Gardening and catching up

6:29 PM No Comments

After the floods and constant months of rain, we seem to have had a reprieve for the last two weeks, which has been good, allowing everything to dry out a little.  It has also allowed us to complete a few chores and get stuck back into the garden.  I have to hold my hands up here, Toni does 80% of the work in the garden, I just help out from time to time with the heavy lifting.

Rock Steps and Wall
I finally managed to get the rock wall and steps finished, it had been sitting at about 90% complete for 2 months or so.  I needed more stone and had not been able to get out because of the wet weather to source any, but with the rain abating, I did.   Hopefully the steps and wall will outlast me.

Rock Steps and small retaining wall  replacing rickety wooden originals

Back into the Garden

Starwberries about to be planted out

Toni had been getting a fair bit done in the garden, this mornings chore involved transplanting about 20 Strawberry runners.  

Collecting the "trained" runner from the old bed

We had dug the garden bed away, replaced lots of the soil with decomposed cow manure, compost and decomposed chook manure and straw, then covered it with newspaper, planted the 20 or so runners Toni had trained into seedling pots, into the new "soil" through the newspaper, then mulched well on top to keep the weeds down and moisture in.

The strawberries had been taken from another bed, the runners encouraged to grow into small seedling pots, left to grow in the pots, then planted out in the new bed.  Hopefully they will proliferate under the Mandarin tree.  This is something new we are trialing, knowing the Strawberries are understory plants, hopefully they will thrive in the new position and produce good berries for a few years to come!

The tomatoes seem to be coming along nicely, the cherry tomatoes are supplying us with heaps of fruit at the moment, with the other patch,

Tomato Patch

 a mixture of Tigerilla, Black Russian and Roma tomatoes.

Baby Chickens
We have had several lots of baby chickens hatch in the last few months, and here is the latest batch.

Mother and three babies !

Hopefully a few of them will be females, to supply us with yummy eggs !

We are supposed to be killing our first chook for meat next week, a young male from the very first batch of chickens we hatched, he has just started crowing, so we will see how that goes !