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It’s always nice to finish a few chores before the end of the year, and this little bit of landscaping has been drifting on for while now! In fact I think it really kicked off in earnest in February this year.

We did think we’d finished Path 1.0 a long while ago, but unfortunately I don’t seem to have a picture of Path 1.0. 🙁

But we came to realise we made a small mistake in our choice of fill. We originally filled the path with pea gravel. Which looked good. But actually wasn’t. It was way too small, so most of it made its way into the house in our shoes, or just drifted into the gardens. So eventually we dug all that out and the path sat bare of top coat for a while.

Until today. Finally we went and got a couple of scoops of driveway chip and finished it off. Just in time for the new year!

If you look closely in this post from August 2016 you’ll see a pile of fresh woodchips sitting by the shed. That pile continued to grow truckload by truckload for about another year until there were five truckloads all in a row.

So after leaving enough time for the last load to gently age we decided at the start of December on about the warmest day of the year so far to go and shift some around all the natives. Wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, ride-on trailer by ride-on trailer, shovel by shovel the piles have gradually reduced so now they’re down to only about a third of the original size, and there’s some slightly happier trees

I just wish now I’d stopped to get the “before” photo of the piles.

Still a fair bit to move, but that can wait for a little bit while we spray out the weeds etc first. Need a bit of growing weather for them to realise they’re dead!

We now jump forward to October 2017 when the next major operation of the year occurred. The Staining of the Trellis. And it did seem to be a major operation. Trellis is horrible to throw a paintbrush at!

But at least it’s now done, and hopefully won’t need touching up again for a few years. It certainly looks a lot nicer out there, and it evens out the colour of the old and new trellis quite nicely.

New years eve now, so I feel like I need to catch up on a few of the things that went on this year before I forget about them!

The largest operation since the planting of all those trees back in May was the installation of a great many meters of pipe to water them all. This time I called in a man with a small vibrating mole plough who made it all seem so easy. Of course that was back in winter when the ground was nice and soft, but it was still a whole lot easier than trying to dig trenches by hand, and a whole lot tidier than getting in a digger to dig a channel.

All I had to do was to put in the 4mm dripper lines from the main lines that ran close to the trees. Took me a few weekends to get around to it, but they were all set to go before the big dry hit this year in November, and the trees look like they appreciate it all so far. And we appreciate the ease of turning on a few valves rather than standing with a hose or running around with watering cans.

Once that was all done it was a matter of scouting around for anything else that didn’t have water nearby and getting that sorted, so there’s now a fair amount of brown dripline along all the box hedging and other plants.

Next water related task is to get some drippers on the natives, but we need to finish the wood chips first… More on that next.