Christmas unwrapping

Weeding for the best part of 5 hours - that's what I was doing one weekend in December. Thanks goodness mum and dad came to help otherwise I wouldn't have got very far... our backyard has been a wilderness for some time now and every time I surveyed it I got that sinking feeling otherwise known as despair - when you know you've left a chore too long and it just keeps getting harder every day (or should I say month) you put it off. We have now made some inroads - is it too much to hope we'll have a half-decent space by Christmas..?

In an effort to stem the tide of unbidden greenery, P decided to cover most of the yard with blue tarpaulins (a sort of blue Christo artwork if you will) which had the effect of creating a hothouse for the weeds under which they flourished, as we discovered when we started the unwrapping of the back yard. I have a hunch they actually thrived beyond normal parameters - the photosynthetic process in green plants uses the blue spectrum of light to function.

P and his Dad get out the power tools - for building the retaining walls

L had a ball in the sand pile with his herd of toy dinosaurs

P's Dad working on the wall - see the wrapped yard in the background

L and P hard at work

P levelling the ground in preparation for the turf laying

Our backyard ready for turfing

They were so green and lush I wished they were edible - they looked pristine and almost virtuous in their green-ness - thoughts which I had to swallow down as I proceeded to tear them from the ground and onto a make-shift compost heap. I guess if you take the long view, we will be eating them eventually, once they are composted down and spread around our vegetable garden to be, the nutrients from that green-ness will come through in our salads and stir frys of the future.

Another side-effect of the blue tarps was to create a huge waterfall in our back yard where the tarps collected all the rainwater and directed it to the corner of our garden where our sunken garden (read drainage pit required by council) overflowed and threatened to engulf our back neighbours' house. P was up in the middle of the night working to stem the flow. Luckily that only happened once in a particularly heavy downpour.

I am hoping to get some help from a permaculture garden service - they might be able to help with some of the hard labour and also advise on design for our garden. We have quite a clear vision of what we want, but we could always do with more information on how to go about it and which plants will do best in different areas. We'd like an organic vegie garden, complete with chook dome as well as a sizeable portion of lawn for L to run around on. We're putting in a shed behind the water tank and eventually we'd like an above ground pool in the back corner (opposite the sunken garden). I'd like to have some native shrubs and trees around the fence line as well. We also want to plant some large deciduous trees near the house to ensure good shading in summer and bare branches in winter to let the light through.

All in good time!