Cementing our place in the gardening world

As we are told several times on "Better Homes and Gardens", when you want to makeover an area, you should always start by removing everything. A quick phone call to our landlord, and all was agreed upon. The old bushes and the lawn had to go. It was also decided that the patch behind the house should be cemented over. The only thing that stayed was the structure of the raised garden beds. A team was hired to execute this operation. The doggies were a bit disappointed at having been locked up inside the house for three days, but in the end we had a clean slate outside.

Work in progress

Work in progress

Work in progress

We needed a new lawn, which was arriving on the weekend. Our first ever gardening task was to level the soil where the turf would be laid. It rained all week and I am ashamed to say that I let the weather get the better of me, so Anshuman did all the levelling.

The turf arrived on the Saturday. It was a new experience for us, we had never seen a lawn being formed before. First, the rectangles of turf had to be laid out to cover the soil. Then, ideally a roller should be rolled across to level it and remove air pockets. We did not have one, so we just walked over it. Finally, we watered it every day for the roots to set. After two weeks of hard work (mainly by someone else!), we had a brand new garden to work with. The time for planning had started!

Laying of turf

We planned our garden several times - both on paper and virtually. There are various free online tools, but we used Garden Planner to start with. It was a pretty cool tool, they have tonnes of options to add to the layout like trees, shrubs, flowers, lawns, building, vegetables etc. It had a grid and each addition could be adjusted to the actual size. It gave us a very decent idea of what we could fit in our garden.

Next we made a paper layout, which allowed us to edit more. We had grand ambitions of a veggie patch, a garden full of flowers and trees to block out the neighbours spying on us. But, as Hercule Poirot says, we had to approach this with 'order and method'! First, we had to decide what we wanted as permanent features in the garden, as both vegetables and flowers have short lives. It was fun researching on the internet for plants that suited that requirement.

Garden layout draft

After much research, we settled on plants native to our location to start the project with. There were so many options to choose from for trees, shrubs and even flowers. All had the advantage of being local and hence, were suited to the unpredictable Melbourne weather. Our first ever plant shopping list was taking shape!