Grape dipping baskets as planters

True to my word I am posting some shots of my latest revamp - the rusty grape dipping baskets transformed.

I love rusty and authentic but unfortunately they were making a mess of our new travertine and I was finding their rustiness a little wearing!

I lined the bottom and sides with mesh to stop the soil escaping and used that coconut stuff to insulate them (mental blank - cannot remember the proper name for it!)

The painting involved a good undercoat with a Dulux rustproof spray paint and then white enamel spray paint.

The plants are a mix of hardy species which should handle the lack of attention they are sure to get:) I've used pebbles as mulch to complement the travertine.

I may buy some more of them online (I've seen them on eBay) and keep them in their rusty and weathered state for use in the back garden but for the purposes of the front porch these are ticking all the right boxes!

For the record, on eBay you can buy them for $10 - $15 each....in Sydney at the Murobond store in Artarmon they were selling them for $60 each!!!

It feels good to have gotten one project out of the way:) Thoughts anyone?

nurturing our babies

In our garden, winter is marked by the flowering of our Camellia hedge. 

We first started growing Camellia's in pots when we lived in our old apartment.

You can see them here in the two pots either side of the bench.  Oldest KAT was heading off to school for her orientation in this shot.  That would be seven years ago!  Such an exciting time:)

The Camellias were a burst of colour in our shared courtyard.  As you can imagine, we had limited control over the 'look and feel' of a communal courtyard but I didn't let that deter me...embracing container gardening like a woman possessed!

I cut my gardening teeth nurturing these beauties (the Camellias not the children).

I taught myself how to prune on them.  I learnt that they can handle the heavy-handed treatment meted out by a novice gardener!!

I fertilised them, I transplanted them into bigger pots when they were needing a bit more room.  Somehow the Camellias were telling us that we needed more room too!! 

Eventually we had to uproot ourselves from our apartment and find a backyard to call our own.

When we moved to our ugly blue bungalow they came along.  By that stage they were a part of the family.

In the first twelve months we were in our new house we somehow managed to find the time to transform the garden from this

to this....I will do another post on the evolution of our garden.  It's been a work in progress with me as landscape designer and sometime gardener and SM as the 'muscle' creating beds and retaining walls, digging holes and lugging plants around.  We took an overgrown and unloved garden and created order and a patch of grass that would make any bloke proud.

Knowing what hardy and special plants they were, we planted a new Camellia hedge along the boundary and inserted our two babies into the row.  It's under planted with Liriope (a plant that repays you in spades as it's easily divisible and makes loads of new plants to use in your garden).

They have flourished alongside their new brothers and sisters.  Each winter they burst forth in flower and repay us all the care we have lavished on them.

Another Winter, another bounty of blooms.