walkway | organised castle

After the grey and rainy days of the past week, we had a perfect Queensland winter day. Brilliant blue sunshine but quite chilly with a westerly wind. I did not even stop to take a photo as we were busy working on an outdoor project.

You may remember this post from a little over 3 months ago when we began in earnest to build the walkway/pergola entrance to our garden. It had been several years in the dreaming/planning stages but is now finally a reality, albeit, a not quite finished one.

We worked until the light was fading fast so I snatched these last minute photos as GMan was packing up the final tools.

2018-07-08 01

2018-07-08 02

We still have to attach the crossbar at the end closest to the house as well as panels of wire on the lower sections of the sides.

The next step will be to decide on exactly what coverage we want on the top of the walkway. It will probably be timber slats but we need to consider how wide and how far apart. The base will be paved with some of the pavers we salvaged from the front steps when they were demolished. There is even a pile of excess crusher dust salvaged from the front steps project, too. We will clean the pavers with the high pressure Gerni first.

2018-05-30 02

The final step will be to plant 4 Mandevilla creepers in shades of pink and crimson.

I am excited at the progress we have made and am looking forward to seeing a welcoming flower-covered entrance to our garden.

For the first time in what seems like months, we actually had a weekend where the weather was conducive to being outdoors. Lately it has either been 35C or raining or both so gardening has not really been on the agenda. We were delighted to see a forecast of mostly sunny days with a maximum temperature of 27C.

Yesterday, we decided to firm up our vague plans for a freestanding walkway/pergola to define the entrance to our garden. The idea is to have it covered with a flowering creeper. We have had a general idea of what we wanted but now have calculated the materials and so then it was off to Bunnings to buy the 6 large posts for the uprights. These are now positioned on sawhorses under the house where GMan has begun painting them.

We have marked out the exact location of the posts as you can see in the photo below.

2018-03-18 01

We are hoping to get the construction started over the Easter break when we have a couple of extra days off.

There will be more updates once there is more progress.

The perfect weather deserted us overnight and we awoke this morning to drizzling rain and cloud drifting past the windows. However, we did not let that stop us and we braved the overgrown and out-of-control vegetable gardens. Everything was covered with the wild cherry tomatoes. I had resolved to pick all the fruit which was ripe and not damaged before removing the plants. It was a massive job but we successfully cleared the garden beds and planted a variety of seeds. There are now beans, radishes, spinach, beetroot, lettuce, kale and cucumbers planted.

Hopefully, these freshly dug and planted beds will soon yield a range of produce.

2018-03-18 02

I don’t have a before photo but suffice to say that this is a vast improvement on how it looked this morning.

It may be a little difficult to see but there is an addition to the area. We constructed a new compost area in front of the hen house using some panels of pool fencing and some star pickets. This allowed us to put all of the cherry tomato plants in a single heap. I also cut the asparagus back and added that to the pile.

The forecast warm weather with showers every day fort he next week should give the newly sown seeds the best possible start so I am feeling quite optimistic.