Brett Writes!

The garden progressed nicely. I demolished the hill of dirt, and started eating into another. Sue marked out circles for garden beds according to a permaculture design, with the middle one becoming a frog-pond.

This is an intermediate photograph, showing the reduction in the hill, and the spread of the topsoil 13 days later.

While I was doing this, we constructed a compost bin out of shed leftovers (a very smart Manor Red sides with Wilderness Green posts), and Sue made compost with cut grass/weeds and horse manure. You can see our scythe resting in front of them.

I’ve been using the scythe lately to mow between the trees in windbreak — hard work but fun.

Having built the shed, and waiting while we developed the house plans, we decided to put in a vegetable garden. Behind the watertank was a gentle north-facing slope of empty land, perfect position for a garden. The photo below was taken from a very large pile of stockpiled topsoil scraped off the house site and driveway.

And here’s me standing on top of it, with a post-hole shovel and a mattock (the latter proved unnecessary).

The object of the next few weeks was to redistribute that pile over the garden area. This was actually a lot of fun! It’s not mentally challenging to dig and wheelbarrow, so my iPod helped immeasurably, and I listened to a lot of Sapphire & Steel and Doctor Who audio dramas, as well as a few informative podcasts (mostly from the ABC). Also, it’s very good exercise!