Our First Garden

As with Our Slow Retaining Wall (see here), I have a severe lack of photos to record the construction of our first garden. Fittingly, it was located along the top of Our First Retaining Wall.

 Here you can see the view across our neighbours' backyard, but I actually want you to look at the passionfruit vine that we planted, that's climbing along the top of that fence. While the house was still being constructed, we paid a visit to the Bunnings plant department, hoping for some inspiration (being garden virgins) as to what we might be able to plant to climb up our various fences. We ended up walking away with four $7.50 passionfruit vines, that we managed to keep alive while living at mum's house, but that got attacked one-by-one by our little dog-fiend, so only one remained (and I had to rescue it from outside its pot and store it in a fenced-off area in order to protect it). so, our one remaining passionfruit vine got planted eventually.

And turned into this.

Moral of the story? If you want a fast-growing, fruit-bearing, easy-to-care-for climber, passionfruit vines are awesome!! Just don't let anything with a tall stalk anywhere near my dog.

The main plant we planted in this garden that ran from the front right corner of the house all the way to the paved area at the top of our Slow Retaining Wall was the Metrosideros excelsa, commonly known as the New Zealand Christmas Tree. These plants have a lovely minty green leaf, and little red bottle-brush like flowers. They make a lovely hedge. You can see them here, if you can look past the Chinese Star Jasmine.

 

In the early stages, before the passionfruit vine went crazy, I had a very successful little herb garden going in this garden, nearest to the alfresco. It didn't flourish so well once the passionfruit vine cut off its access to sunlight, but it was great while it lasted. Plus, herbs aren't expensive to replace, and generally don't last forever anyway. The two plants in the front of the picture below are Yesterday Today and Tomorrows in pots, that later got planted in the front yard.

 My little chilli plant and some marigolds (very very very easy to grow marigolds from seeds, if you're interested).

 

Here is the garden while it's still in its fairly early stages (you can see the mess still in the front yard at the end of the path). I decided after a little while to plant some cherry tomato seedlings, and I'm going to deem that a mistake. Like the passionfruit vine, they went NUTS, except that in going nuts, they didn't bear much fruit, and involved constant violent trimming. So, they eventually got culled.

Here's a photo from the other end (once we'd done a bit of work in the front yard), where you can see the tomato plants a bit bigger.

And here is the result of one of the said violent trimmings.

This was the view down that side of the house (alfresco on the right) just as we moved out.

The path near the air conditioner under the kitchen window.

 

The very very very useful sprinkler system we attached to the tap along the Northern side of the house (which ran with tank water) to not only irrigate this, Our First Garden, but go on to irrigate the entire front yard, fence gardens, and curvy garden with the letterbox in it. Sometimes I think we're genius-es (genii?)

Given Allie's plant-destroying tendencies, we spent most of our time with some kind of makeshift blockage set up along the Northern wall of the house, to prevent her from entering the front yard and squashing all of our plants (note the dog mesh on the left prevented her from getting into our first garden). Eventually, we decided to get some old fencing panels that we had lying around (left over from the fence along the top of Our First Retianing Wall). We got the same guy that made our front gate to make it into a gate and panels to fit the space, powder coat them black, and add a little scroll on the top of the gate. Worked out nicely, don't you think?

 

The view from the front yard.

And that's Our First Garden!

Click here to see the Next House finished product