the size of our garden (8 metres of berry canes was sadly not considered workable this year) and our attention spans (2 years to grow asparagus might be a tad too ambitious for us amateurs).

Then we went outside, and started to clean up the beds from last season. No-one had touched the garden over winter so there was a bit of work to do.  While discussing "full sun requirements" and I was feeling oh so proud of myself for using technical terms :) we figured out the compost heap should really be moved. It's currently in prime planting position.

So we set up a new compost heap up the back.  Here is the photographic proof.

This was the site we selected. It's up the back corner away from everywhere else and tucked away at an odd angle because of the fencing. As you can see overgrown.  Random said he tried to dig and plant in it last year, but the soil is pure clay.

Having cleaned out all of the rubbish plants, I turned the soil over with a pitchfork. I can guarantee it is a heavy thick clay. Not a soil.  Oh it was a yuck that clung to the bottom of my shoes in a two-inch layer that had to be scraped off. However the good news is that we found some worms on the clay, so this could become good soil.

Next was picking out all of the non-organic matter. As this is up the back corner, we think previous people may have used it as a rubbish pile - awesome!  And then Random put on a layer of newspapers.  As we are a household full of techno-literates, this layer is mostly composed of junk mail so thank you Good Guys and Bunnings :)

Finally we wet down the layer of newspaper and threw all of the rubbish plants back on top to start the new compost area. Ta Da!

Flush with our success, we though we'd just start one of the side beds and just pull a plant or two, just to make a start for a couple of minutes before calling it a day ...

Yeah. We did a liiiiitle more than just a couple of minutes.

Finally while I was raking some leaves and cutting suckers from that tree in the background of that picture, Random dug over most of the earth in the foreground and planted some peas.

It was a dry day, with the sun out, but the sun had little warmth in it. We work consistently, but we didn't push ourselves.  The digging up of the ground under the compost heap was the hardest work I did and it barely raised a sweat.  I did exhaust myself but I felt good for spending the day outdoors.

The peas have been rained on or I've watered them every second day. So we will see what the next part of the garden project will be.