Garden projects

A summary of things we've been doing on site to improve our land

While setting up the house has involved working around a lot of trades, the one thing we have been able to do is start cleaning up our block from weeds, planting new trees, and landscaping around the cabin.

First point of order was the thistles. We felt very smug getting them out well before they went to seed but turns out this superweed will accelerate its seeding as its dying, which happened while we had them sitting under a tarp before we took them to the tip. So potentially we created a super germination event for thistles next year, live and learn…

Then came planting native trees. We sourced some beautiful local flowering natives (banksias, grevilleas, wattles, dogwoods) from a nursery down the hill in Scamandaer, and found some very cheap tube stock Blackwoods and Needle-bush hakeas in the nursery at the St Marys Tip Shop. We salvaged wire and old tent pools from the tip shop for our first tranche of planting, and later sourced some fancy tree guards for the smaller more vulnerable tube stocks to keep the wallabies and possums off them.

We have concentrated the planting along the fence line both to provide more privacy in the future, and to block weed seeds blowing over from across the road where the blackberry and gorse is not being managed.

For a bit of fun we made some wildflower seed bombs and scattered them inside the old house foundation we have at the bottom of the block. Hopefully come springtime we will have a small field of flowers framed inside a concrete frame.

Next came shaping the area around the cabin. We started with sheet mulching a garden bed which will later be planted with native ground covers and grasses to frame the cabin.

We also spread decomposed granite around the gravel pad for a more natural look. Thankfully our neighbour has an excavator and made short work of what could have taken us weeks! He even lent us a Whacker, which helped us smooth out the area before the rain hit.

Then came the Bunnings run of the century. Our friend lent us his truck so we could bring back all the materials needed for us to install a shed and build a fence.

The shed was one of those kit “Easy Sheds” and that is the biggest lie ever. It was 3 horrible days of our lives we will never get back. 400 screws and so many flimsy sheets, trying to put this thing up with only 2 of us and limited flat space was a real mission. But we now have much needed dry storage which has allowed us to take some things out of the house, freeing up more space inside.

The final big task we had was to concrete in posts and install some privacy screens to enclose the space between the cabin and the road until our vegetation can grow in to fill those gaps.

Next to the shed we are building a utility area which will house a firewood stack and a washing line.

It's been fun playing with different natural textures and utilising what we had on site such as logs and rocks and left over crusher dust from the build. We can’t wait to see how the site recovers and grows back around this area. The plan is to let the bush come back to the edges of the cleared area and add more trees between us and the road (but that’s a job for next year now as we are soon out of time for our stint down south!).