Almost there

After this lot, the lawn will be 3/4 finished... It is the project which Never Ends. 

The Great Wall of Adelaide.

Five meters down, only about 40m to go! We are busy packing all the rocks we've dug up back in behind there, and later on (today? In my dreams!) I'll plant my plum trees in the level we've created. A long way down the track the wall will be rendered to attempt to beautify it, but for the time being we are concentrating on the structure only (the 'bones'). Naturally, yesterday when D didn't have a day off the weather was absolutely perfect. Today, when he's home to help its warm, sunny and very, very, very windy. Not half an hour after I was admiring the gorgeous purple and fuchsia flowers on my Japanese snow peas they were swept off their trellis, bending and breaking half way down. Pooh!

Getting organised.

Look what I spent the afternoon doing: laying out my future vegie garden! The boards are temporary markers - just old weatherboards from the old cladding - but when we build the real beds they'll be made out of recycled hardwood boards (donated by our old neighbour for getting rid of the pine tree). Each bed is about 1m wide by 2m long so I'll have 8m square of dedicated vegetable growing area, although I'm sure I'll keep squeezing random vegies into other patches of the garden.

After I took this photo I got to work digging out a bit of a ramp on the right hand side and levelling out the area where the beds will go (terracing them though in a disorganised 'make it up as I go along' kind of way, Katie-style). It got dark while I dug but I was on a roll so we set up FIL's spotlight and kept working for another hour. Now I have blisters and a warm sense of self-satisfaction for a lot of dirt moved today.

A bit grim out there today

You'd have no real idea from this picture just how cold and wet and windy it is outside today. There are the raindrops on the window (for I was standing outside to take this) and a bit of a wet sheen on the paving.


I am torn between going to the shops (to do some SP-free girly shopping, nice but not necessary) and staying inside in the warm looking at pictures of gardens on Pinterest (not Productive). I am also hoping this sideways rain doesn't wash our groundworks down the driveway.

You see, on the slightly nicer days we've had recently, D and I have been busy digging to make foundations for our retaining-walls-to-be. I say 'digging' but mostly I mean 'moving rocks.' You can see my original garden plan here, and for the most part the retaining (the darker lines in that image) will be about the same shape and in the same place, except for right up at the back fence where the ground is so rocky we have decided to forget about trying to make the wall go straight to the fence, and instead there is going to be a little raised area by the water tank where I hope to have a garden seat and some overhanging trees so I can sit up the back of the yard and admire the view (such as it will be: a completed view and organised garden, rather than the Shambles it is now.)

In the background you can see our unfinished chicken coop (a Work In Progress for over 6 months now, oops), the only passionfruit vine I have ever managed to grow well (on the fence), and where that lonely Styrofoam tub is is roughly where I am going to put my raised vegie beds once the retaining is done and that area is flattened out properly.


I am SO looking forward to having this done. It will be a big tick off the To Do list (a huge tick, in fact) and then I will no longer have a yard which looks like a building site. I can hardly wait!

(Winter countdown: 15 days left).