Holland Down Under - The Clog Barn

Our trip to coffs saw us visiting many places, but these were just so cute and the garden is fantastically maintained (bushes must be constantly pruned to keep them in the right proportions to the buildings etc). Now just bear in mind that these are not all in order as we walked backwards and forwards several times through this compact yet surprising garden village.

*** Found this post hiding away in my drafts folder, apparently i was going to write more or edit it later and forgot about it lol!!

Feast or Famine - part 02

(left) my clivia finally flowered
(right) my table arrangement, all from my gardens.

Vegies, fruits, edible natives. We have loads of them and the front garden is such an ecclectic mix that most people dont believe it til they see the pumpkins snaking their way through and over the calistemon, the citronella geranium, the gooseberry bushes, up and over the 3 metre tall moonlight grevillea, getting tangled with the nasturtiums and lavenders and the leaves of the strawberry plants popping up from inbetween.

Add in my favourite herb, a kaffir lime, rocket, more gooseberries, some more grevilleas in a few different shades, a very mature lomandra, and many many other plants as well as some little rock paths, a garden seat hidden between the lomandra and the beautiful and fast growing melaleuca and my favourite little purple flowering seaside daisies.

Feast or Famine - part 03

Then the fenceline right at the front, well it was built as a brick retaining wall when the house was built, to cover over the septic tank (long since out of use) and then one of the previous owners decided to put a rustic wooden farm fence up. He was going for the OK CORRALL look (according to another neighbour) but thankfully didnt manage to find (or took with him) the metal nameplate to complete the look. This i have masses upon masses of the most gorgous bougainvilleas growing. DBF doesnt like my Bougs, but he works around them (and he does admit the flowers are very spectacular enmasse).

These were taken during one of the recent hail storms, poor garden.

Feast or Famine - part 04

The back garden is different, it is one backyard but garden wise it has several different sections. First there is the original garden wayyy up the back, it goes the full length of the back fenceline, which is reasonably long and borders three different houses from the next street. This original garden has a mature macca tree, mature mulberry, a number of banana trees (mainly ladyfinger variety), several palms (that i forgot i had because the macca had grown around them lol) and one golden penda tree that has NEVER flowered in the 7 or 8 years since i planted it, yet it is most definitely a golden penda and very healthy.

You can see the frames that will eventually be my chookhouse. Its just taking me a while between renovating the inside of the house, kids, life, uni (exam week this week) and all the rest of the stuff, let alone the rain and getting the materials together (the posts and small concrete pats were new, but the rest of the frame will be wire, corrugated iron and other materials i already have lying around (literally cause i dont have a garage or shed to put them in yet).

Feast or Famine - part 05

That garden originally did have a mature orange and a massive mandarin tree, but those were both systemically poisoned with malathion by a previous neighbour (who thought he was helping) and the future fruits were not only bitter to taste but caused the eater to vomit uncontrollably for hours, so both trees were totally cut down and destroyed as there was no way i was having my then small (toddler) son eating one of those fruits. See the pic below, well the massive big tree in the top left of the pic, that was the mandarin tree, it was at least 5 metres tall and twice as wide.

It also now has a heap of golden canes that are slowly thickening up and growing taller and will eventually screen out the houses behind us. Also up there are two old variagated ficus trees that along with a few others in the area, all died off at once (age?) and are now in the role of trellis to support my choko vines. Whatever chokos drop from the vines the cattle dog eats, she is very self sufficient in this way and we dont mind her eating the chokos when she seems to enjoy them so much. As well as the slab which at the moment is used for storage of materials such as tiles and the kids like to build shanties whenever we have large sheets of cardboard.

Feast or Famine - part 06

Then there is the east fenceline, that originally i couldnt see past as the neighbours yard was full of mature plants, until she passed away and the new owners levelled the entire yard. Now i can see at least ten houses i never wanted to see, including one whose occupants drive me up the wall, caterwauling the most horrendous songs and destroying even the best songs all day and night and in summer with windows open, it makes it a nightmare to spend time in my own yard.


So we prepared and planted a LARGE section with different citrus fruits, several oranges, several mandarins, a bush lemon, another lemon (unknown species, it was $3 from the nursery as it had lost its tags, so they knew it was a lemon but not what kind and therefore couldnt sell it at normal retail cost), a variagated cumquat (i love these things and so do the kids, best form of sour lolly ever lol) and Dear Sons pride and joy, his Lemonade Tree, that he paid for out of his own money and this year it had its first ever fruit, just one, but for a 1 year old plant, hey thats not bad (we nipped all the other buds off to get it to mature better before bearing too heavy a crop). Intermixed is the rampant sweet potato, the line of lavenders, and some acacia/golden wattles (which i managed to kill most of the first time round by planting them in the manure rich soil that the citruses like, so the survivors were moved a metre out into the yard and are slowly getting back to normal).

Now this "screen" isnt blocking things out overnight, but by next year, they should be tall enough that i dont have to see the singing freak (see my profile for the type of songs this guy sings and you will know why i dont like my kids hearing him) AND even better, they will have nice crops on them, providing further hail this summer doesnt strip all the flowers off.

Feast or Famine - part 07

In the centre of the yard is our mango tree (getting close to 3metres tall and going on 3 yrs old now as well as being grafted, so we are in hope its about to fruit) and our nectarine and peach trees (they had such lovely flowers and masses of fruit til it hailed, then all the fruit hit the ground and before we could rescue said fruit, our blasted cattle dog ate the lot of it (lol last year she ate all the pumpkins off the vine and the year before all the roma tomatoes). There is another citrus in that little configuration too, but for the life of me i forget what it is. There was also the chocolate sapote that had been transplanted there to try and save it (was originally with the citrus acacia line but suddenly went downhill) but it didnt survive.

Feast or Famine - part 08

Just below this center garden is a small row with a few lillypilly trees (the survivors of the original six, which the border collie decided to dig the rootballs out of the ground one hot summer day) and a couple of calistemons. These are just behind my retaining wall (which i designed and built when DS was 4.5yrs and DD 18mths). This retaining wall then has a small row below it with my "WHITE GARDEN/SCENTED GARDEN" that contains my three gardenias (presents from DBF) and four chinese star jasmines.

Feast or Famine - part 09

Infront of the Scent Garden, I had a flat area that housed the kids swings and trampoline, until DBF decided to turn it into a vegi garden (tramp and swings now on slope between the mango garden and the slab). He made quite a nice garden really (DD then 5 helped trench it and dig in around 100kgs of well rotted horse manure, she is rather handy with a shovel and gets very upset if she isnt allowed to help, unlike DS who would rather lay on the trampoline with his latest book lolol). It has had quite a few successful vegies in it and then it was overtaken by his sunflowers, which for some reason he didnt expect them to strike or grow (old packet) and ended up with around 100 fully grown sunflowers. He has just recently cut all but one of these down to the ground and chopped them into inch long peices and thrown back into the garden (he cuts all his mulch by hand with secateurs, lol even palm fronds end up having this done to them).





Now as the title says, We have feast or famine here at the moment in this particular garden bed. At one stage we had soo many bok and pak choys that half of it was given away to friends, i used roughly 1/4 of it and the rest was added to the compost as extra fuel (and the compost ends up being used back in the garden anyway, so very good recycling lol). Then we got hit with bad hail (well our place did pretty good in consideration to downtown where a lot of cars and buildings got written off) but it hit our tomato plants so hard that rather than growing they all started dying back, but as with natures self defense mechanism, they decided to bear as many offspring as possible and we ended up with zillions (i literally had to sort through 8kg of tomatoes from one days harvest) that went from green to ripe to rotten in one or two days. This kept going over a week or so period and we couldnt harvest them fast enough let alone give enough away, so there were at least 10kg that were recycled (and plenty that i threw out the window randomly into the vegie patch while sorting rotten from ok to reclaim my kitchen sink back again, which means there will be multitudes of new plants sprouting soon).