I first started work on the garden in early 2006, and thought that starting with a clean slate would be easy. This, to me anyway, proved more of a challenge than I originally had considered.
Areas of the garden include:
Vegetable Garden.
The vegetable garden was one of the first areas to be developed in the garden. It was designed around a similar vegetable garden that I saw during the open garden at ‘Murdeduke’ near Winchelsea, Victoria.
(Photo: August 2006)
My daughter helped with the maths side of things and some of the labour. The soil was from the large heap of scrapings (sawdust, rice hulls & manure) off our calving pad which had been stockpiled for composting over several years. (This same soil has been used to build up all of the garden beds). I grew all of the Oz Box hedge from cuttings from a friends garden.
(Photo: May 2008)
The Orchard.
I decided to plant an orchard early so that fruit trees would be established if we decide to live here one day. There are plans to extend the orchard this winter (2008). This has mainly come about by the fact that crows have ripped up most of the area to the east of the existing planting. They were digging up and eating cockchaefer grubs. Varieties of fruit trees planted include: Apples (Golden Delicious; Jonathon; Gravenstien; Twenty Ounce; Cox's Orange Pippin & Crab Gorgeous), Pear (Sensation), Plums (Green Gage; Coe's Golden Drop), Peach (Elberta), Nectarine (Goldmine x 2), Cherry (Stella), Apricot (Moorpark) and a Black Mulberry.
The Floral Garden
The garden area in front of the building is only about 12 months old, with some of it still being completed.
Lawn chamomile has been planted along the path leading to the arch. Landscaping roses in front of the Shop are ‘ Many Happy Returns’ & ‘Golden Touch’ (Treloar's Roses, Portland), with the standard roses being ‘Gold Bunny’ (not seen in this photo). The climbing Roses on the arch are ‘Westerland’ (Treloars).
The garden includes quite a number of roses including:
Hedging roses along the carpark which are ‘Lavender Dream’ & Hiedeschnee’ (Treloars)
Landscaping roses along the front boundary are ‘Pink Bassino’ (Treloars) which are growing in front of a hedge of Escallonia Iveyii.
A large garden bed in the centre of the lawn is filled with a variety of perennials including: penstemons; fox gloves; daisies; alstomerias; lavenders and many different bulbs.
Problems
Wind is the greatest problem that I have to deal with at the moment. Attempts to establish wind breaks has been difficult as the trees battle against strong south westerly winds. Both deciduous and evergreen trees have been planted with mixed results.
These seaside daisies create a great gound cover under the 3 silver birch.
(aerial photo: May 2008, Bruce Martin)
