Planning a garden bed

and an unexpected gift 

I've been working on this garden bed in my front yard for a while now, just chipping away at it, letting it evolve as my ideas of what I want it to be change. It started off as a pile of silt left over from the flood, and I was just going to spread it out across the grass.  Then I thought about how much better it would be to have a garden there, rather than just grass, and imagined what I'd plant and how it would look eventually, and the idea grew on me, and so the garden bed was begun.

After lots of research, looking at garden bed ideas, thinking about the kind of plants I wanted, removing grass to make it larger, lots of digging and reshaping, I then had a rough shape of the bed I wanted. It's a keyhole bed shape, which will  give me more area to plant, and as I plan to add vegetables around the edges, these will be easier to harvest.  Keyhole beds traditionally have a compost bin at the centre, but I'm not sure yet if I'll do that.

Removing clods of grass = very sore back

I played around with adding "features"......some rocks from around my garden, and fallen branches from the local park.

I had decided I wanted a plumeria pudica  ...... an evergreen variety of frangipanni.........in the middle, and when I saw one at a local nursery, I grabbed it.  I'm a bit of an impatient gardener, no waiting until everything's done before planting, so in went the plumeria on the high spot, next to my "landscaping" logs.

It will look like this when grown with pretty white flowers.

I wasn't happy with the look of the logs, and really wanted an old  tree stump, a vertical feature, but even if I found one, probably wouldn't be able to lift it into the car to get it home, so was resigned to logs and rocks. Meanwhile, the digging continued, moving earth around and giving the bed the shape I wanted, with a nice high point sloping gently down.

I had muttered to a few people about wanting a tree stump, and was met with eye rolls, and outright laughter, but one friend listened, and last weekend, her son pulled up with the trailer on his car, and in the back......yep, you guessed it, a tree stump.

It's perfect, I dragged it into place in front of  the plumeria, which will grow up nicely behind it.

Still life with dog.

The 'keyhole' is just visible on the right of the picture, behind the pointy rock. 

It even came with a little collection of fungi, and a very large spider, which is now hiding under the bark, away from Mrs Greedy Chicken.

I've put a couple more plants in, cuttings I've been given, and plan to fill it with some low growing spiky natives, to provide food and shelter for small birds, unusual herbs, some annuals for seasonal colour, and green leafy vegetables around the edges, and anything else that takes my fancy......a little bit cottagey, a little bit native , a little bit productive.  While it looks grey and dull right now, once the plants start to grow, and there's colour, interest and form, and a good layer of pine bark mulch, it's going to look smashing.

I'm pretty happy with my unexpected gift and the results of my hard work.

My weekend plans include more work refining that garden bed shape, as I've decided to make one side a "kidney" shape, so there's some more grass to be dug up.  To give my poor old back a break,  there'll be time out to do some knitting or sewing,  and tomorrow a couple of friends are coming for lunch on the riverbank.....hopefully the rain will stay away.  What do you have planned for your weekend? Whatever you're doing, enjoy! 

............till next time.