Gardening is good for your soul.

I have finally decided on the spot for Mum’s garden. I had to think about it a lot before I was happy with the position.

The first spot that I had chosen was always going to be too hard to protect from wallabies and possums and it was just far enough away from the house so that I wouldn’t have watered it as often as it needed.

Mum had a stone birdbath in her garden and when we were cleaning out Mum’s things prior to putting her house on the market, the spouse brought her birdbath home. For a couple of weeks it just sat in the middle of the yard, empty and waiting.

I worried that it would get knocked over or broken, so I asked David to move it down closer to the house so it would be safe and this is where it ended up.

The birdbath sat there in front of my frog ponds and neglected flower garden, for a few more weeks.Slowly I began to feel that this was the proper spot for Mum’s garden.The spouse erected a climbing frame for me and David rolled over some tyres for easy planting.

It is not easy gardening up here in the hills. We have severe frosts in winter and sometimes a few inches of snow as well.We are in a low rainfall part of the state and we have just come out of a horrible drought.Everything is generally brown, parched and crunchy by January and the  garden has to survive on the water I bucket out of the shower and washing machine.

The soil here is sandy bush soil on a rocky sandstone base, the soil repels the water rather than absorbing it and to say that gardening is challenging is a bit of an understatement.

But,I am an optimist and we have been gardening here for twenty years now so I have a fairly good idea of what will survive. I have my system for the ornamental garden down pat. I use tyres, old metal bins, baths and kiddies clam shells as garden beds and frog ponds and it all seems to work.

Normally I make the soil for the tyre garden by mixing together sheep poo and mushroom compost and half filling the tyres with it. Then I add a bag of potting mix and plant into that. Then I top dress with a layer of compost made at the local school farm. Finally I finish off with whatever straw or hay is available for mulch.

This time though I used bags of “pot luck poo” from the school farm, potting mix and powdered cow manure. I haven’t been able to find any decent mushroom compost locally and what we have found has been earmarked for the vegetable garden.I will have to wait and see how this lot goes without my favourite ingredients. I like mass plantings and so as well as the grape vines to climb over the frame I have put in an Italian lavender, penstemon, globe pumpkins, a giant sunflower and some petunias.

This year has been very wet. The drought is well and truly broken, everywhere I look the grass is thigh high and it is very easy to forget that it isn’t always like this.The roses are the best I have ever seen them and this is mainly because the wallabies have plenty of feed elsewhere and haven’t needed to eat them.

The spouse has been very busy up here getting ready for the bushfire season and I have just been grumping about the place building gardens and trying not to think about Christmas. We live in a very flammable part of the world and I have to keep that in the back of my mind as I plant out Mum’s garden.

It isn’t getting any easier going down to Mum’s empty house but I went down and raided her garden while the spouse mowed her grass. I dug out the Sweet Williams that were the last flowers mum planted and I have potted them up ready to share.

Mum’s friends have given me some plants and I am going to plant a red leucodendron and a white diosma in here. There are heaps of daffodills and irises in here already. I just need to pull out the grass and add some more manure to give the soil a bit of a boost.

So this is what I have been doing all December as I try not to think about Christmas.

If you walk around the corner from this photo you come to my kitchen garden.

This is protected from the frost by a roof of laserlite and finally after twenty years of struggling against the frosts I can grow capsicums and cucumbers.

And this last photo just makes my fingers itch. I have just cut back a crop of broad beans from here as well as pulled out a heap of old silverbeet plants.I used one of the precious bags of mushroom compost to give the soil some oomph and I will plant bush cucumbers in here later on this week..

I have just given the occupants of this garden a really hard prune. Two wheelbarrows full of clippings went down to the chooks.Normally I would freeze some silverbeet just in case, but I have just discovered Kale and it just crops and crops and crops so I don’t have a shortage of fresh greens for the table at all. Here is the kitchen garden after my big tidy up.

And here is Amy’s happy hen.