I haven't posted a gardenjournal in ages because I wasn't feeling very inspired by my vegetables but I got started on major earthworks this winter. Why winter? It's cold enough to work outside and the soil is dry enough to be able to sieve and there has been lots of sieving required to take out all the broken glass, old shoes and builder's rubble in the soil. This picture is actually one side of the site once I made some progress in the sieving and demarcating of the area. Building a garden here is actually very tricky because there's a thin layer of soil and then you hit rock formations. Previous gardeners had tried and failed and I found plenty of nursery tags for roses and ferns and other plants totally unsuited to the heat and intense sunlight here.
Before: I had planted some aloes against the rock but wasn't very happy with the overall look of the place
I decided to go for raised beds with low rock walls, firstly because I love rustic stone walling and secondly because there's so much stone everywhere. All the stone you see comes from the soil.
There's something oddly satisfying about stacking rocks into low walls
And of course I had to add in my favourite large rock I found in the yard, there are many such conglomerate boulders because the area was a seashore many millions of years ago, before there was life on earth so no fossil animals but beatiful fossilised estuary.
In some places, there are channels and cracks that can simply be filled with soil and planted.
I'm still far from finished but this is how the area in the first picture looks now. All the small stone serve 2 purposes: the white colour reflects sunlight and keeps soil cool and retaining moisture and to do something more with all the stones in the soil.
Making a garden that works for these conditions requires selecting the right plants and everything I've planted is native to my country and well-suited to heat and intense sunlight - Aloes, Euphorbias, Crassula, Cotyledon and Mesembs. They were mostly struggling in pots and longed to be able to spread their roots and they are absolutely loving this. I'm watering them at the moment so that they can settle in during our hot, dry spring but once the plants are established, the garden will be able to survive on seasonal rainwater. Quite a few are flowering wildly in ways they didn't before
As for my hands, there's been a couple of times when I had to stop for a while so that the skin could recover. Because I dislike gloves...
I'm still quite far from finished as I have changed my mind a lot and changed shapes and contours of the planted areas because it's really a matter of standing back and studying how it looks and seeing which plants are best suited to which spots. I'll post it again in a few months time once its finalised and the plants have settled in and grown a bit.
