Oh my aching bones!

Well, today was a glorious sunny day here in Healesville. 20c feels like summer is on its way! Having said that, I had to do some maintainence work in the garden to get my summer crops in and make sure the Aussie garden I am creating will cope with the heat we will no doubt get. Already this week after heavy rains, in only a few days the garden is dry. Water restrictions have been down graded from Stage 3 to Stage 2. This is due to the drought of 18 years finally breaking and filling up most of the cities dams to near capacity or in the case of our local reservoir, overflowing for 12 months. The rains we had this year were incredible!        

Maroondah Dam June 2008 This was winter!

Maroondah Dam February 2011 This is our summer. Big difference!

This means we can now hand water with a trigger nozzle at any time. This is great, but I still use the old fashioned bucket of rain water and an old tin cup to water in my seedlings till they have established. I have a drip system running through the main vegie patch and hope to connect that up to the rain water tank we have up the hill to gravity feed the drip system. I HATE using tap water for a couple of reasons. One; why should I have to pay for something that falls out of the sky, and two; most tap water has chemicals in it which only make the plants not thrive very well.

 I ripped out a lomandra longifolia today and potted up the individual corms. They had nice long strappy leaves. Whilst it is a lovely drought tolerant plant and the birds love to hide in it, it was blocking the new blueberry bush I planted. I will sell on the pots for $2 each. The soil came from the dig out we did a year ago from an old embankment. The worms have been doing a great job and now the soil is excellent! The pots I already had. So this is a good way to help reimburse some costs to get on with the jobs!

  So I hauled the soil back into the retaining wall and planted another blueberry plant (Sunshine Blue) I did a ton of that yesterday as well. Talk about a great abdominal workout! So nice to be able to reuse the same soil which now is a gorgeous pile of loamy soil instead of the heavy clay it was a year ago. Lots of rotting vegetation in it and the worms have created a masterpiece! I should be stuffing my face with a ton of blueberries next season!
  Tomorrow I hope to put in the other section of the drip system, continue putting dirt into the new vegie patch and plant out some tomatoes. That's after all the other work I have to do!