Garden antics & coming full circle

After almost 18 months of preparing, planning, umming, aahhing, & changing our minds completely, we have returned to where we started - the garden. In preparation for big diggers, gravel rafts, & the various mechanisations of TC3 construction, much was removed from our wild jungle garden which in fact did not need to go at all. Oh the joy & humility of hindsight :-)

So now that our 2 "sheds" have us living in wonderful domestication again, the time has come to transform the building site into a new & much more expansive garden.  It's great fun too - with so many trees now gone, & the house occupying so little space, the gardening potential has gone exponential!

Nessi puts the final touches on the kitchen-bivvy walkway

It was going to be a curvy wurvy kind of boardwalk, but we chickened out :-)

The unofficial princess of stout, Ariel Linklater, brings much needed supplies.
The Hop Baron 8 ball stout is highly recommended

Post-stout hammock happiness

The solar hot water experiment

This photo probably deserves some explanation...we have developed a mild obsession for hot water projects. First of all we got a compost hot water trial going (full details in a future post I think), & quickly followed that up with a simple solar hot water experiment.  The set up at the moment consists of 300m of 13mm plastic irrigation pipe, coiled into nice tight spirals, sitting on sheets of dark coloured corrugated iron, all covered with clear plastic to keep the (b)easterly out. This seems to work quite nicely for 2 peoples washing needs every day, with a gas hot water backup for colder days. A work in progress...

Recycled macrocarpa desk, transformed into our new dining room table...the dining room is outside of course

Re-built stone walls, with another set of steps

Making new steps right next to a big old tree stump was not that smart...

The mammoth stack of bricks is almost on its way to a new home

Richard overseeing the loading of his "new" bricks

Forklift in progress

And away they go - off to Pigeon Bay to become a grand english country garden style wall. A fitting new life for the old 3 York St, and accomplished in good style; all stages of the process have been very hands on - from the building of our original house, to our demolition of it, to the cleaning & stacking of the bricks by Richard & Lynley - it's been fantastically old school.