Our 1 Acre – One Veggie Patch at a Time

The Rose Garden

June 9th, 2008 AndrewD

A few weeks ago I mentioned how I bought Lee-Ann a rose (rose in a bag) as she wanted a rose garden. So this weekend I knocked up the first one, we will see how that goes and maybe build some more. The position for the garden is right outside our dining room window facing north – as you will see in the photo it is right on the hard clay as well, so it was to be a raised bed.

Looking around what we had, some pieces of paneling, probably not enough but next to the fence some left over wood from the house. A single row of these thou would not make for a very high raised bed, so I would need to join two of them. And then make a frame for the garden bed itself.

The size I decide would be 3×1 and it should hold 5 rose bushes comfortably. I would join two pieces together by nails, hammering the nail half way in the first one, cutting the head of the nail off with some pliers and then ‘hammering’ the top plank in.

The wood with the nail half in

Building rose bed frame 1

Taking the head off

Building the rose bed frame 2

Nail with the head removed

Now the rose bed put together

Empty Rose Bed

The garden bed being filled up

Rose bed being filled up

Completed rose bed – there is now some mulch on to and we plan to get two more roses

Completed Rose Bed

Been a while

June 9th, 2008 AndrewD

I spent two weeks in Sydney, you see I normally return to Yass on the Thursday nite, but there were a few bike things I had to do last weekend for one the of the groups I am still a member of (BikeSydney – http://bikesydney.org) and I wanted to make it to at least one Sydney Swans game at the SCG (turned out to be the last Sunday game for the year at the SCG). Lee-Ann came down for the weekend and the inlaws stayed with the kids.

I’ll just say I drank far to much beer for two weeks. I need a couple of weeks detox.

Anyway all has now returned to normal and I returned on the Thursday nite train to Goulburn, Lee-Ann and the kids met me at the station and we had some chinese for dinner.

So whats happened, there are now 37 garlic – woohoo, now as long as they last till harvest. Some of the onions of sprouted. Broad beans seems to be going on OK. I have never grown broad beans before so not sure what to expect. Is 8 plants enough? I have planted a second lot of 5 plants (approx 4 weeks behind).

The other news being that we ate our first home grown broccoli and how fantastic it was, I waited until 30 minutes before we needed it so It was the freshest possible, and just steamed it with some butter. It was a side to a casserole I made.

The cauliflower is also coming up nicely (you can see it hidden behind the leaves) – I say we will be eating some in a week. We are doing grub patrol, as we have some green grubs on the plants. And every time we see one it gets the under the boot treatment.