December Gardening pt 2 infrastructure projects

I blogged recently about the flowers in our garden.  We have also been doing a lot of work on the infrastructure of the place.

The first of these projects to be started was putting some treated pine sleepers around beds in the vegetable garden.  I think we got 24 sleepers which were a trifle heavy and :

• made the trailed sag a bit when they were loaded in; and
• when leant against a rail in our stable put enough pressure on the frame of the stable to (temporarily) warp the doorway!

This was the first bed I walled off.

 This used to be a dog run.

 Another bed in the garden.

A second part of the project was to get some good soil to top up a few beds and a few cubic metres of forest litter mulch.  We paid to get it delivered (and good value it was compared to the cost of about 6 x 80km trips to pick the stuff up, without even factoring the time cost).

Another project was to remove a couple of cypress trees that were hanging over the house and thus forming a nasty fire hazard.  (They were I think originally planted when a right of way existed behind them, to enhance privacy and reduce the dust inside the house.)  It looked a bit tricky to drop them myself so i called in a local tradesman to do the business.

 Timberrrrr!

He charges good rates because I look after all the follow up business such as cutting up the trunks for firewood and removing the foliage.  From this lot I get 4 large trailer loads of foliage which were taken to the tip.  I hope that someone mulches all the green waste and sells it, but I have a feeling that it simply gets bulldozed into a large heap.  Here is a trailer load heading out.

When I took the last load to the tip a ute load of agapanthus pulled up next to me.  Before that guy had begun to unload another punter pulled up and asked if they a) were agapanthus and b) just being chucked.  On being assured that both those were answered in the affirmative driver 2 quickly unloaded his garbage and backed his trailer alongside.  I don't think many of the plants ended up in the tip.

On a subsequent visit to the tip we filled up the cargo area of El Camion Real with heavy duty cardboard to form an underlay for the mulch as shown in the bottom of this image of our grape vine area.

We also scored 6 plastic milk crates - another product with many more uses than that for which they were designed - which were needed as stands for garden sprinklers.

More mulch has been added to make a good path between the sleepers and the fence.  It is interesting to compare the amount of vegetation in this image and that in the top half of the second image (taken three months ago.  Here is a crop of that image to emphasise the point.