Blog entries tagged with "garden"

Has it really been one year?

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at 10:38pm

One year ago today was settlement day, the day that I picked up some keys and took possession of my place. Within two weeks from then I had moved in, but in the almost year since then I have been working through a todo list. A list that is seemingly endless as items are added at around the same rate that they are completed.

The completed things (mostly in order of east to west through the property) include:

  • new television
  • mounting said television on the wall
  • new shelves to fit in the alcoves on either side of the television
  • additional antenna socket in the study
  • network cabling between the television and the study
  • a two seater couch and two armchairs
  • a number of my photos mounted on the walls in 16×20″ frames
  • all sorts of kitchen utensils, cutlery, crockey and appliances
  • swing out rubbish bin under the kitchen sink
  • two stools for the kitchen bench
  • new deadlocks and entrance sets, including the garage
  • remote opener for the garage door
  • additional towel rail in the bathroom
  • shelves within the cupboard in the study
  • cutting down trees and removing stumps from the front garden
  • digging over front garden beds
  • removing bamboo along driveway
  • taking down unused curtain rail hooks

The larger items currently on the todo list include:

  • put up venetian blind (currently on order) in kitchen
  • get quotes for new screen doors
  • finalise new line for edge of the garden beds and put in concrete mower strip
  • rug in the lounge and a new coffee table

Here’s to another year…

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Am I becoming a gardener?

Sunday, February 13th, 2011 at 05:53pm

It is now two months since I started living in my own place and the most surpising thing I have how is how much gardening I have been doing.

It all started with the grass, which I mowed a couple of times using a borrowed lawn mower. While the edges in the backyard were easy to handle with some shears, in the front yard there was a ground cover plant blending in. I say ‘was’ as a few hours with the shears filled up my green bin and exposed a rock border.

My long term strategy is to have a garden that doesn’t annoy me. This means that the things that need doing don’t take much time or do not need doing very often. In the case of mowing the grass, I will at some stage add a concrete strip in front of the rock border to simplify future mowing.

For a week or two nothing annoyed me, until the bushes around the letterbox started to envelop the letter box and the bamboo down the side of the driveway started to rub against the car. An afternoon with shears solved those problems, but only for the time being as they will eventually grow back. The long term strategy there will be to remove the bamboo completely and put something else near the letterbox.

The outcome of this and other jobs (such as trimming back the other edge of the front lawn) is that I have been filling up my green bin every fortnight and it looks like it will continue to be filled up for many fortnights to come.

To enable this gardening I have accumulated some tools; spade, fork, shears, secateurs, gloves, broom, etc. While I did borrow a lawn mower a couple of times, I realised that I needed to get one of my own as I intend to get into the habit of keeping the grass mown.

To avoid the hassle and noise of a petrol lawn mower, I decided on electric. Granted, I did buy the cheap small electric mower from Bunnings, but so far it has worked out nicely. Although I haven’t quite worked out a good way to manage the power cable as running over it with the mower is not a good idea.

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