A busy and fruitful weekend.

On the downside – still no painters, but looks promising for  next week and my bedroom side toilets/drains are blocked : (

On the good side – which is the bigger side, lots of progress. A trip to Mudgee resulted in some great new plants, trebled with a Diggers’ Club delivery and a few relocated Sydney plants, so lots of plantings for the front wall. This is a huge area, so I’m mainly putting in the big plants and then starting to dig out the areas that will have the mid and smaller fillers. It’s already starting to take shape.

A flowering Plum was added to the front garden which means the old shrubs have now been replaced with 6 deciduous trees – 5 of which will change colour and blossom.

I also started up my “plant nursery” with putting aside an area for propagating cuttings – starting with the Convent roses and adding in the original geraniums and some Salvias which look cutting-friendly. Fingers crossed!

D has started undercoating the side verandah and it already looks so different! Very exciting to think of how much better the place will look with some TLC.

The expanded Pumpkin patch which was to mulch itself in the lead up to Summer has already been partly planted out with a Globe Artichoke, Rhubarb and an Asparagus crown which I am told should be a faster track to Asparagus cultivation. I’ve only taken a small area and will endeavour to leave space for the vegetables it was originally intended for. A neighbour mentioned wild asparagus growing on a roadside as a faster route to croppable asparagus – I must find out where this is.

I managed to get wire over the top of the Grotto for the climbing roses to have something to hang on to. The bulbs are so close to flowering. I hope they last long enough for me to enjoy them and don’t come and go in the few days I’m away! I’m now at least able to tell what is coming up. I also installed two solar spot lights in front of the Grotto which are currently charging. Not sure if this will look pretentious but only plan to use them for special occasions (including miracles).

Lastly, I dragged some of the old sleepers from the replaced section of the fence around to a fairly unstructured garden bed to give it an edge. Even the small sleepers are unbelievably heavy. I was really pleased with this, even if  it will mean some work in digging up and preparing the garden bed – although it’s always good to have another bed to plant in.

All in all a good weekend, although the list doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter. I came home to two boxes of perennials from Tesselaars which will put me back to work and I’m hoping the slip for collection from the Post Office may be my long-awaited ‘taties from Diggers.