Gardening

I haven't posted for a while because my time has been devoted to lesson planning/teaching and to gardening. I want to learn as much as I can from my sister (the landscape designer - she calls herself a gardener) while she is staying with us. We have been putting many hours into the garden.

Here is an image of a earlier successful experimental plot where the blackberry and other invasive species were pulled out, the grass cut short then newspapers and bark mulch laid on top. Once the rains start it can be planted to convert it back to forest but this has taken a year to get to this stage.

If you look hard you can see the hose and little orange flags marking the new line of one of the cultivated beds closer to the house. We are making the beds a more interesting shape and reducing the amount of lawn because it is very expensive to keep a green lawn over the summer in Victoria.

Here is a bed that has been extended with Donnel's potent mix of layers to suppress the grass and build up new soil: a thick layer of wet newspaper/paper/cardboard, next - old grass clippings, then a layer of coffee grounds (yes, we have been collecting large bags of them from the coffee shops we frequent), then a layer of green weeds, and now we wait for a layer of fall leaves. The grass underneath is already turning yellow.

Here is another extended bed, though that ugly line on the right has to be corrected.