Lottie's Lot

After such a dry winter, it’s suddenly like we’re getting a winter’s worth of rain in the first week of spring.  Just when our garden establishment was scheduled.  With soil moving being the big task of the day Saturday, it would have been silly to go ahead.  So Christina came up with a Plan B: the Fimbaristas will come and place and fill the Colorbond beds FiMBY arranged & dig the bigger holes on a fine day during the week; we’ll do planting out next weekend. 

We met up with Christina at Chandler’s nursery to choose some plants.  We got:

• A self pollinating cherry ‘Starkrimson’
• A mulberry ‘Black English’
• A chestnut tree ‘George Sands’
• A gooseberry ‘Captivata’

We have now vowed to never go plant shopping without Christina again.  It made me realise how much I don’t know about just simply choosing a plant.  I tried asking questions and understanding what she was saying about plant structure and such, but it’s all so different for each plant and each situation I’d never be able to learn.  GAH!  Christina came back to our place to look over things again with the plan and make sure there were no questions that would need answering when we weren’t there.  It was bucketing down.  Lottie really wanted to be with the people, but she kept getting soaked then bolting back to the open laundry door and looking out at us.  People are really beyond understanding!

Lottie Doesn't Like Gardening in the Wet and Cold

Sunday we went and picked up the half wine barrels for our ‘Mediterranean Zone’, i.e. the top of the driveway where we’ll have some olives, a bay, and a fig or two in the ground.

Wine Barrels in the 'Mediterranean Zone'

The wine barrels were made at Mendocino Cooperage and the Barrel Records shows they were used by Fetzer.  So these barrels that started their life in California have wound up in our garden in Tasmania.  Of all places!

Barrel Record

We’ve done some back-and-forth with Christina at FiMBY to fine tune the garden plan.  Most of the veggies will be in 4 raised beds – they’ll each be a different colorbond colour.  They source a lot of their seeds from The Lost Seed, and we’ve enjoyed looking through their website at the different rare and heritage varieties they have.  Why have boring carrots when you can have Purple Dragons?!  Or same-old white cauliflower when you can have Violet Sicilian?!  So when we get to planting, we’ll be looking for more ‘interesting’ varieties.

But in finalising the plan we now have more destruction; the sickly psoralea at the top of the back garden will now be going. We’ll be putting a mulberry tree in the south west corner and have raspberries across the back fence from it to the large apricot.

Here’s the revised plan; you can see a larger version by clicking on it:

Here’s the plan for the 4 big raised garden beds:

https://lottieslot.tasgeocaching.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/cragg_planting_plan1.pdf

On Friday we recieved the garden plan from FiMBY for our comment! 

Garden Plan from FiMBY 

Raised Bed Planting Plan

We’ve made a few comments back and forth and it’s all coming together wonderfully.  And, even more exciting, it looks like garden establishment will be happening 4 September – hooray!

We’ve done a lot of work in our gardens over the years. It can be exhausting as well as rewarding, but we’ve decided to take the step of getting some expert advice in to help us establish our veggie patch.

Here’s a bit of a history of our garden food-producing wise. In addition to sorting out more decorative garden beds and completely re-doing the front garden, we have worked on edibles in the garden. I think my first attempt other than just plant pots was a wall of herbs (photo taken 4 April 2006):

Then I totally destroyed a garden bed and re-did this as a mostly herb but also occasional veggie patch (photo taken 20 May 2007)

That patch is still going. It always has fresh herbs to cook with and I sometimes get in snow peas or tomatoes. But we wanted to expand into veggies in a bigger way, so in September 2008 put in a small veggie patch in a different part of the back garden:

And even planted some raspberries:

But this is how we both have felt about it all:

Yeah – a bit overwhelmed. I don’t think it’s that we can’t do it on our own, but we work full time so it can be difficult to be inspired get into the garden on weekends. Plus some expert advice might help us avoid a few mistakes. So we contacted FiMBY. Christina came out to look at our garden on 12 June 2010 and to chat about what our vision for our veggie garden is. She will work with us to come up with a design for our veggie garden, help us establish it, then mentor us for a while. I was surprised how excited about it my husband was; I really thought I’d have to do a lot more convincing! FiMBY takes July off, so we’re hoping to get going in early August. I’m quite excited!

I’ve set up this website to document our progress.