The Story So Far....

The point of this blog is to chronicle my learnings in getting my backyard in order and the ulitmate decision to build a productive vege garden.  If someone out there gets some useful information out of it or has some to share with me via comments then all the better.  The yard has been through a few iterations since 2004 so there is some history that I want to share.  'Tis a long story, so best if you go make a cuppa, settle in and read on...

The Beginning....
In 2004, we bought our new house.  It is an ex-display home in the Logan (southern Brisbane area) suburb of Underwood.  It is a big low set house on a relatively small block.  Our backyard is best described as a medium to large size courtyard.  It's sheltered by a fence-line of tall Jasmine, a 3 metre rock retaining wall and the house itself.  It gets summer sun but in the winter the sun is too low behind the hedge.  The front yard slope quite sharply and unless I terrace it (which I will one day), it is not that usable or manageable.

Hedge your bets
One of the features that attracted me to the house were the beautiful hedges.  For what landscaping the front had, they looked good.  Out the back it was hedge heaven.  When we bought the house the owner had done some nice work to the back yard area and it looked great.  With an inground irrigation system it was even going to be easy to look after and I was going to get some good workouts on the hedge trimmer.



Drought
If you are from eastern Australia you'll know that from about 2005 to 2009 we had water severe water shortages and restrictions such that you could not water outside.  In those years the state government subsidised the installation of rainwater tanks.  Though I missed out on the rebates I have two 3000 litre tanks and a 1000 litre tank in my back yard.  I removed some hedges near the house to do this and changed the planned position of the tanks many times (but that's another post).

Anyway those years of drought and a 35kg German Shepherd traipsing all over the backyard, and it was clearly becoming more or less a dust bowl out there.  In winter part of the grass doesn't get enough sun and other areas the clay soil was so compacted aerating was almost impossible even after the rains.  I tried various things including sowing lawn seed etc but they results were only temporary.  It was just not working out.  We wanted a nice backyard we could sit and enjoy or as it turned out, have it producing for us.

The Solution
Trying to grow grass all year round is pretty much pointless so i decided firstly to put in a raised sleeper bed along the rock wall.  What i would plant i didn't know...but i knew I wanted to get rid of the bare dusty soil.  Here how it looked before planting out:

From this point I planted out the bed and got some good fruit off it.  As my interest in this grew I decided to establish two more beds on the other areas were grass would not grow.  This is a work in progress and pretty much brings us to the present day and I'll cover all that in more detail in other posts.