My garden was pretty ugly out the front. Horridly, horridly ugly. I was silly and didn’t take a photograph of it before I ripped it to pieces, but here’s an approximation –

Take this badly tended garden from the back of my house…

And add a couple of those dead shrubby things and one of these monstrosities which are interestingly called mother in law tongue snake plant.

And you can kind of guess what my garden looked like. Wasn’t pretty.

Last weekend I finally got the shits and dug it up with the help of an overenthusiastic three year old dirt flinger.

As you can see, the garden edging has rotted away here too (thanks cyclones and general tropical monsoons) and the rocks are just tumbling everywhere. Actually the whole thing is pretty much suffering from my apathy. I have a gardener who comes once a month to do a general tidy/trim of everything and if it wasn’t for his efforts (which are pretty decent and rather affordable I might add) it would be a lot worse. The sprinkling system is still in place however and is attached to a timer that I can set for whenever I want it watered. At the moment it’s set to off because we’re getting enough rain that we don’t need to do anything.

Getting the roots of those mother in laws out wasn’t too difficult, but the roots of whatever was in the far corner took a couple of days to excise properly. I tried jumping on the end of a shovel and sticking the lopper into the dirt to try and sever them before I gave up thinking it was a guaranteed certainty I was going to get severely injured by a shovel flying into my nose. Eventually, I was successful

Then I left it for a week or so while intermittently turning the soil and raking it again. I have no idea if that’s something you’re supposed to do but it felt like a normal thing to be doing.

Today we went into Masters Home Improvement to get myself some plants. We were undecided about what to plant at the front, I gave Cailee the choice and she wanted veggies but it’s not an ideal spot for veggies. We settled on herbs and decided to destroy the back garden above to make room for a veggie garden. I couldn’t find all of the herbs I was interested in, but that’s ok. I got what they had and some bags of potting mix for extra planting help. The grand total was less than I had budgeted for (am on a very tight budget at the moment) and if Cailee wasn’t so intent on playing in traffic like a kamikaze I would have doubled back and gotten some of the garden edging I’ve been lusting over. It’s just not going to be finished without proper edging.

And at about 4pm this afternoon I finally have an incomplete infant herb garden, YAY!

I have tarragon, mint, rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme and basil. I’m going to make a trip to Bunnings tomorrow after work and see if they have some more I can add to it.

Budget: $100.

Actual Cost: 

2 x bags of potting mix @ $4 each (half the price of Bunnings)
Herb fertiliser – $3.40
Oregano – $5.98
Mint – $3.25
Rosemary – $3.25
Sage – $3.25
Tarragon – $4.98
Basil – $5.98
Thyme – $5.98

Total: $44.07

All in all, I feel pretty successful in my endeavour to slowly transform this house from looking like it belongs to some gay frat boys who adopted a kid to one that looks like actual people live in it. The next thing I am going to attack is the front porch. Stay tuned for my efforts in cleaning that up, it’s a monster of a job thanks to the dickhead painter we hired when we built the place.