Brigitte’s autumn hideaway

Posts Tagged ‘garden’

In the last post I already mentioned Christoph cutting trees to make space for our new veggie garden.
So today he was busy working on a raised bed.

It is pretty long because this will be in the back the whole length of our future veggie garden.

Christoph worked by hand to get all the long screws into the wood when the power left the screwdriver… yes, he never gives up

The finished work is absolutely brilliant!

We made layers with all the scrap material of the garden…

…and then a thick layer of our wonderful compost hip.

The last layer was made of organic compost from Mitre 10 (Later we will add some mushroom compost ;- )

When time comes we will make 3 more raised beds in the front but from back to forth.

Meanwhile I have a wonderful place for my salad, kitchen herbs and other things I will sow

Our garden is still blooming and that’s how we found out the name of our mystery plant!

It is called ‘Ginger Lily’ in Australia and  here you can see some pictures of the flower in bloom.
One mystery solved and another arose when we found this plant.

We have no idea what it is and are waiting for her to bloom.
She is in the end of a section were we build our new garden beds.
The sun doesn’t shine in the veggie garden anymore since she is traveling in a lower arch.

Christoph chopped down some trees and now we will make five raised beds.
It is a section were the sun shines the whole day (especially without the cut trees

There is a lot of live around our house and we enjoyed to see this huge female stick insect!

We gave it onto the black currant bush so nobody would accidentally stand on it.

Since we planted our swan plant we also had a visit from a female Monarch butterfly…

… and as you can see she was busy

Summers can be hot and dry and we all have to use the water wise. You can help by bathing your kids in a herbal bath (use a big container as bath they will like something unusual and you can teach them to be water wise in an early stage ;- ) and then use the water for the garden.

Peppermint geranium or other scented flowers smell really beautiful in a bath.

You could also collect the water when you have a shower. Stand into a suitable container (like the one in the picture below) and use the water for plants afterward.

Keep a bucket in your bathroom. If you use warm water for brushing teeth, collect the cold water in the bucket and then the warm water in a cup for brushing your teeth.
Collect also the rain water of the roof with barrels or other containers.

Cover the water collector with a fine netting or plastic foil so insects don’t drown.
With one night rain we had this little container full. We will buy some barrels so we can collect all the water we need for the garden. Don’t worry if the water is yellow or orange, that’s from the pollen which may stick on your roof.

Christoph was very busy and now all cut trees and other twigs are processed. Here he used our bench as alternative for a  saw horse

It worked well

We started to remover the tree trunks from the fence to make a space for our Feijoas.

The trunk trail looks good and now we have a place behind them to plant my avocados

While digging we found another larva.

There are quite a few interesting insects and we are always surprised to find such big ones

This corner of the garden we leave for the birds an who ever enjoys to come by (we actually had a wild rabbit snooping around!)

David is cute, here he is telling me what he is doing…

… he is harvesting Kawakawa fruits (unfortunately they are not ripe yet…)

Anyway, there are still many fruits higher up on the shrub and I am already excited to see them ripen (they are orange and edible when ripe)

Here is Davids proud harvest

Funny, but he is the only one from my kids who collects herbs and flowers.
Maybe he is the next herbalist in our family

Have you ever studied the basil blossoms?

They look quite fancy

In our garden grows this beauty I don’t know.

It ‘s like a little shrub with this big pink flowers and elliptic leaves.
Maybe I can identify them after a visit in a garden center, but if you can help me I would be really happy

I love roses and be so happy we already have some old plants in the garden. This one smells delicious like raspberry

We are also lucky to have a blue hydrangea in the garden (the others are all white)

In the Mediterranean corner I let the pink oxalis grow along the fence which looks really gorgeous.

And in the front of the house we discovered this lily! Amazing how many different plants there are…