Muddy Day

Hello!!
For some mad reason, Jeff was all super keen to get out and work outside. I was looking longingly at the unlit fire thinking ‘Netflix’.
He had been into town earlier and picked up some more steel droppers and Cousin Jeff had dropped off some more pallets.
So we built a wall for the wood.

My previous efforts were just not working so well this time. The pressure of the heavy green wood really pushed the stakes out alarmingly.

Its a lot easier to quickly stack the wood up this way – we don’t have consistent enough sizes to do a criss-cross stack at each end. (I am sure we will get better at this as we go along.)

The pallets under the wood really help too – I hated getting the manky bottom pieces full of mud and bugs!

Ready for some more wood now!!

In Huggle-Monster news… I have two sadly neglected compost bins that I have decided to clear out and start again from scratch. I emptied one today and spread it over as one of the layers on this second Hugelkultur garden.
Then I got in touch with my bushcraft skills (er… lacking)

OK – here’s the plan. I saw a really great little fence woven out of sticks and branches on Mavis’s page over at One Hundred Dollars a Month.
I need to prepare more stakes but to be honest by this stage of the day I was saturated and pretty ready not to be outside. (I started off in wet weather gear but just overheated haha)

At some point, these ‘snowball’ bushes need a brutal pruning. I think the branches are going to be ideal to weave through the stakes around the Huggle-Monster. Then I can finish going the hack with adding more compost and materials and finish with a layer of straw

I have so much to do in here!! It was great to use it over summer but I didn’t have a chance to really sit down and think about how I was going to organise the space properly.

I am thinking a lot more of those smaller brick raised beds… or similar.
I should just sit with paper and pen and some measurements and figure it out!

Not much more I could have fitted in time wise, but there is a lot of potential here!!

Once the tomatoes come up I will put the garlic back in the same place as last season… At least the grass and weeds were kept down where I had mulched with the seaweed.

This is one cherry tomato plant that decided to grow right next to the garden bed!! Not being a great tomato-disciplinarian, I went ‘meh’ and let it go!! I even picked a tomato off it the other day!

The leek and brown onion I put in here a couple of weeks back are now mostly all sitting up fine.

Lettuce, capsicum, cool wriggly willow branches and hopefully rocket seedlings and not weeds!

The cabbage patch needs weeding but apart from that and a few chewed leaves, they seem to be going along well. Perhaps its time to be kind and give them a feed of my kelp juice!

Oh, and good news… we sold the ride on mower today!
A couple dropped in that had seen it before – complete with cash in their pocket and a trailer on the car!! One more thing done!
Hope you had a slightly less muddy day than me!

Cheers!