Working Bee - Bed Building and Weeding

On Sunday 8th July we enjoyed a successful working bee at the Sharman house. Four keen permies, namely Kathy, Celeste, Maryanne and Pat turned up bearing a vast array of gardening implements, along with piles of newspapers for mulching purposes. The grown-ups were abley supported by Addie and Laurie (the kids).

The brief was two-fold;
1) To weed the back garden, and;
2) To build a third vege garden on the north-east side of the house to complement the existing two.

The back garden comprises mainly exotics and it had become quite overgrown. It needed weeding, mulching and a general tidying. The permie army did a fantastic job of clearing approximately 20m2 which was then covered with several layers of saturated newspaper, to prevent light reaching the weeds.

The trusty (and rusty) wheelbarrow served as the vessel to hold the water in which the newspaper was soaked. Once the soaked paper was applied several layers thick and overlapping, we mulched heavily with lucerne and the garden was beginning to resemble it's former glory.

The fine working crew can be seen assembled in the photo at top.

On the other side of the house Celeste and I were building the new vegetable garden. The design was to match the other two beds which were constructed using 100 x 12 x 1800mm hardwood timbers stacked three high and screwed into 50 x 50mm posts driven into the ground. Hardwood was used instead of treated pine to avoid potential contamination of the soil and veges. We toiled hard, often having to dig through sandstone in order to embed the posts. However the work was satisfying given the weather was a tad chilly.

By knock-off time we had achieved much. We now had one quarter of the back garden cleared and mulched and a third vege garden well on its way. We then downed tools and headed inside for a delicious lunch of chicken hot pot, vege hot pot, roasted potatoes, quiche and cake. After tea and coffee it was time to bid fond farewells and look forward to the next working bee.

Permie Pete