After none of the sunflowers germinated, I opted to put in eggplant seedlings instead. I must shamefully confess that I bought the eggplant seedlings because the slugs and earwigs ate every seedling that I grew from seed myself. I did try to deter them but obviously their numbers were far greater than my efforts.
I resorted to growing some seedlings inside again and just praying my cat didn't destroy them with his curiosity like some of my earlier seed plantings. I managed to get a couple of cucumber seedlings that way.
So I planted the two cucumbers into the top front garden bed.
After looking around my alfresco I realised I have a fair few dahlias in desperate need of a proper home.
Remembering my friends' beautiful dahlia border along their driveway, I thought it might be nice to have a row of dahlias along the front of my garden. That way I'd be greeted by a row of colour whenever I come home.
Most of my dahlias hadn’t come up yet, so it was fairly easy to plant them with a roughly equal distance between them.
Behind them, I planted two rows of sunflower seeds. As I don't yet have irrigation in place, I had to water it all by hand, so you can easily see where the two lines of sunflower seeds were planted.
In the back garden, the pepino plants were trying to take over the large garden bed.
Whilst this looks mainly like more pepino plant, there is actually a pear tree behind it all! I'm not sure why only this section decided to grow up and over rather than along the ground like the rest of it did before I got around to tying it to the wire trellis that I have attached to the fence.
My kiwiberry vine has flowers! I know it's a lot to hope for, but just maybe I might get fruit? This particular kiwiberry vine is a variety known as Issai and it's self-pollinating, so it is possible.
I'm also amused to see my purple cauliflower had produced a tiny little cauliflower floret for me. I don't think I'll crack out the au gratin recipe just yet though.
Lastly, I was finally able to mulch the second berry garden bed. Having enjoyed the abundance of purple African daisies in the first berry garden bed, I decided to use the many different coloured African daisies sitting around my alfresco to create some visual interest between berry brambles in the second bed. This left one extra gap, but I solved that by putting in one of the many lavender plants that have been waiting for a home.
It looks much nicer now with the mulch to help keep the soil friable and moist through summer.
Some times you need to take a moment to see how much progress you've made, especially when you're tired after doing all the work on your own. Looking at the photos of the garden beds, I can clearly see how much I got done. Yet equally as satisfying is noting how the soil pile has shrunk in such a short time frame.
Saturday 8 October, 8:30am. Just after soil had been delivered:
Saturday 8 October, 7:22pm. After my first day of filling a garden bed in the back and starting on the main front garden bed:
Sunday 9 October, 1:07pm. As the winds ramped up even more and made further garden work impossible:
Monday 10 October, 3:25pm. After I finished the top of the main front garden beds:
Monday 17 October, 6:21pm. Having made a decent effort towards the bottom garden bed, I can now almost completely cover the soil pile with the tarp:
Sunday 23 October, 6:43pm. The pile after the bottom of the front garden bed was finished. I was finally able to get my car back into my garage!
Saturday 29 October 2016, 6:22pm. Not much is left after topping up the eastern side garden bed.
Sunday 30 October 2017. The pile was gone completely from the driveway. I didn't bother taking a photo of the empty driveway. There’s three garden beds that still need topping up, but they'll make do with last year's soil for now. They'll be a first dibs on the next soil I get, whenever that may be.
Have you ever had a seedling sprout in a pot or garden but it doesn't look like any weed that you recognise?
So then you leave it to grow a bit longer just in case it's something good.
Well, I had that happen in a pot that had a gaura bush in. This is what it turned out to be:
A beautiful red snapdragon. :D So glad I didn't pull it out!
