THE REVEAL: VEGETABLE GARDEN

I was hoping I would do a complete garden reveal in one post, but it’s a bigger beast than I anticipated and as the other two areas are still in progress (and its been a while since I’ve done a reveal), I figured why not split this garden in three parts. So here is part one of our garden reveal – The Vegetable Garden!

A little reminder of were we started, pretty grim, right? This area is a bit of an awkward space at the back corner of our home, but we knew we could make better use of this space, and now being suburbanites it could only mean one thing – a veggie garden! Which my cooking enthusiast husband was pretty excited for.

The first thing we did here was raise the fence height to the maximum we could without council approval, which is 2m, and it instantly made the space feel more private.

We however made two mistakes with this fence:

1. Underestimating how much pine shrinks – The first panels we put up were tight together when installed, but after only a few months the gaps between them were up to a centimetre in places, which looked awful. The only thing to do was to add an extra layer of panels to screen out the gaps, which gave us the privacy and look we wanted.

2. Choosing the wrong colour – We initially painted the fences in Taubmans Monument, which is a super popular exterior colour here in Australia. I really should’ve done a sample of it – a big rookie error! Although it looks like a dark charcoal on the sample card, it is actually more like navy in real life. There is clearly a lot of blue tint in the paint, and needless to say but I didn’t want navy – I wanted a charcoal/black. So we made the decision to repaint it black, and it instantly felt more luxe.

The next step was to install these raised vegetable beds complete with wicking beds (which water the plants from the ground up and are self watering, so clever). I can take no credit here what so ever, these were all my father in laws handy work that he also installed for us; a big win!

This is how this space stayed for about a year as we saved and planned out the rest of the garden. Until the slab went in we were pretty restricted with what we could do.

But once that slab did go in it was go time! First up was the garden bed for our lime tree and star jasmine climber. I really wanted a fruit salad tree, which is a lemon and lime tree in one, but they had been out of stock for months so we went with a Tahitian lime tree instead, and I’m dreaming of the day I can make margaritas with them.

And our star jasmine is flourishing as you can see from the photo above when it was first planted and this one.

With all the beds and planting in place we could finally add the floor, which for this area would be loose stones and stepping pavers.

The only other thing we added to this space were these bamboos along the far fence line. This was a bit of an after thought but we did this for two reasons, 1: to add some greenery to this end of the garden, and 2: to give us some privacy as we kept the fence lower here to match our neighbours fence height. I keep visualising how good this will look when it fills out, just wishing we’d left more space between the veggie bed and the fence.

Before I show you the finished pics I thought it’d be fun to revisit my initial concept and mood board for this space, which I shared in this blog post a few months back.

And here is another reminder of how it looked before.

And this is how it looks now….

And here is another before and after from a different angle.

And another one…

So the first part of the back garden has been revealed! It feels good and I’m so excited now to finish this enormous project and share with you part 2 and 3!!