You may remember last spring I planted lots of veges and herbs in my vegetable patch. It thrived for quite a few weeks before the crows found it! I thought the Scarecrow we made and blogged about here might help…but it didn’t. In fact even when I was picking tomatoes from the garden last summer the birds would swoop at me.  In the end I gave up and the vegetable patch, thankfully hidden around the side of the house, become one great big disaster area.

With Spring in the air I had to give it another go…I missed my fresh herbs, even if I had to live without a tomato bush. 

After no time at all the weeds were out, the herbs and lettuce were in, and I even found a new set of eyes to watch over the garden to hopefully keep those pesky crows away.

Late last summer half of our front lawn dried up and died.  We had had a rather unusually cool and wet summer so we put it down to the poor weather, but I think lawn grubs were to blame.  For the next six months we looked at a large patch of dirt everytime we arrived back home. 

This weekend we (well, let’s face it – my husband, John) finally addressed the problem, laying a gorgeous new lawn.  I did do a bit of research in the lead up to the weekend to identify the key steps to preparing, laying and establishing the lawn.

Step 1. Poison the existing grass and weeds a few weeks in advance.

Step 2. Dig the soil down to 75mm below the garden edge, a little lower if you intend to add an underlay which is really only necessary if your soil is in poor condition. Fortunately ours was fine to use.

Step 3. Prepare the soil, just ahead of laying the turf by levelling it carefully and applying a lawn preparation fertiliser. We used Sir Launcher – designed for the Sir Walter broad leaf grass.  Water the fertiliser in well.

Step 4. Start laying the turf from the straightest edge and laying in a brick-work pattern.

Step 5: Finally, trim pieces of turf using garden shears or a sharp spade to fit the edges.

Step 6: It is recommended that the turf is rolled with a water-filled lawn roller, but given our very small lawn the turf supplier suggested walking over the turf, particularly the joins wearing a pair of rubber thongs while hosing the lawn. Hopefully this will suffice.

Step 7: The final step for the day - water the lawn well, and do so daily for the first week.

Here is our new lawn. 

Next weekend the plants around the garden will be getting some attention, some food (fertiliser) and some new friends (more plants!).

A few weeks back Hamish brought a very small bean plant home from school that he had grown in a plastic cup with a little kitchen paper towel. I’m sure you’re familiar with this little school experiment. Back in my day we used cotton wool. 

The bean sat in the little plastic cup on the bench for a few days…maybe even a week…before Hamish and I eventually popped it into an old pot to give it a little more chance of living.  I didn’t really pay too much attention to the bean after this until a few days ago when I noticed that the little bean shoot was now a plant cascading over the pot.

So Hamish and I gathered some sticks and built a garden obelisk to encourage this little plant to grow and hopefully produce some beautiful green beans.