Returning to My Woggy Roots
(c) Melina Magdalena (2011)
In the meantime, we had to replace our trusty gardening fork and spade. Both of the old ones were about 20 years old and their handles broke off in the same week. It was such a pleasure to be given a $100 budget and go replace them. I took the baby and he rode on the trolley through the hardware store.
It's more than a year since I wrote the post Gardening Outside the Fence. The guerilla garden in the vacant lot over the road didn't work out. The blocks are still up for sale, and people walk across it regularly. Someone dumped a truckload of what I hope was clean fill on the block a couple of months ago. The kids have had a great time compacting it, and climbing up and over.
Outside our fence this year is an enormous crop of broadbeans. There's some dill and one silverbeet plant struggling in amongst them. I've widened the strip to include the area outside our front yard too, and the soil there hasn't had a chance to be built up and enriched. So many poppies volunteered themselves in the front flower patch, that I spread some in amongst the broadbeans, too. We've enjoyed eating them, but I'm not sure many of our neighbours have! I've put in some more sunflower seeds in between the ageing bean plants, hoping that the new plants will be sheltered as they sprout.
Around the corner from us is a mulberry tree growing happily on someone's nature strip. It is a marvel - still young, but green and prolific with fruit. I'm not sure the people whose house it is growing outside of, want to share! We planted a mulberry in our backyard early last winter. It lost all its leaves and looked like a stick in the ground. Then suddenly it sprouted large leaves again, AND fruit.
It's amazing to look back at what was here when we moved in, and the changes that we've made in the last three years. These are changes inside the fence - not just outside. The backyard vege patch has been remade completely, and the seed I sowed there a few weeks ago has sprouted enough for me to be able to differentiate the plants (mostly). In fact this morning the baby and I thinned the radishes. My Grandma had a theory about nutrition that said - if a child puts strange things in its mouth, it is probably lacking nutrients, and so you should feed it radishes. Well, I tested that theory this morning. It's too early to tell!
I've had my eye on a patch of the nature strip outside our house for a while now. The nature strip, also known as the 'verge', is the land between the footpath and the kerb outside a residence. We had requested some time ago, that the local Council cease spraying our nature strip, after the herbicide blew into our yard and killed some of our flowers. So now it is our responsibility to keep our nature strip under control - sans herbicide.
The weeds are quite diverse, but there is a great deal of grass in the nature strip, as well as clover and other plants with prickles. We had a terrible time last spring with Caltrop, and I'm concerned that my activities outside our fence do not lead to another outbreak of this horrible plant.
I may be addicted to digging. For advocates of the no-dig garden, this may seem a little odd, but I find it immensely satisfying to work at soil and transform it into something that I can use. The soil around here is great!
A few weeks ago I used our new spade to break up the patch of nature strip into small sections. I didn't get back to it until today, but that is a good thing, as we got so much rain last week that the soil has softened. I managed to dig up about one-fifth of the area this morning, and during that time I had some interactions with 3 neighbours. I didn't reveal my plan, however. When asked - why are you doing that? I replied - so that I can grow something in here other than weeds!
Actually, I plan to put a fig tree in the centre of this patch. I hope the council will allow it to grow. If I prune it cleverly, I think it won't be obstructive to traffic, and we just don't have room for a fig in our yard! The fig tree will of course, be very small for quite a while. So I've planted out some seed trays of zinnias and portulaca. And I've reserved some sunflower seeds as well.
It's the first day of my two week school holiday break, and I'm loving it.
