Plans from my study window

Our study is only open to Favourite Handyman and I. Occasionally our six year old is allowed in with specific permission but it is never open to our two year old. When the others are out playing elsewhere and have forgotten about their mother (very temporarily full tummies I guess), it does feel like I have a room of my own, that wonderful asset Virginia Woolf wrote on my heart about.

So this damp and drizzly morning, when the fog of sickness seems to have eased enough on our house for me to be in the study blogging, I am looking out at our spring flower patch. This area is the top corner of our section. When we moved in it was all lawn and my Dad, looking at it closely, observed that it probably had the best drainage in the section and you could just make out a square definition which suggested this had once been the vegetable garden. Years before when it was last a family home.

We started our garden in this corner last Anzac Day, when we buried the children's placentas and planted a cabbage tree above each one. Later I made a raised bed garden nearby and grew lovely silverbeet, borage and strawberries. Then I pulled the logs away from the raised bed and let the chooks in. They turned it all over with great glee. There had, I now remember, been blackcurrants which I planted some time in 2007, and we added another blackcurrant another cabbage tree and some native grasses this year.

So now we have an area which is quite well mulched and supporting bushes or trees in a circle while it is still lawn or weeds around the periphery. The area is about 3 by 3 metres, so 9 square metres. Last night I made a new compost heapon one grassy corner. The chicken poo/straw/sawdust mixture from Raelene's chook house should break down nicely there and turn it to fertile, weedless soil in a couple of months. We did that in the corner of this area last spring and it worked well. There is still some weeding or compost building and some mulching with peastraw to be done to get the whole area the way I want it.

This area, which I look out to from the study (otherwise hidden by the chook run from) much of the back lawn, is perfect for spring bulbs to peek out from the mulch, amidst the straw and trees and not getting in the way of my next vegetable plans as has happened when I've put them in garden beds. Maybe I will try out the daffodils in the soil after all. I'm not overly fond of doing pots when I have so much lawn to be made into beauty and food. I have some yellow freesias and the yellow daffodils so far. There isn't much budget for flowers this autumn and I need to get out the very front and see if I can dig up some of last year's bulbs which were largely lost and unseen behind the huge flax and bring them out the back.

I do want some snowdrops for the shadiest back part though. Galanthus, they are also called. We had one snowdrop bush hidden behind a tree when I was a child and it was such a miracle, and thing of beauty in the still cold winter, to find it each year.

Also still in this area are some new borage plants, self seeded and one silverbeet plant still producing. There were others but they had gone to seed so they are pulled and prone on the soil. They can either compost there or be thrown to one of our 'proper' compost heaps.