Pictures of my first garden

The backyard when we moved in.

We had the typical Aussie backyard to start with.  Grass, Hills hoist and a lemon tree.
Luckily, there was also a cute little house, very well built, which was used as a cat house by the previous owners.  That later proved to be a perfect little chook house.

It's weekend time, get the Victa!

While thinking about and planning our veggie garden, my husband had the pleasure of mowing the grass on weekends.
Why didn't we think of saving all that grass mowing for later, for the building of the beds?

soil, compost and worm castings waiting for their turn

 Then, one day we had lots of soil, compost and a special addition: worm castings delivered.  The building of the veggie garden had started.  We were learning as we went on, as we'd never done anything like it; having been always apartment dwellers.

 I was reading about no-dig gardens (wonder why that appealed to me?) and permaculture principles.  That's what we wanted to apply at our place.

stacks of newspaper being soaked in the wheelbarrow

So first we put down wet newspaper, several sheets thickness.  I didn't want straight edges, but curvy ones and optimize the area for planting.

Something like this.  The paths were covered with wood shavings.  The plantings were mixed even with flowers among the veggies.   Surprisingly lots of plants could fit in as by the taller ones we put in small shade loving ones and next to the slow growing ones went in quick ones like lettuces which would be gone by the time the big ones grew big.
Permaculture is a great system, and there are lots of  books about it with detailed, well researched instructions on how to go about it.

The newspaper layer was covered with soil and decomposed manure.

Next a layer of thick straw.  Sprinkled that with Dynamic Lifter  which is a complete natural fertilizer, and watered it down.

The hat was a present from a friend with Vietnamese origin.  It seems to be a military hat, I hope it will not offend anyone.

Onto the straw was put another layer, this time a thick layer of compost.

advanced seedlings planted

On the very top we laid biscuits of lucerne hay to completely cover everything.

When planting the seedlings, we made a whole into the hay which was about 10 cm  thick, put in a couple of handfuls of worm castings, and planted the seedling into that.  We did the same for each seedling.
They were doing very well.  But only seedlings or plants; we had to wait for next year to sow seeds.  By then, most of the layers would brake down into a compost-like  material.

The boys also started on the chicken run; to build a fence around the lovely little green house.

As you can see, it was all very professionally done!

Kookaburra

And look who was watching the whole time!  A regular visitor.