Sunday 18 August 2013

Sunday Slideshow (Aug #3)

Well it's been a bit of a lazy weekend, and we have been playing a bit of catch up on chores, plus my super muscular lifting skills were in hot demand this weekend (more to follow - riveting stuff - stay tuned)...

Saturday I spent about four hours under the house sorting and rearranging everything after we had the Termidor termite barrier installed a couple of weeks ago (read about it here). After bumping into a few items in the dark I finally decided I had to get everything back to its rightful place, so that was job number one done. Job number two was a Daddy-Daughter date, as I had promised to take Sasha to see 'The Sound of Music' that the Townsville Choral Society was presenting at the Townsville Civic Theatre...

 
All in all they did a sterling job and we were two happy theatre patrons - love the arts !
 
 
From here we were off to collect Kate and Poppy, and go over to some friends who needed a hand lifting some heavy items in preparation for putting their house on the market as they are moving interstate (insert sad face and boo-hiss faces here....) So having done a collective ten minutes of heavy lifting work, it was time for some of these...
 
 
Followed by a few of these...
 

...followed by a good nights sleep, which is what you need after such a busy day - you can see from the three photos above that we enjoyed the culture of Austria, Tasmania and Scotland just in one day!!
 
After a restful night I was up early and decided it was time to get a few jobs done in the garden, in preparation for some demolition and construction tasks being done this week. The back stairs and landing is getting torn down and replaced, and the back carport (currently standing by good fortune only I think) is coming down piece by piece and being replaced with new materials. This will open up the carport to the pergola by the pool, and giving us a bigger entertaining area for when we have people over and the weather decides to rain on our parade.
 
So in between clearing up I decided to do a little bit more work to the vegetable garden area down the back that we started on three weeks ago. So the area behind the carport and pergola started off like this...
 
 
And then it progressed to having a few little garden beds created for the girls to plant some tomatoes in (and other veggies as it develops over time). They were pretty chuffed with their first efforts...
 
 
We also planted some sugar snap peas along the back fence. Whether they come to anything or not is beside the point, as part of growing them is to produce some green fertilizer and put some nitrogen back into the soil (one of Peter Cundall's tips from Gardening Australia).
 
 
 
Anyway, back onto today and I thought it would be good to carry on the working bee theme of the weekend (thanks Alana) and rather than just plant a few new plants, why not prep a few more garden beds and put some pavers down around them that we had picked up out of another area of the garden last weekend. On top of this I pulled down some timber panels that the previous owners had put up, so now it looks a little like this...
 
 
This is the start of the path and the new garden bed on the right will eventually become a herb garden bed.

 
The path wraps around the garden beds, past the peas along the back fence, and then the tomato plants planted two weeks ago (far garden bed where the marigolds are) and then another tomato plant and some Greek basil (middle garden bed).

 
Its opened up the area quite a bit at the back now, and where I am standing is the possible future location of a chicken coop for 2-3 chickens (the jury is still out on that one - any thoughts?) We also think that a small rainwater tank installed in the bottom right of the picture would capture rainfall off the carport and be ideal for watering the veggies and herbs with.
 
Anyway all this gardening is thirsty work, so the girls insisted on cooling off in the pool (as you do in "winter") before tucking into a tasty ice-cream...
 
 
How's the serenity...??
 
 
Note 'Red the Lifeguard' keeping watch in the top corner from his doggy sunbed!
 
 
"Ummm, excuse me girls, where's mine ?!"
 
 
Hope your weekend was great as well - have a great week everyone!
 
Cheers, Col
 

2 comments:

  1. It is great to see the area opened up. I'm keen to hear the verdict on the chooks. I bet Red would love them!

    ReplyDelete
  2. He'd certainly have something to round up then ;-)

    Cheers, Col

    ReplyDelete