Gardening

All things gardening from planning to sitting back and enjoying your garden.

Gardening is not just about plants and taking care of them.  There are many areas that make up your garden, garden beds, pathways, lawns, seating, shady areas, privacy, partitioning and fencing.

My front garden is kind of normal, garden beds, pots, driveway and grassed areas.

My back garden is something else.  I didn’t actually plan it as such, it happened and is still happening but I love it and know each and every plant in it.

Gardening is of course, choosing plants, positioning them in the right place to keep them happy and if you don’t pick the right place just hope the plant is adaptable to something close to where it should be.

With my garden I love taking a cutting from a plant, potting it up or placing it in a garden, keeping it watered and fed and watch it start to grow.  The little leaves/shoots that appear and continue to grow can be magical especially when what I have done is to poke a hole in the ground, place the cutting in the hole, pat it in securely and water it in.  I do that a lot.

I also love getting cuttings from friends and relatives and striking those. They get a new name like Dodi’s Agave, Bede’s multi-coloured Croton, James’s Yellow Daisy, Bob’s Chinese Jade etc, etc.  These are all extra special plants.

Walkways through the garden can be anything from gravel, stones, timber sleepers, cement, pavers and lots of other ‘stuff’.  They can be shapes/flows, straight lined, angled. The only limit is your imagination.  A word of caution though, be aware of your underground pipes for planting and making solid pathways.  My garden is rustic, I’ve used mainly pavers, two sizes the work well together and treated pine sleepers that I have had cut to sizes that suit the path, painted with my chalk style paint to work in the the other paving.

There are other things to consider for your garden and that is planting for the birds, bees and butterflies.  I’ve been told bees like pollen, butterflies like nectar…ask your nursery person.

No matter how large or small your garden is, once you start working in it, adding and subtracting, moving what is not doing well to a place that it may do better (that could be a pot for a while), you will find it is a very special place for you to just ‘be’.

Any ‘good stuff’ I find I will share with you so bookmark my site and pop back from time to time.

Cheers!