As any of you who know me will realise, the "Making it in Mandurah" words on the right of this blog are somewhat tongue in cheek. For many people around these parts "Making it" seems to mean holidaying in Bali and owning a huge house, a huge vehicle, his 'n' hers jetskis plus and various other things I am not the slightest bit interested in.
My version of "making it" is considerably more modest and involves having time to, well, make things including our vegetable garden and good meals. I am happy to report that in gardening terms, we have recently met a couple of criteria I set myself and have officially made it.
Late autumn and early winter are great times in the garden here as the temperature stays in the twenties or below and it rains fairly frequently and heavily. This means that we have finally got to the point where our garden is providing most of the vegetables we eat. Given that we started with a sand dune this is no mean feat. Every morning I head out into the garden with my colander to pick salad greens for our packed lunches. Every evening I head back out there to harvest more food for our evening meal.
I have been repeating that pattern over
and over
and over again
for several weeks now. The big winners have been kale, chinese stirfry greens, chillies, beans, rocket, mizuna, herbs and pumpkins.
But I set myself another criteria when it comes to "making it" in the garden. Our garden must also be a great and safe place for local wildlife to live in and visit. I've been on a couple of courses about creating wildlife-friendly gardens (thank you City of Mandurah) and read about how various chemicals can be problematic for wildlife so we've given them all a big swerve.
We have succeeded in attracting numerous birds to the garden and we now also have masses of lizards. There is one creature I am not too excited about. Here is a calling card it left us in the shed.
Yes that is a (tiny) snake's shed skin. Our planned frog pond is still just a concept but frogs have moved in anyway. In the evenings we hear a chorus of burrowing frogs in the front garden (put put put) and here is a motorbike frog who has recently shifted into the back garden (vroom vroom vroom).
I woke in the night with a raging temperature to hear a Boobook owl right outside the window (bookbook bookbook bookbook) and today I'm just admiring our garden from the great indoors (and mucking around creating repeating patterns) as I have woken up with a lurgy. I've swapped my work day for tomorrow and was still in bed reading when I heard a squeeeak in the driveway then the cheery hellooo of a friend who had popped by while out doing chores. She's never popped in unannounced before and was a little apologetic about doing so. I however was delighted and would have loved to have said "coffee?" and welcomed her in despite the fact that my house is messy and I am wearing PJs and have bedhair like a crazy chicken, but we thought it best that I don't share my germs.
It is three years today since we left New Zealand. I still dearly miss my NZ friends especially my closest "swing-by" friends. The fact that I finally have a swing-by friend here means that I really am making it, at least by my definition.
Here is a bit about an ongoing project that has been keeping us out of mischief lately.
Now that the front garden is planted, thriving and no longer an embarrassing eyesore, we turned our attention to the back garden. Now that area was looking pretty bad. By the time we moved in last year the grass was waist high and by the time my mother visited a few weeks later I had simply smothered the long grass with all the old curtains from the house (pure linen from Liberty of London but brown, floral and well past their use-by date), newspaper and cardboard.
There was method in this madness. The soil in this part of the world is some of the most gutless and nutrient poor in the world. Imagine trying to garden on a beach and you'll get the idea. This wasn't an issue in the front garden because there we planted local natives but out the back we wanted to grow food. The first job was therefore to create soil. This we did by piling yet more free tree pruner mulch on top of the curtains/newspaper/cardboard to kill the grass and help it to decompose. We also added whatever other organic matter we could to the soil including the contents of our Bokashi buckets, used coffee grounds which I collect from a great new local cafe (yes, another one!) and finally after hunting for a year for some, many bales of pea straw. I've also discovered some amazing stuff called Sand Remedy which is a combination of powdered clay and minerals which helps sandy soils retain water and prevents the depletion of nutrients. Quite a long process when really all I wanted to do was stick some plants in the ground.
The other complicating factor is that our neighbourhood is still on septic tanks. We knew this was likely to change soon but in the meantime we didn't want to do anything that would bust the existing system, such as plant fruit trees in the wrong place. It also means that whatever work we do there may need to be dug up when the new sewerage system goes in. So nothing is permanent, just placed on the ground so it can be moved at a later date. After a visit from the Dunny Doctor I knew where to plant and where not to plant. As of yesterday this is how it is looking.
We simply reused materials that were already on the property including the old water tank as a woodshed, an old shed that was right down the back of the garden to house the garden tools, a friend's gifted firewood stash to make climbing frame teepees (the timber is jarrah) and various old pavers and roof tiles used to make paths and edge the beds.
The garden looks quite bare in those pics but it is already producing a fair amount of food. We have basil, coriander, mint, rosemary, Thai basil, rocket, curly parsley, flat leaf parsley, chives, spring onions, spinach, silverbeet, five types of lettuce, strawberries, Tahitian lime, lemon, feijoa, butter beans, French beans, peas, peppers, chillies, pumpkin, courgettes, cucumbers, watermelon, tomatoes, lemongrass, various other things I have forgotten and also a whole bunch of flowering plants to attract beneficial insects.
It is obviously still a work in progress and we have a long way to go but given that this was our starting point
we have also come quite a long way.
