Garden Bed

One of the first things I wanted to achieve once I moved into my house was establishing a decent garden. I have previously discussed how I started from scratch by ripping out all the existing garden beds and plant the Australian Natives. One area of my back yard that need a bit of work was along the boundary on the left hand side. This had grass right up to the fence line and didn't provide a great deal of privacy. In fact it made that part of the fence just plain bare and boring. Here is a picture of the back yard with the exposed fence.

The other part of the garden I wished to tackle was replacing all the existing timber sleepers that already existed for the garden beds located at the back and right of the yard. These were not treated pine sleepers but were instead old railway sleepers that certain had seen betters days. In many cases the wood had rotted to a significant extent. So this job has effectively doubled with the creation of the new garden bed and the replacing of the old timber sleepers.

The first job was to lay out the area of the garden that I wish to convert. I used stakes of wood and string to give me an indication of the border.  The width was approximately 1.2 meters versus length of 7 meters. The next part was to start digging out all the grass within of that boundary. Unfortunately I didn't take as many pictures as I would have liked on this project. A few at the start and a few at the end. But the shots below give you an idea of what the garden before and after.

Here we have all the plants in, all of them Australian Natives. There are a combination of bottlebrush, kangaroo paw, grevillia, acacia and banksia.

And as you can see the plants are progressing nicely 3 months after planting.

Turning the clock forward just over 2 years, here is what the garden bed looks like on the 4th March, 2007. As you can see the entire length of the garden bed is full and it has got to the point where some of the bigger plants are competing against each other for space and sunlight.

Well the garden has been going fantatisc of late. The good rainfall that we've had in Sydney has certainly increased growth of all the plants in the garden bed. So much so that one of the smaller banksias didn't get enough light and eventually perished. On the other hand the Giant Candles banksia started producing flowers and they are spectacular at the moment. Make sure you have a look at the Native Australian Plants page for one of the shots. I have updated with another shot below of what the garden bed looks like taken at the end of April 2008.