InstaGarden

I have to start this by braggin' on the Big Fella a little.  He was up all day yesterday turning over the soon-to-be front garden soil, smoothing out the driveway and planting grass seed, and doing all kinds of physically exhausting things.  We then visited some friends briefly and came home to a phone call requesting he go to work... in 1 and a half hours!


So he worked overnight then finished our little project this morning, after taking the Little Big Fella up the road for breakfast and letting me have a sleep-in.  He has worked his butt off these few days (the day before he cleaned out and rearranged the back shed and under the house)!  Ain't no way you could call this man lazy!!!


So!  What has our little project been I hear you ask (although I'm pretty sure most of you have actually guessed and just want me to shut up and show you the pictures)?  Remember what the front of our place looked like when we first moved in?  Here's a reminder:

See those stones (under the weeds) in the middle of the driveway?  Well, we took the weeds out then the Little Big Fella decided that it would be fun to run all over them... every day and spread them all over the place.  This became annoying... very quickly!


So we had no gardens and we had those very annoying conifers on each side.


As well as the Great Pandanas Saga along the back fence, we also started building a little garden using some rocks we found up the road.

We re-shaped the garden edge after that photo and sprayed the grass with Round-Up (doesn't that just make us sound like farmers or something???).


So yesterday, as I mentioned before, the Big Fella turned over the dead grass.  We'd already removed the stones from the driveway and turned it over but the Big Fella smoothed it all out again (seeing that the puppies had been digging in it) and sowed some grass seeds.  We're hoping if we keep it fairly wet the puppies won't be interested in digging there for now.


And yesterday afternoon (and again this morning actually) we visited some friends, who are kind of the local unofficial nursery, and gathered some plants.  Over night (with an awful lot of effort from the Big Fella) we have an InstaGarden!!!  Check it out!

For those who are interested, on the left is a nighttime jasmine, then a flowering ginger, a foxtail palm and another flowering ginger.

And here they are from the other side of the fence :-)

Here's the garden on the other side of the front yard

And from inside the fence.  Some of these will grow quite tall, some will become bushes and some will stay short, so it should be a nice, balanced garden in the end.

A closer look at the plants

And in the middle of that garden bed

And the other end

Here's my amazing (exhausted) hubby, and my cutie son with Choccie (the female pup)

Now don't go thinking that's all!!!  We've been working hard on that back garden so we had to put something in there!!! :-)

These are our banana palms (yay!)

In the back corner is some bracken fern (I think) that we haven't decided what to do with so it's just been potted.  And in the pot 3rd from the front is an avocado tree!  We don't know where we'll put that either so it's "maturing" while we work it out :-)  The other pots are herbs and the plant in the foreground is a Basil, which has started going to seed.

The two trees are paw paw (papaya) and the pots all have herbs.

So there you go!  We grew a garden overnight... kind of.  One of the puppies has already dug up a bromeliad and had a good chew of it so we'll see how well everything survives puppies and transplanting.  Either way, it's nice to not have a bare, ugly yard now, and space to grow more food :-D