Veggie Garden - Veggies, chicken, and a dog - Padresol

It’s the only thing that relaxes me so I thought we’d do a garden out here, was just a plain backyard, a bit of a swamp so I just thought that we’d like to spend time out here with the kids and stuff, and that was the motivation. It took about three months I would say, over the weekends, had a friend come here and help me, help design it and it’d be about three months but pretty solid work on the weekends. The most difficult thing to do physically was I suppose moving all the stones in. The veggie boxes were easy to do, very simple to do but I’d say moving all the stones in for the ... the Tuscan stones for the pavement. The part I like the most is probably sitting out here after work with a cup of coffee just sitting down here on our table and chairs and just admiring the garden and what we’ve been able to do with it. And still being able to have a dog and a garden as well which you know makes it nice.So what we’ve done here as you can see at the end of the cage, so it’s easy access for the eggs, we can open it up and well there you go, you can see we’ve got an egg there, just ease of access, we don’t disturb the chickens or the dog, so there’s the egg. So in the dog pen here, what I had to do, because he’s got a lot of Kelpie in him, I had to build a thing because he was actually jumping this fence, I couldn’t work out where he was getting out. But he’s actually jumping the height, so what I had to do is... so he couldn’t get his paws over, so he couldn't jump from here it looks a bit like Guantanamo bay at the moment but at least it keeps him in and he’s pretty happy with the whole situation. What we decided to do is put a bit of grass in for the dog to make him feel more comfortable and it just takes the harshness out of the whole thing I think. And he seems pretty happy with it, he’ll lay down there in the sun and it probably keeps him a bit cooler as well. Then here we’ve put some vegetables in, zucchini there, we’ve got broccoli, bok choy, capsicums and tomatoes and some corn. We did have corn down here and we’ve got a great variety of lettuce happening there and then Chinese cabbage down the end. So I’ve put those in so far and as you can see there we’re putting a really good three way mix into the veggie garden here, there’s heaps of worms in there and it just seems to be flourishing at the moment. So we think everything’s okay and we can’t wait to eat the produce that comes out from it. And so what we did here, we put a crab apple tree in and just raised the bed and then we made underneath it our herb gardens, so we’ve got oregano, coriander -, we’ve got two lots of coriander, some parsley, we’ve got some chilli there, some mint, and some spring onions so we just made this section our herbs. You can see here we’ve got a strawberry patch, we’ve got three different types of strawberries, so we’re really looking at which ones produce the best fruit and then we’ll probably go with those ones in the whole bed there. And to help keep the watering done what we’ve done is put pea straw in fairly thick so we won’t have to water as often and it will just keep the ground all moist, especially during those hot summer months The enjoyment we get from the garden is watching our produce grow and just eating it I suppose, and it’s great for entertaining out here when we have friends over, and it’s always a talking point.