Garden planning {bulbs and roses}

I am so ready for this weekend. This week has been all over the place for me. Work is busy, and I had a few days that were tough to get through. I try not to let work stress me out too much, but this week it did. But by the end of the week I've found some perspective, so it will be ok.

During the week to keep my spirits up, I indulged in some online retail therapy.
My flower garden looks fantastic, but apart from my lilies it's rather empty. So firstly I ordered 250 tulips, 300 anemones and 240 ranunculus bulbs from Tesselaar.

All of these images are from the Tesselaar website.

Next were my roses. Now Rob and I don't see eye to eye on roses. He loathes them with a passion. I however, would love to be able to pick roses for the hut and for friends and family. This partly led to the separation of the two gardens, so that Rob would not have to go near the roses! They are in the u shaped bed that surround the quadrant beds, so even I won't catch myself on a thorn whilst gardening around them. For the last 5 years I have sent away for the Treloar catalogue, which is in colour and mulled over the roses writing lists of my favourites. But eventually I narrowed it down to 40. Ten each of red, pink, yellow and white. They are all hybrid teas, which I know not everybody appreciates, but at the moment that's what I'd like. We certainly have room later to expand!

All of these images are from the Treloar website.

Last Saturday we had another load of soil delivered and Rob finished his vegetable beds. Although not the best time for planting we couldn't resist, so we planted some self-seeded Speckles lettuce and coriander. On Sunday we visited the Tas Farmgate market and picked up some chinese celery, dill and broccoli seedlings from Paulette at Provenance Growers. We also sowed carrot, parsnip, silverbeet, spinach, broad bean, rocket and savoy cabbage seed.

Watering in the speckles lettuce.

Lastly I just thought I'd share a little diagram I drew of our dream harvest year. I've joined in Chantelle's  April Photo-a-day challenge. Today's photo was something I drew. Believe me I don't draw very often. But this was fun. Not so sure about the likelihood of growing tangelos and mandarins in Tasmania, but the rest should be doable.

Happy weekend, I hope to drop by your blogs over the next few days, sorry I've been a bit slack at commenting this week. Well it must be almost beer o'clock! Yippee.

Veggie patch

With the absence of flowers in our garden at the moment, I think I'll make Friday a regular day for posting about progress in our garden.
Despite the often inclement weather over Easter, Rob persevered and put together most of the garden beds in his veggie patch. Our poor neglected grape vines that have been plonked in the ground for the time being need to be moved out to the slope in front of the orchard, so that the last 3 beds can be put in place.


On Tuesday we had a delivery of top soil and another of pine bark mulch. You'd think by now we'd be able to calculate the volume of soil/gravel etc we'd need but we realised that we'll need another truckload of soil to finish off the beds. Although our soil is pretty good already, it is clay based, so this nice sandy topsoil will improve the drainage in the raised beds. We put down weed mat between the beds and covered it with the pine bark for the paths.


Rob also finished the last two quadrant beds in my flower garden, and levelled off the soil. I spent a happy afternoon weeding around the box hedge plants. I got about half way through, so will finish that off on the weekend.


Finally we planted three new trees. A pepper tree (Schinus molle), a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) and a liquidambar (Liquidambar styraciflua).

We hope to finish off the beds this weekend, and plant out some seedlings for (fingers crossed) a winter crop.

Happy weekend.