Verge Orchard

With our limited space constraints (our block is around 427 square meters) came certain drawbacks in terms of self sustainability. One is the lack of space available for planting fruit trees as they tend to grow large and take up a decent amount of space. I have jam packed our backyard with different varieties of dwarf, semi dwarf, and columnar fruit species, but some women buy shoes, I buy fruit trees. So eventually I ran out of space entirely in our backyard, but still had a beautiful weeping mulberry tree needing a home, and a fig and orange tree needing relocating as I accidentally planted them in possibly the shadiest spots in our back yard and they were less than impressed with my efforts.
So last weekend we were lucky enough to get the Transition Town Guildford Verge Gardening Group together round at ours to help us plant the trees onto our rather large verge that currently just grows useless weeds in winter and is a dry scorched wasteland in summer. Over the course of two hours we managed to dig all three holes, amend the soil and plant all three trees.
Since then they have gotten plenty of rain, and are all looking very happy with their new homes. In future I plan on extending out and adding some more veggie garden space around the fruit trees and mulching the rest of the verge to eliminate the need of mowing and to also increase the space available for us to continue producing out own fruit and veggies. Enjoy of the photos of the process and the lovely end result, prettiest verge on the street now.

Weeping mulberry tree before transplant

Mulberry tree located on the verge

Everyone hard at work planting the trees

Transition Town Guildford Verge Gardening Group very proud of their handy work

Update as Promised

Sorry about being a little slack on the blog updating lately. Going back to uni lately has taken up a large chunk of my time which leaves me little time for things like blogging and general fun stuff. But, I figured it was about time to put a quick little update about what's been happening around here.

Most notably is the fact that we finished irrigating all the beds, including around the pond and the herb spiral which means I don't have to go out there every single day and water everything which is nice, as I can spend that amount of time doing other garden tasks like fertilizing, weeding and replanting of seedlings that got killed off by the heat.

Yesterday Transition Town Guildford held a very successful event, a bicycle treasure hunt through Guildford. Teams of both adults and families gathered to receive their clue sheets, and then headed off to search out the answers found in and around Guildford and make it back within an hour. The more questions biked to and answered the more chance to win some of the $500 worth of prizes we had on offer! We had a first place prize for families, adults, and a best dressed bike. We had a great turnout of nearly 50 people and everyone had a great morning biking around searching out clues! Best dressed bike went to a family who all dressed up as pirates and even decorated their bikes into pirate ships. Great effort!

Ok, on to the pictures! Enjoy :)
The uploader thing only seems to let me upload these two for now for some reason, more to come once it settles down.

L to R: Kohlrabi, Broccolini, Radish, Kale

Eggplant, Chillis, Peas