Backyard Blitz: Part Two

Possibly worse than the eastern side of the farmhouse was the area beyond the old laundry, its only saving grace was that I didn’t look at it constantly out the kitchen window. This area used to house the previous tenants hunting dogs – there were trenches dug, bones and antlers everywhere, an old tank on it’s side full of rotting firewood and random rubbish, an old 44 gallon drum incinerator, a few tree stumps to deal with, the rickety orchard fence saga continued here also (although Matt pulled that out before I grabbed the camera, but it was a sorry state of affairs like the fence in yesterdays post). In short, this whole zone was a rambling mess…

So we got to work with the bobcat, removing all the firewood from the old tank, finding a heap of rubbish in the process, moving the old incinerator and picking up all the rocks/roots/sticks, pushing out some tree stumps. I was hoping the old tank could be salvaged to use as a veggie garden bed if Matt cut it down, but unfortunately it was fully rusted through on the bottom.

Once all the rubbish and rocks and sticks and fence posts were removed we could work up the soil a bit with the bobcat, remove some more rubbish/rocks/sticks as we went, level it all out again, rake up more rubbish/rocks/sticks. Unfortunately in all the leveling and scraping and digging up…we found a water pipe. Luckily we didn’t bust through it, just unearthed it, and then a light bulb went off that we could utilise this wayward pipe’s position to put a tap in the corner of our planned veggie patch. Cue a trip to the main farm next door to get fittings to put a tap in, getting the wrong fittings, going back to get the right fittings, digging the pipe in a little deeper so we wouldn’t dig it up again, putting in the beginnings of what will be a tap…things were taking a lot longer than we anticipated. Finally thoughts turned towards putting in the veggie patch. We had some old sleepers kicking about the farm, which seemed as good as anything to build a veggie patch out of.

We had decided that just at the end of our grape vines was the perfect spot – it got full sun, was sort of near the house but sort of in the orchard, a good starting ground as we might extend our veggie gardening into other beds if it takes our fancy. We found six sleepers, cut them down to size to make a big ol’ rectangle, put small stakes on the inside and screwed them to the sleepers. We then filled the bed with leftover soil from our bobcat work, which although better than I was expecting (everything is so sandy here!) it wasn’t the best soil, so we dug in three big bags of sheep poo from the shearing shed as well as lots of yummy compost as well.

Now this area is looking a thousand times better. Flat ground! No holes! No rocks! No pile of antlers! No I’m not joking. We topped the veggie patch with some hay and I’ve spread some lawn seed about. Last night we had 4mm of steady rain on the farmhouse roof, this morning the sun is shining – perfect grass growing weather if you ask me.

When we lived in Gippsland we did a lot of this kind of work together, in fact every weekend for a year we did this, taming our ramshackle jungle garden to hold our wedding reception. It felt good to be working together again, we always have common goals and ideas and just bounce off each other happily. He does the heavy lifting, I do the fluffing about. And our site foreman is generally never far away either…