About

This blog aims to share my mistakes and successes of starting a garden from scratch. My partner and I bought our first house last year in Melbourne, and the garden consisted of weeds and dead plants so we had a clean slate to work with. This blog will take you through the planning, implementation, disagreements, successes and failures of our developing garden. Our garden consists of edibles (fruit and vegetables), natives, annuals, and the odd outlier plant. I hope you enjoy following this journey as much as I enjoy posting about it.

24 thoughts on “About”

    1. That’s great! Hope your arches are coming along well. It’s so rewarding watching everything shoot up happily. And it’s spring here now so everything’s flowering too!

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  4. Thanks for stopping by my blog! My husband and I have a small kitchen garden (aka container garden, or potted garden) on our back porch with bellpeppers, tomatoes, and various herbs – he loves to cook with the fruits of our labor!

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  5. Fantastic. I’m all for growing at least some of the food you eat, even if it just means a few herbs in a pot in the kitchen! I’m a nurse as well (and I too love food and exercise) so I’m sure we’ll learn plenty from each other!

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  6. Thanks for visiting, and Following me. I do enjoy hearing about people having the same problems as I am, even if the ‘buried treasure’ you dig up is brick and metal, and mine’s old bones and palm tree roots… I lived in Melbourne for 5 years, and grew all my vegies in big tubs in the front yard, because it wasn’t mine to dig up. So I have sympathy and fellow feeling for your 4-seasons-in-a-day climate. I have big plans for my vegie garden, but it has to wait till next year, after the Wet is over. We’ll have to exchange notes some time on what’ll grow there versus what grows up here… Kate

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    1. Oh my goodness, what’s with the old bones everywhere! I’ve dug up several animal/bird skulls – it’s a little eerie! It’s almost tomato season here – looking forward to getting my vegie boxes ready for some summer vegies! Enjoy your break from vegies – you can focus on your non-edibles for a few months. Thanks to you too for stopping by and following 🙂

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      2. Ahh, that makes sense. What a busy doggy he/she must’ve been! Makes my bone issue even more eerie though! This house has been lived in by many people so a dog could well have been the culprit in this situation too.

  8. Jen, do you know what has happened to The Belmont Rooster? His blog is not just down, it’s been deleted! I emailed him a few days ago to ask if he was OK and have heard nothing back. I wondered if you had any news… He’s such a conscientious, regular and prolific blogger that I find it hard to believe he just got fed up and binned the lot… I thought you might know, as you’re one of his award nominees.

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  11. In regards to Molly the Grevilla I would cut her right back and going by the attached link feed her some seaweed solution.

    Click to access growing_grevilleas.pdf

    I love your gardening blog and really enjoyed the story about you mowing the lawn and cutting the pipe; you certainly paint a good picture…I could see it all!
    I too am a keen gardener; doing it now nearly every day, seem to get side tracked from the boring chores. It is great therapy and good exercise. If ever you come to Qld would love to exchange garden tips and show you around my garden. I am Marilyn, Viv’s sewing buddy and my husband Syd went to school with Adam’s Dad. Adam know’s our two boys Brodie and Dane. Actually they bought me a chicken pen for Christmas and are in the process of building a fence around it and then we will be able to get the chickens and have fresh eggs. Dane has already named them Poached, Scrambled and Boiled.

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    1. Thanks Marilyn! It’s so nice to hear someone liking my blog. I don’t really think about other people reading it, I just type away, so it’s a lovely bonus to hear about someone else enjoying our little stories. Viv talks about you all the time, I feel like I know you! Thanks for the advice on my grevillea, I’ll definitely try that. I love the names of your future chickens! Enjoy them, they can be such characters!

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  12. Congratulations proud Mumma, I’ll show the boy’s the photo in the morning to inspire them to complete my chicken pen!

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  13. I’m exhausted; sitting down with a cup of coffee after a morning in the garden. Emptied my compost bin onto the vege patch and emptied one of my worm farms. I now have three in polystyrene boxes and they produce wonderful fertilizer.
    Every time a polystyrene box appears from something, another worm farm. All I have to do is feed them the kitchen scraps and they keep multiplying. So what should I do when replenishing my energy; read Jen’s Gardening blog; I think I’m addicted to gardening. Loved the story about the tomatoes and the Italian fruit shop. My tomatoes have finished now after making lots of sauce but I do have some rather large pumpkins growing in size. I had to plant lots of flowers to attract the bees to my garden and finally pumpkins! The flowers also attract butterfly’s. I guess everything is happy in my garden after all the rain we had last weekend.

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    1. I’ll definitely have to pick your brains about worm farms at some stage. When we build our new shed we’ll have more space and I want to get a compost system and/or worm farm going there. Worm farms just seem so space efficient which would be great for us! I’ll have to get your tomato sauce recipe too! I suppose you got all the rain from Marcia? Hope she didn’t do any damage (guessing you’re too far south for damage?). Enjoy watching your pumpkins grow 🙂

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  14. Fence Saga

    Example of Bamboo hiding a fence

    http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/factsheets/
    Gardening Australia
    Presenter: Josh Byrne, 11/04/2015
    Josh gets stuck into some essential maintenance on bamboo

    Tidying
    “One of the best performers has been a Hedge Bamboo (Bambusa multiplex ‘Alphonse Karr’) and I put it in as a screen to provide privacy along a boundary fence and you can see how well it’s done. It’s grown up right above the fence line which is where I wanted the privacy, but now it’s time to come through and clean up underneath to really show off those glorious golden stems.”

    Josh strips back the loose leaves to expose the fresh growth. “This is a clumping type bamboo, but it’s important to note that they can still spread and damage things, concrete-edged planter which is why I’ve got it planted in a to keep it contained and stop it from pushing over the fence or busting up the deck.”

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  15. The ongoing fence saga: I have a friend that has exactly the same fence line as you with exactly the same piece of dirt between the fence and concrete footpath. She has planted a clumping and non-invasive variety of bamboo called Bamboozle. It looks pretty looking out the kitchen window and grows to a height of 3 metres.

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