Garden (part III) skipped from mid-2008 to Spring 2009. Not much changed. Then the house got pummeled by the worst winds we've ever experienced up here. Bugger the view! We needed shelter. So I bought dodonaeas and acacia cognatas and planted them along the front fence about a metre apart in two rows. Fast growing, wind-tolerant, they just needed to get tall...
I also sourced around 300 natives that were wind-tolerant, bird-attracting, had appealing foliage and/or flowers and planted out most of the space in front of the house in two flanks - one on the east, another on the west. That was October 2009 - the plants went in as tubestock, so no more than about a foot tall.
Then, in late November Andy returned. Plans were afoot to convert the carport into two extra rooms - a bedroom for the best little helper, and a study - and that meant making space for a new carport. Andy excavated a cutting in the hill and used the fill to build up some of the front yard near the western planter box. He also stripped the topsoil off the strip between the house and the vegie patch. We'd found that it was angled so that it collected water and brought it back towards the house. So Andy fixed that and broke up the clay substrata to allow freer drainage.
To stop water pooling in the opposite corner - between the vegie garden and where we park the cars - I needed to put in a drain. So, I dug a trench with the little helper, laid a slotted pipe and covered the whole lot with gravel. We also had to move the vegie garden just a touch...
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