This weekend's achievements

Ta-da! I now have mulch paths to enable me to get to my berry garden bed without getting two inches of clay mud stuck to the bottom of my shoe. 

You can also see the future garden bed that still needs to have the rest of the weeds pulled up and then the gypsum/newspaper treatment before soil can be added. Unfortunately I don't have soil to make garden beds yet.

An updated view of the dwindling mulch pile, and the progress of the front mulch path that is slowly being built each weekend.

I also had my first decent harvest of more than just one type of fruit or vegetable. I'll grant you it's not much of each - one snow pea, three pods of peas, a handful of spring onions and a seedless Valencia orange (only one of two that grew on my very young tree). Yet I can't tell you how pleased I was!

Almond flowers and mulch progress

I only bought my dwarf almond tree a couple of months ago, but it's already flowering! I know it's not likely to 'fruit' in its first year, but I'm happy to know it wants to flower so early anyway.

This hopefully means it'll be inclined to continue flowering in later years when it is ready to produce almonds. 

It's taken a lot of weeding and mattocking out the deep weeds to get the next section ready for the gypsum, newspaper and mulch treatment. 

It's a bit easier to see the outline of the future garden bed now. 

First snow pea

It was tasty. I hope there's more to come! 

First snow crocus

I was so excited to see that my snow crocus has its first bloom! It's a variety known as Prinz Claus.

The size of the flower did surprise me though. Having never successfully gotten a crocus to flower before, I hadn't realised how small they are.

Mulch at last!

While waiting for the mulch to be delivered, I set up the tarp so I wouldn't lose too much of the mulch in the muddy clay soil underneath.

I also prepared the first section of the front path. (Please excuse the pile of concrete and brick rubble. I will be getting rid of it eventually.)

And then at last the mulch arrived!

I forgot to take a photo of the full pile before I started carting it to fill the front garden path, but in my defence I was trying to clear the footpath of the mulch that didn't make it onto the tarp.

I then filled the other pre-prepared areas. 

Lots of achievement satisfaction today. Still a lot to do, but I can see the progress made over the course of my week-long staycation. 

Mulch preparation update

Thankfully it remained dry enough today to get more done to prepare for tomorrow's mulch order.

The area near my future washing line is now ready for mulch to be put down. Due to the constant threat of wind and rain, I've had to weigh everything down with bricks leftover from when my house was built. 

I also finished weeding the area for the front path, and I put the large cardboard box I'd been saving down. (I realised later that I'd forgotten to apply the gypsum, so I had to pull it up and do it properly, but thankfully that didn't take too long.)

Beautiful fruit blossoms

   This morning, I was presented with the perfect opportunity to take photos of some of my fruit trees. In particular, my superdwarf Sunset peach and nectarine trees.

The Sunset peach tree is always the first to bloom. You can see the Sunset nectarine just behind it on the right. 

Funnily enough, despite the heavy bloom here, the Sunset trees were less prolific than last year (my first spring of owning them).

I just adore the tight bunches of flowers with the red/purple leaves.

A better view of the Sunset nectarine beginning to bloom. 

Close up of nectarine blossom. It's interesting how different it is to the peach blossom. Very pretty.

I'm hopeful for homegrown fruit this year!

Missing section of dampcourse is up

Last section of dampcourse installed! Of course it was only after I put it on that I realised that I'd bought a different size than the previous ones. Oh well, a little bit of extra height to protect the fence from the damp can't hurt.

Unfortunately it was rather wet for the rest of that day, so I didn't get to progress this any further. Each delay meant pushing back the day to order the mulch and start getting it down. I was getting impatient with the incessant Melbourne rain.

Lots and lots of weeding and more preparation

My back and legs are aching, but at the end of today, I've nearly finished weeding the front yard (a lot of work was done on Saturday as well to get it to this point).

And I've started applying gypsum before putting down cardboard in the area next to where my future clothesline will be installed. I still need to affix dampcourse (the plastic barrier) to the gap between the two garden beds, and then finish the gypsum/cardboard treatment for the rest of the space before it too will be ready for mulch.