grow a garden of native plants

I think this is well on the way, so I’ll tick it off my list of things to do. Had one large eucalypt blow over in the extreme Canberra weather (which was a little embarrassing for some reason) and the dogs still ruin things just as they are getting started – bastards – but all in all, the trees are taking off. this place will be beautiful in couple of year’s time – worth it, for sure!

Went a bit nuts planting even more seedlings in the backyard. I have probably planted a lot of them too close together – I thought i’d take a ‘survival of the fittest’approach, and I want it to be sort of a jungle anyway… but I just read in my gardening book that planting things too closely together leave you with a lot of weak, sickly plants…bugger. Will just have to watch them closely and make some hard decisions in, oh I dunno, 2 or 3 years time. So I’m not losing sleep over it right now.

Its cheating a bit to put this as a goal, because just about everything is in the ground and all i have to do is water them occasionally. It is going to be great when the trees really take off – i’ve planted some potentially very tall ones, so in 10 year’s time the neighbours might not be happy with me…

Thanks to a generous friend, I now have some vanilla leaf and monkeyflower growing in the back. The monkeyflower is probably in its final location at the base of a Buddha statue, but I didn’t have the garden ready for the vanilla leaf; I’ll propagate it in the back yard for now and move it to the front yard next fall.