Garden News March 2008

It’s been a month of hard work, the new front garden is finally complete and Judy has started to put in the plants, it is a nice addition to the garden and will be very colourful when the day Lilies are in full bloom.
As usual it cost about twice as much as I planned and that’s doing it all myself.
The price of good soil has gone up, now costing $57 a metre; the new garden took 11 metres all hand shovelled into place.
There was cementing, paving stones, another shade area, a trellis to hide the new water tank, a post for the dragon fruit, hot house, and bridge over drain.
That was the last major job in the garden, still plenty of small jobs to do which all go together to improve the garden.
One thing I am really looking forward to is a weekend where I am not shovelling soil, I seem to of been doing this forever and my bones are telling me that I need a break.
I wish I had a dollar refund for every metre of stuff I have brought in; I think I could have been very rich.
March has been very dry and we are back to hand watering, it’s a pity because the sub soil is becoming dry again.
The bugs are still really bad, grasshoppers, caterpillars, grubs are eating everything and the cockatoos have just about finished off this years crop of pecan nuts.

Garden News February 2008

I have my boat being serviced, I have come to the realisation that the garden is starting to own me, so I am determined to go prawning/fishing at the very least once a month. I have almost finished the new front garden and have decided on the new feature for the back garden, it’s going to be very simple, a little difficult to put into place, will look very natural and WILL stand out as a feature. I had toyed with the idea of a garden statue but thinking about it statues are not really my style.
On Sunday 3/2 we had 175mm of rain in the morning, all my drains worked very well as the rear patio remained dry. It was really strange not to be completely ‘shagged’ by Sunday night.
I spent most of Sunday cleaning up the shed and repairing prawn cast nets.
More heavy rain during the week, by Wednesday we had 300mm, almost 12 inches of beautiful rain, cannot ever remember so much rain in such a short time. All tanks are full, a whole 65,000 litres in storage.
The front is too wet for a truckload of soil to be delivered for the front garden so I have been trimming fruit trees and doing other garden tasks.
I have had to hand mow for the past few weeks and was glad to get my ride on mower back, but at a price, over $700, of that nearly $500 in parts, a drive belt is $140, it wants to go well for the next few years.
Towards the end of the month we had a day where the temperature reached 42c and it was very hot, all the plants started to wilt in the heat.
In the space of a week the lawn grubs have destroyed a major part of my back lawn, I have never seen so many insect pests as there are at the moment. Grasshoppers are eating the cordylines, grubs in the crinnins and alocasias, cockatoos in the pecan’s and flying foxes in the longans, very frustrating gardening at the moment.