floral experiments #01

• Wannabe Farmstead

It began unexpectedly with the paint I’ve been needing (we have some unexpected asbestos walls which need to remain painted and the current coat is peeling and we didn’t get the renos done that I wanted so I told J it had to be done before summer ended, and I’m running out of summer). He was doing a Bunnings run for some stuff to repair leaky taps and asked if I needed anything, I told him to get Cottage or Federation Green paint and pretty much any white that looked like it would go with it (I don’t much care as Cottage Green and white is not my favourite but I’d never gotten around to redoing it in Cottage Red and we’re planning on repainting the inside in greens).

J was adamant that he would somehow get the “wrong one” (it’s literally a shade, they all have one specific name, they vary very slightly between brands but not nearly enough for me to care about in this case) and much wheedling later I very grumpily agreed to accompany him.

I ended up picking up three swatches (two Cottage Greens and one Brunswick Green which under the fluoro lights looked closer to my recollection of the paint on the house, but I had been right the first time).

I sent the swatches to Middle as she and her boyfriend are planning to build a granny flat in the yard (only thing they have a prayer of affording anytime soon) as the buildings would have to match.

We didn’t end up getting the paint after all that but seeing as he’d dragged me out there I made J buy me flowers.

There was a somewhat wild garden here when we moved in and now only the hardiest plants have survived as J steadfastly refused to deal with anything that wasn’t edible from the time we moved in til now, and a previous too-large flock of chickens ate all the grass. We have however been here for nearly two decades with an ugly looking garden and I was really putting my foot down (plus despite my constant complaining making it sound otherwise, he does like keeping me happy).

While doing some extremely basic prep work on the garden beds (very long awaited and constantly put off redoing the stone edges using some accidental concrete bits that happened when a bag got rained on to replace a bunch of the stones J had taken for various things, stabbing with pitchfork to soften up soil which turned out to be already soft and trying to mix in leaf litter and levelling everything out a bit more), I covered over a hole and wondered why J kept taking soil from this particular area. When laying out the new plants the answer came.

I’m leaving off planting anything in there til I figure out what to do about this XD

New stuff went in:

The original plan was to see how these plants went (a couple of them apparently like “brightly lit shaded areas” so they’re in the bed that’s almost always shaded, the rest which allegedly like full sun to part shade are divided between the “brightly lit almost always shaded” bed and the “brightly lit sometimes gets a whack of sun for a short period of time” bed under one of the shade trees) and to wait for any survivors to get bigger so I can see how my composition actually looks (I don’t know how big these things get so everything was guesswork).

I am terrible at sticking to plans at the best of times and have already told J we’re getting an Elkhorn fern or similar for the log that I forgot we had the next time we go back to Bunnings which is sooner than anticipated as he forgot to get replacement heat lamps on our last trek.

The catio garden decided to suddenly do better since I last took photos of it.

And we only got 4 chicklets out of the 24 fertile eggs J planted in the coop. The day J put them in the two broodies apparently decided they were over it, fortunately it was a hot enough day that it was probably fine, and then the broodies decided they did want to sit after all but apparently only half the eggs got sat on.

Useless fun fact: J accidentally said “seeds” when he meant “eggs” when he was telling me when he was going to go pick up the fertile eggs so we’ve decided that they’re now “chicken seeds”.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License