Your Garden

my front garden has a path from gate to front door, and to the left of it a small lawn (which i'll be mowing this evening) surrounded by flower beds containing two nice small trees, some feeble shrubs and a rose bush that is flowering as we speak.

the back garden is all gravel right now (this will change) with some flower beds that don't have much in them and there is a dead tree at the end which we need to get cut down.

i have been weeding and digging and generally gardening like a maniac since we moved in. i'm going to be starting a compost heap soon, and also planning what plants i want to get for where in the garden.

i've found "how to be a gardener" by alan titchmarsh (the book, i haven't seen the programme) really useful and recommend it to any other new gardeners. it's clear, informative, has good instructional pictures, and is well written.

I do have a boring lawn lined with weeds and surrounding a clothesline but its shared with two other flats. There is also a strip of bark chips with shrubs out the front. This is mostly yucky variagated cypress-y things, but there is a lovely rosemary and a fern coming up through one of the cypresses and a rose bush by the door.

Inside I have pots filled with tomatoes, capsicum, lettuce and various herbs, which I will move into the porch when the weather is warmer. I also have some flowering potplants. I want to get more ferns growing in pots inside as I have recently become very fond of ferns.

Name Bosko Balaban
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I'd thought about hireing a petrol brush cutter for the day but am a little scared of them.

Thirteen years dormant.

Anyway, my balcony has been much improved by a $40 auto watering system from alibaba. This year I am growing myoga ginger, Japanese long onions, gobo. The ginger lime is flourishing even as the lemon and the lime do battle with the bugs.

Our house is small and stands more or less in the center of a 100' x 125' lot, so there is plenty of yard space around the main structure. We have two massive big-leaf maple trees between the front of the house and the street. These cast so much shade that the remainder of the front yard is mostly moss where once there was lawn in ages past.

We have many mature fir trees at various points elsewhere, two towering laurel hedges that are so well-established they could not be killed short of taking a backhoe (or explosives) to them. I should add that we have no annuals anywhere other than weeds and very few plants which were not volunteers. It is a total unplanned mess.

At some point roughly 50 years ago, our house was occupied by people who created a concrete patio and a concrete fish pond in the back. The pond has not held water since before we moved in, 33 years ago. It is now 3/4 filled with rocks and dirt, but still shows it's blue-painted lip all around. The patio is usually covered thickly with fallen fir needles. Weeds grow up in the cracks.

I could say more, but this gives the basic impression. Our garden is derelict, but not in a wholly creepy "haunted house" way. The local birds love it and we get deer and rabbits visiting it. When the maples leaf out in spring, it can look quite lovely from the front. But no one would ever mistake it for a tended yard.

My backyard is laden with the dreaded Asthma Weed, which is noxious and causes allergies and I just cannot get rid of the fucking thing. I'm paying a gardener to come fix it this week because effed if I'm scrabbling about with bad knees and grass allergies in that lot.

I do have a small patch and some pots doing ok that said, with 3 kinds of tomatoes, beetroot, chillies and lettuce on the go.

^^^ had been wondering whether the antipodean plant in question which ails Trayce so was really called Asthma Weed - all high-up Google hits say things like "Marijuana and asthma: Does it help or harm?", so guessing not.

We have gardens front and back, both are quite small (esp the front one).

The front one has two tiny lawns with the front path down the middle, rendered uneven by tree roots from outside. Three wheelie bins, food caddy and composter take up a lot of the available space. We do however have room for a magnolia, fig, lavender, heather, a raspberry bush, and herbs (a bay tree, thyme, rosemary, sage and mint)

At rear, there is a patio which really needs replacing, or at least re-mortaring. This houses our garden furniture. A lawn which needs trimming soon, shrubs and trees around the edge, and trellis on the fence which houses bird feeders with seeds, suet pellets, mealworms (not live), peanuts (oddly we have been untroubled by the squirrels of late) and fatballs.

Just bought some wintergreen and really stressed on what type of location to plant it in. It was twenty bucks. Also harvesting the berries to grow my own.

asthma weed:

https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/how-to/asthma-weed/9428392

To hell with noxious plants. To heaven with athol brose!