Didn’t get home till Sat this past weekend, A long week at work in which I stayed in Sydney an extra day and then Lee-Ann and the kids headed off to my mum’s house in Bundanon on Friday, as mum wanted to pick up some shoes and clothes for the kids, so instead of going to Goulburn or Yass I jumped off the train in Bundanoon.

Got home Sat and the patersons curse has shot up. Especially right behind the house, a sea of purple flowers. That rain last week really got them going. I think we will have to get the ’slasher guy’ back.

So on Saturday once home we hit the front yard and I made sure Lynsey the eldest came out and helped, it took 3 attempts for her to find suitable yard working clothes. Over the past few months I had built a small swale approx 10 metresinfront of the house with the clay/dirt that I dug up from my partly completed trench. The point of it is to help stop the rain water run off that goes under the house when it rains.

Also we had picked up a few native plants the other week and they needed to be placed in the ground before they died(too often Lee-Ann and I have picked up potted plants only to ignore them and they end up dead).

So with that we pulled out a bundles of newspapers that we had picked up from the local newsagent and started supressing the weeds around where the swale was. Once that was done we grabbed the mulch and mulched over the paper. Before mulching all over the clay we put the plants in with some extra soil around them, and then mulched over.

So what did we plant
For bookends on the swale Melaleuca armillaris (Bracelet Honey Myrtle), then working in from each end Prostanthere rotundifolia (Round-leaf mint-bush) and in the middle Eriostemon myoporoides. Anyone know if these are good for making tea? I do know that the round-leaf mint, when you rub yourhands over it they smell like mint.

So anyway another 10m2 of weeds that hopefully I won’t have to deal with.

Native swale in the front yard

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 11:24 am and is filed under Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.