Living on the land

One of our inherited roses

We’re only new house owners, our little family of four. We’re lucky that the lawnmower came with the place, because we would have been in trouble. We were even luckier it still had fuel in the tank. I grew up on a large block in the country with chooks, vegies and lots of space. My husband, P grew up in the country too, but moved to Sydney’s western suburbs in late childhood. It feels good to both of us to be back at ground level.

We bought our house from a gardening family. They’d done almost 50 years of it, and it shows. The raised vegetable garden has amazing soil, teeming with worms and organic matter. They were more into ornamental plants though really, and I plan to convert their ornamental gardens to food growing beds, so it will be a long road improving the soil in those areas. The front yard screams “ELDERLY PEOPLE LIVE HERE!”. We have amazing roses, mass planted annuals, an immaculate lawn. I’ve been terrified that I’ll kill everything (and I’m pretty sure they’ll be driving past to check). Ultimately I plan to scrap most of the flowers and plant more food in the front yard too, but I think I’ll keep the roses.

I imagined that buying a house would mean selling our soul to the bank, but no-one told us it would mean opening our wallets and emptying them on the counter at Bunnings. The staff see us coming and start rubbing their hands together, because we’re regular. So regular in fact that our 3 year old, J sometimes asks in the morning if we are going to Bunnings today. Often we are. We all hop in the car and make our pilgrimage to Artarmon and come back with plants, cow manure and potting mix. You know you’ve got the gardening bug when you dream of manure…