Gramps Garden Makeover Pt4

This is the the front yard complete with soak

The front yard was always a dumping ground and car park for builders... then became the dump for spare soil... which we dubbed Mt Everest. Couldn't find the old pics.... Eventually we had Mt Everest removed - so the yard resembled any other new house on a block moonscape.

We put in a cluster of Eucalyptus caesia (Silver Princess) trees, with my favourite planting technique using perferated poly piping coiled at the bottom of the planting hole, and coming to surface as a deep watering port.

We had some decent rain, and a plumber who appeared to fail the first rule
of plumbing: water flows DOWNHILL. So the drainage pit was put in a high
point in the yard... I drained the few inches of water in the yard (at
around midnight!) by diggin a hole next to the drain pit, and diggin
trenches across to this hole, then started a siphon into the drain...
worked well!

From this we decided to put in a soak (temporary wetland) with Billy
Buttons, rushes, sedges etc, as well as some big quartz boulders (quarried
from a deep pit near a small town in the NorthWest of Victoria called Gre
Gre). The soak got a smaller quartz from the same pit for its 'lining'. I
don't like the idea of raiding waterways for river rocks... I bent a
borrower trailer with the first boulder, and had the rest delivered in the
OH MY GOD-sized loader - which managed to manouver into the front yard.

More sandy loam raised beds went in with euchy mulch... planted with
kangaroo paws, Poa labilliardii, Eucalyptus platypus, Coral gum,
Hardenbergia violacea and Creeping Boobialla. The growth has been dramatic
in recent times! (You'll see some temporary chook-wire fences... they
'deflect' the Four Legged Excavator around beds)

The Yard did 'flood' in mid December last year, and the result was a full
soak, overflowing through my spillway connection to the drain. If you look
in the background and compare with the soak picture (above), you can see
the road has disappeared under water! We suspect that the retention of
water will be longer during winter, that the three days it took to disappear in December. However, our intention was that it be a place where water does infiltrate into the ground - not a permanent pond. Time will
tell how this will work in a wet winter (!).

We have since distributed some more quartz pebbles and taken down the fences. We anticipate putting acrushed granite path across to the side of the house 'at some stage'... Overall, this went from Nov 2002 till Dec 2003 as a major work, but is now at the tinkering stage.

We had part of our wedding reception at our home (March 2004), and had the garden to the stage where it looked more or less complete. There's a lot of growing into the landscape to do! I'll post an update or two in the future as it grows/floods and evolves!