Sunday Gardening

What a glorious Autumn day we had on the plateau yesterday! Even the chooks were out enjoying themselves in the warm dust.

I find myself being drawn the the outdoors more and more since moving here six months ago. It does tend to rain a lot here on the north coast, so fine weekend weather is a rarity. So while the sun was shining and I had a small list of jobs to get done out in the garden:

Filling in holes left by an old tree root system or maybe some bandicoots.

They were quite deep and so I used pine cones to fill up the spaces and tunnels before overlaying with soil. You can see the depression where one of the chickens helped themself to a dust bath just after I had finished!

I spent about an hour smoothing out the exposed soil and removing the rocks and old tree roots and sticks. This will make it easier to mow once the grass grows over. My husband came out to do some whipper snippering of the weeds trying to take over the slope.

I had to liberate a couple of agave plants that had outgrown their pots. ( I had my husband move the pots to the back deck and I will have to think about what I will plant in them).

I found a perfect hole for each of them between the exposed roots of the camelia trees.

They were so pot bound that their roots were  even square.

Both of these holes were already there and the agaves fit into them perfectly.

With dad's help, oldest son Duncan planted a mandarin and a naval orange tree in the far paddock. I am hoping to establish a fruit tree grove along the fenceline there. There's already a lemon, lime, orange, kaffir lime and mango trees established there.

Then my husband taught our son Tristan to ride without training wheels! A huge achievement for an eight year old.

I did a bit of hedge trimming,

along with the Rosemary bush.

By this stage of the day it was getting pretty late. So I did some pruning of the camelias and the branches that were hanging down a bit far,

along with the May bush which had a lot of dead branches.

Being out in the garden all day was so good for my mental health. By sunset it was finally time to enjoy a well earned cup of tea sitting on the log with my husband.

Afterall we did buy the place for the view.