How do you plan a Garden? Where do I start?

My empty garden is mostly rubble, rubbish left behind by the builders, who promised to clean up and didn’t.

This is the best spot in the garden currently, it has plants which are not only alive, but have survived a full year in our windy garden (I think the fence helps).

Despite the strong winds in this spot, they are thriving. Unfortunately so are the weeds growing up around them in the improved soil. Does anyone know what the green plants are with the white flowers? When small they have a pretty shape, but as they grow they become messy and eventually die. A visitor has told me that they may be from the nightshade family and that some people call this weed a “potato plant”, but there’s no potato-type growth underneath them and I can’t find any picture matches under that name.

The World of Espalier

I have always been fascinated with Espalier, but I always thought it was for aborists or people with training.

Chris England shows this is just not the case and anyone can Espalier their own trees!

Vasili’s Garden got Chris England to show the world how to do it, on video

Chris also has a great nursery called Merrywood Plants in Baxter Victoria, where you can buy all the gear you need, including black lattice, which I have never seen before.

I’d love to have loads of espalier in my garden, but I’m not sure I know enough about my yard yet, to know where to put them. I’d particularly love blood oranges, but I’m not sure if these grow well in Victoria or not.

Americans, have you seen these bees?

The Xerces Society wants to know, have you seen these bees in the USA?

Why don’t YOU have a bee hive?

As a suburban gardener, I would quite like to have bees to assist pollination in the suburbs. However I think my neighbours with children would be less than keen on my keeping bees on the other side of the fence. I am also allergic, as are many of my family.

My question to other gardeners is, why don’t YOU have a bee hive?

I am curious to know if any gardeners don’t grow/raise bees due to the cost, as I would be interested in sponsoring a local bee hive in a more suitable location and maybe other people are too.

I planted things in pots!

I bought a couple of pots and some seedlings from Collector’s Corner at GardenWorld and Bunnings. I started with three empty white pots, ten succulent seedlings, a bag of white pebbles and six herb seedlings.

I used our bins as a potting bench, as I don’t have one.

This is the what happens when you pick up the open pebble bag the wrong way. Such little pebbles are hard to pick up.

This is the best photo I got of the succulents, I waited too late and lost all the natural light.

Which is why this photo of the herbs looks so funny, too much white, too much flash. I took more photos, they’re on Flickr.

Where in the gardening world am I?

via Margaret Morgan

Jodi DeLong (from Nova Scotia, Canada) has started the Garden Bloggers Geography Project, with the question: Where in the Gardening world are you?

Jodi is asking garden bloggers around the world to post about their local area and as I’ve been meaning to start a blog for my empty garden, so this seems like a good place to start, as I don’t have a garden to post about yet.

I live in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne is located on the mainland of Australia, on the south edge of the East Coast, in the state of Victoria. Victoria is a beautiful state of Australia. From restful Daylesford with it’s Italian lavender farm, the hidden treasures high in the Dandenong Ranges, the sweeping green curve of the Mornington Peninsula, fairy penguins surfing themselves to shore at Phillip Island, the breathtaking view along the Great Ocean Road to the ever-present heartbeat of Melbourne’s CBD. The tourism slogan is You’ll Love Every Piece of Victoria, so far I have yet to find a piece that I don’t love and just some of the many reasons why I moved to Melbourne and Victoria.

At the hyper-local level, I reside in the Greater Dandenong district, a melting pot area with many vibrant cultures, young demographic and high growth rate, with many newly built houses on new land estates and as a result, many empty gardens (including my own).

I live not far from a place called GardenWorld. GardenWorld is a place that will tempt anyone to get started on their empty garden. Shop after shop of beautiful plants and garden tools. My favourite is Collector’s Corner, which has the beautiful and unusual. Succulents, bromeliads, bonsai, cacti, orchids, bug-eating plants and air plants.

As for my garden, it’s a sad, barren-looking patch of dirt filled with builder’s rubble, aside from a small strip of actual garden which contains three purple fountain grasses, thriving in their sunny spot (I found a photo of the same grass on Flickr). It’s a sterile ornamental grass.