Gratuitous picture post - part the second

So part two of the gratuitous picture post brings you the back yard of chez moi. We're lucky to have such a fabulously large yard, and the previous owners were pretty damn green-thumbed, so we've got a good beginning to work from. They were also keen vegetable growers, which has made it much, much easier for us to get started this planting season.



I've always had a bit of a dormant obsession with growing my own vegetables. We had a go once when we were kids, and managed to produce one lettuce that ran very quickly to seed, and a couple of very peculiar looking carrots, that had somehow grown out rather than down, and therefore looked rather like orange turnips. Not a crashing success.



Right, picture post, less rambling... on with the pictures, then.






The West Indian Lime planted and watered into the citrus circle. I'm hoping it will have enough room there between the lemon tree and the edge of the patio, time will tell I guess. I have vague plans to prune both the lemon trees at some point since they are a little unruly, so I suppose we can always make it more room that way if needs be.



First and foremost, I'm a crazy cat lady. No post about my yard could possibly be complete without the inclusion of one of our little darlings. This is Maddy supervising Michael in the vege patch. She quite likes to just sit there, so I think we're going to have to watch out for her when we actually plant. She doesn't use it as a bathroom or dig or anything, just sits there. But I can't see the veg liking that too much.

Michael showing the weeds who's boss. Once he got into it, they seemed to come up pretty easily, and the soil beneath them is pretty nice - as I said before, we're lucky that the previous owners were also vege growers so a lot of the hard stuff is already done for us! On top of that, the area we live in was a combination of orchards and grazing paddocks before the houses were built in the late 1970s, so its land that has been used for cropping of one kind or another for around 100 years.
This is where I'm going to put my tomatoes in, as the wall retains a lot of the heat from the full sun it gets, and we can grow them up a trellis attached to the wall which is a bit more attractive than stakes. Those two plants on the right of the bed are going, and this whole bed will be devoted to tomatoes, and possibly basil, if I can prove what I was told today that they like to be grown together. The edging around the bed was unfortunately not dug in at all, just sort of placed on the surface, which means that the grass has invaded over the winter. That nasty grass with the great big runner roots. Grr.

View from the vege patch back towards the house. You can see what is going to become the tomato bed on the left against the wall. The sticks in the top left will become some kind of ornamental grape the neighbours have kindly decided to share with us, and the monstrosity in the middle that consists of a dog kennel with some kind of shrub grown over the top will also be going. I may end up extending that bed out a little further once that happens, we'll see.

In Part Three: Progress made.