Planting out the front yard: Take 2.

Here's a tip: If you are half way through typing up a blog post and you are distracted whilst downloading photos, don't walk away from your computer if you have three year old in the house. Especially if she likes to practise her newly acquired computer mouse-handling skills. Because she will click the "Publish" button on your blog, change your wallpaper and log-on icon and rename all the folders in your photo directory.

Sigh.

My apologies to Kez and Stewart, I didn't realise anyone had commented until after I'd pulled the original post, and I have no idea if they will come back or if they've disappeared into the ether!

Any-way, moving right along. A couple of months ago, I posted that I was thinking about the "radical" notion of growing vegies in the front yard, and last weekend it came to fruition! It was the local Council's green waste collection week this week, so DH very kindly turned this garden bed:

Into this!

DH dug out all the plants and barrowed in a few loads of homemade compost for me, and I did the forking over, levelling, mulching and planting out. As I mentioned in My Garden Diary, I planted out the yacon rhizomes from my last harvest, two types of Arrowroot I bought from GreenHarvest (Queensland and West Indian), and three types of sweet potato tubers - a couple of standard orange ones from the backyard crop, a white-fleshed one and a purple-fleshed one from the local organic grocer. It looks bare and terrible compared to when it was fully planted out with ornamentals (it shocks me a bit every time I walk out there, LOL), but hopefully it won't be long before it is lush with growth again - but this time with useful, edible plants ;-) But as I mentioned it my first post, I think the plants won't look like obvious edibles, so I'm not likely to look too radical to my neighbours ;-)

While I was out there in the front yard though, I was also pondering the grassed area in front of my front fence, with a view to possibly planting rampant vegies like watermelons this summer. Then it occurred to me that, with it's north-westerly aspect, it would be a perfect spot for a medicinal herb garden.

I currently grow many culinary herbs, which of course are often great medicinal herbs as well (such as sage), but as I am really keen to learn more about the complimentary medicinal properties of herbs, I'd like to expand my collection to include other lesser known and grown herbs. The front yard is a perfect spot for them, because most herbs are also really pretty to look at, and I suspect I could put together a rather lovely-looking garden that - to the average person on the street - wouldn't look out of place? Plus, as I have mentioned previously, our front yard is used pretty extensively by the neighbour's boys when they play kick-ball across the street, and anything planted in that area is very likely to get trampled on and/or kicked about by their drunken yobbo mates from up the road on a Saturday night. Not good conditions for growing melons and pumpkins really!

So, to that end I ended up ordering a copy of Aussie herb expert Isabell Shiphard's book, How To Use Herbs in Your Daily Life, which arrived this week, yay! The book is highly recommended by heaps of gardeners, and when I borrowed the first edition from my library, I was also very impressed! The third edition is now out, and I couldn't wait for Christmas, LOL. It's going on the book shelf as one of my staple reference books now though, I can't recommend it highly enough. Combined with two natural healing booklets I purchased from local natural healing expert Pat Collins about 14 years ago (Yikes! I should have been using them well before now, *smack on the wrist*), I have a lot of reading to consider this weekend while I plan what plants will be the first ones I put in out there :-)

After I get DH to dig up the buffalo grass first of course ;-) And barrow in some more compost. And maybe do the edges with leftover house bricks.

Hmmm, best be getting him a bigger Father's Day present I think ;-)