November:
Things were pretty overgrown. On all three sides were colourbond fencing. On the fourth, the back verandah and door leading into the yard. On the left, a concrete slab lay beneath the clothes line. Other than that, all the eye could see was an uneven horizon of grass around 60cms high. Through the kitchen window I saw cute little birds which hopped around, pecking at the seeds on the ends of the grass stems.
December / January:
With the help of a friend's whipper snipper, my boyfriend slashed through the swathe of couch grass, which had grown even higher by now, due to the ample rain of the Wet season. There was enough grass clippings to fill two 240 litre wheelie bins. However, now the yard was looking much more inviting and manageable. As there were no trees or shrubs, we almost had kind of a lawn.
February:
Again, thanks to the monsoonal rains, the grass had grown quite high once more. This time, we borrowed a lawnmower from another obliging friend.
My boyfriend left a tuft of grass in the centre of the lawn, to be finished off the next day. I discovered a little mouse which foraged in amongst the undergrowth. It had made a temporary home behind a heap of tarp which we had left on our back verandah. The feeling that the backyard could be made into a place which was habitable by nature was appealing. March:
I started borrowing books on gardening, garden design and such. It was quite daunting at first. But the authors seemed quite encouraging, and most books advised to have a plan in mind and go from there. Except one book "Clueless in the Garden" by Yvonne Cunnington, which advised the opposite, which I found interesting. Nevertheless, my enthusiastic boyfriend downloaded free software which enabled him to design a 3-D model of our ideal garden, replete with border garden beds, a full-grown tree, an outdoor entertainment area and a pond. It was pretty cool. Until we decided that this plan would either take at least 5 years to undertake ourselves, or a LOT of money to hire someone (and a team) to complete our grand vision. My idea of the garden was basically to create a productive space using recycled or basic materials. I knew I wanted at least one veggie patch, some trees and herbs, and also a screen for the back fence, as it backed onto a public laneway.
April:
We began looking into municipal tips and newspaper fleamarket ads for materials with which to make raised garden beds. In the tropics, wood / timber would not last very long due to termites and the unseasonably long rains. We decided bricks or pavers would be used instead. My enterprising boyfriend found someone who wanted to dispose of their pavers, and after several trips back and forth between their home and ours, he gained us around 600+ pavers at no cost other than fuel, and quite a bit of sweat and gruntwork.
May:
Through multiple visits to local lawn (or yard) sales and the hardware store, we accumulated gardening tools, gloves, a hose and also a wheelbarrow. I even bought a Soil Test kit after reading that it was a good idea to determine what pH the soil was, in order to plant things that would SUIT in the soil, rather than adding things to the soil in order to make plants grow. This was another philosophy which suited my style of gardening, which I was quickly finding out would be No or Low Fuss.
Several books I had read suggested to rid the soil of any existing grass or plants before creating garden beds. As I did not want to use and herbicides or poison, I was recommended glyphosate as a better alternative by a local landscaper and gardener. He said that glyphosate was not a poison, but a salt solution which deprived the affected plant from receiving any water, thereby killing it.
A week after spraying the yard with this stuff, the green grass was effectively reduced to a brown wasteland. I was not overjoyed at seeing this, however, I affirmed to myself that it would be for the greater good in the end. I then bought some potting mix, organic compost, manure and a bale of hay. Things that would help the garden grow again. It was also around this time that we began composting our kitchen scraps to add to the garden in future.June 6th:
My boyfriend and I attended a "Tropical Garden Spectacular" at the local Botanical gardens. It served as quite an inspiration for sustainable, environmentally-conscious gardening. There were talks on gardening with chooks, getting to know soil, recycling and much more. We acquired an aloe vera plant, lemongrass, cassava and sweet potato. These would be added to our existing collection of desert roses, guava, golden durantas and a mangosteen plant.
June 12th:
The soil that my boyfriend ordered arrived. All 8 cubic metres of it. So began the two-day event of transferring all of the soil into our backyard from the nature strip, where it was unceremoniously dumped by the soil truck at the front. I definitely commend my boyfriend on his unbridled enthusiasm for hard physical labour. The sunburn that came with it however, is another story. Luckily, we had aloe vera...
BEFORE & AFTER SOIL:
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