July. A month of damp and frosts like I’ve never seen before, the temperatures dipping into the minuses and sheeting everything with crunchy white ice that twinkles as the sun rises. Nothing is left untouched, every blade of grass stands stiff and frozen, every inch of the cars coated that we have to tip water over the windshield and side mirrors to drive anywhere. It freezes solid the surface of anything holding water, only the creek and dam are spared and Nes takes great delight in getting large sticks and trying to crack the thick sheets on the herb garden pond.
The frosts I don’t mind though, for they give way to glorious wintry days, where the light has a quality that is hard to describe, a kind of softness that washes everything through with a bewitching flaxen shimmer and it is not the pea soup fog of other days. The kind of opaque clag that doesn’t lift until after lunch, hijacking the lion’s share of our sunlight hours, and only dissipates so late in the day it has almost gone, briefly revealing, the glow of golden hour where the entire landscape and every petal, leaf and insect, radiate as if made of light itself. It is enough to make you forgive the fog and while ethereal in its own way, making ghosts of gums and mobs of Eastern Greys, days in a row where it waits for you every morning can give one a sense of claustrophobia.
Add to this the fact you are living in a building site and mud and mess meets you wherever you place your feet, winter, hand in hand with construction and installation infrastructure, feels a special kind of torment that we know none too well. We have done this before, back at Little Oak and not all that long ago, and so there have been many moments of looking deep into eachother’s eyes and holding eachother’s exasperated gaze and genuinely asking one another, “Are we, in fact, crazy?”
But it is also the month we take off to Sydney on a last minute trip so nes can spend her 4th birthday with her Lela and Tata and all her Tia’s and Tio’s, it is the month we jump a flight to far warmer, subtropical climates to catch up with old friends and their new babies in Noosa. Beach swims and the smell of sunscreen fix everything, and we are bolstered to return and keep pushing through to the end of winter. It is also the month that see’s the most progress on the vegetable garden and the dry pool garden, the first of the bare root roses to go in and mum’s house nearly all but finished, set to handover the first week of August. So, for a month that makes you want to never leave the armchair nestled next to the fire, much happens.
THE VEGETABLE GARDEN
The Vegetable Garden is now slowly starting to take shape, well not that slowly, it is 2/3rd’s done in way of the lasagne beds having been put together (more information about our process is available in Garden Guides and within the Garden at Moorfield Journal: 29) and the composting paths down in between them. Back at Little oak we used this combination in the cottage garden with the most wonderful results but unfortunately we had constructed beds early in our time in the veggie patch there and backfilled them with a mix that we brought in, we didn’t know better at that stage. They took so much more work to make healthy and productive where the cottage garden seemed to almost effortlessly burst with life, the magic of what was happening below the surface making all the difference.
Including the veg beds, the berry beds were also made up, inclduing the four that are home to a Tayberry, Boysenberry, Silvanberry and Loganberry, all favourites from our time in Tassie, two long beds sit off to the right of these and are waiting for the new raspberry canes to arrive, varieties that will ensure delicious picking all through summer and autumn. We also found a local fabricator where we bought the steel rods to make the growing structures/teepee’s for the 4 berry beds which I will install throughout August as they begin to shoot. They will be trained on these and kept from going crazy, as they can often do, and this will make them easier to harvest from, the raspberry beds will have a different trellis design that we are currently debating will work best. If you’ve got idea’s we’d love to hear them, there are a million idea’s out there and at Little Oak we never terraced them and dealt with the madness of their growth over a much bigger space.
Composting bays are also being set up, the ones we loved at the Spade and Trowel workshop, again more on this Garden Journal 29 and in upcoming journals as we start to construct and fill them. We will also add multiple worm farms to this area too, it feels amazing to see our kitchen waste disappearing back into the garden once again as they once used to at Little Oak. Chickens will be the next step after this, and once again, the piggies we so miss, and between these two additions and our composting areas and worm farms, our household basically produces no food waste. Hoorah 🙌
THE ORCHARD
The orchard feels like it is in a bit of holding pattern, which is normal this time of year given it is entirely dormant and as we wait for the new bareroot fruit tree additions to arrive in the post, so we thought we’d set up a little something that will help us get this area pumping come spring. We have created a rather large composting bed, same as what we are constructing in Vegetable Garden using pea straw, only larger. We have taken delivery of two loads of horse manure for a local property which will fill this composting bay along with a few other addtions and will be turned madly for the next month and then heaped around all the fruit tree, existing and new, once they have also been weeded of any of the growth that’s popped up in their mulch rings in the last few months. For the full orchard plan, go to The Orchard Guide.
THE ROSE GARDEN
I planted the first lot of bare root roses to arrive from Treloars. I described how I did this in The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 28 in pix but all of this information is already available in the Rose Guide 1 and Rose Guide 2. I also have several other new perennials to plant in this area too that will add to the wild garden feel/formal rose garden mash-up that I am going for this summer. Think greater biodiversity, almost cottage garden like froth but within the confines of a more structured look of a garden room. This will better help manage our pests organically as we did at Little Oak, as the weather warms up and everything hatches and resurfaces.
THE DRY POOL GARDEN
Over 2/3rd’s of this garden has been formed using a heavy layer of peastraw, planting mix, composted manure and more layers of peastraw, and soon composting garden paths that will also help to suffocate the capeweed in this area and add it back in to the soil as organic matter. One day these paths will all be gravel once they’ve done their job. I still have many plants to put in the ground still however, though some are in and sending up new shoots already but there are still many plants to purchase for this area as it is vast. I imagine in some ways I will be planting it for years to come or at least lifting and dividing what I have to spread further.
The olives planted last spring are starting to show signs of new shoots, as is the tiny Ilex Oak which will one day be huge and offer protection from the sun in this area and will forever remind us of our time spent in Tuscany where both the olives and Ilex grew everywhere and the fact this scene looks out over a not dissimilar landscape of rolling blonde hills and hay bales in summer. The how-to on planting into this garden as a peastraw bed is in the Garden at Moorfield Journal: 27.
THE MALUS AND MEADOW GARDEN
The final bare root Malus floribunda, taking the final number to 15, have gone in the ground, arriving very promptly which was great, giving us a headstart when we will have a likely bottleneck of bareroot to get in the ground later this month. I stepped out the process we use for planting bareroot over in the Garden at Moorfield Journal: 26.
HUGO’S OFFICE/MUSIC STUDIO
As you might remember we have been converting one of the sheds at Moorfield into an office, and sometimes music studio for Hugo but heating has been a long time coming, and made for a very long winter for Hugo, often moving up to the house to work because it was just too uncomfortably cold……but those days are now over! We moved, and rather arduously, the woodcooker/heater from the old shepherd’s hut/stone barn, into Hugo’s new office, as we are converting this space into a cellar for the keeping of yummy preserved food we’ve grown and with any luck, a bit of homebrew beer off our brand new, rather fabled hops (story in Garden at Moorfield Journal: 28) and even perhaps a barrel of wine, all of these Hugo’s passions which I just grow the goods for. Now his new little chimney puffs away and he is toasty warm at his desk. Currently the place is a bit of a storage space until the other shed is freed up of mum’s belongings once she has moved into her house, this weekend!!!
MUM’S HOUSE
So, yes, as outlined above, mum is due to move in this weekend!!! This has felt like SUCH a long time coming, 21 months to be exact since we all began cohabitating and no matter how much you love family, not having your own space, can be hard. Not to mention the ever present stress of building and all the associated bills that go with it. It’s been a lot and we are all exhausted but the end is near, Friday for handover we are told, fingers and toes and everything crossed, and soon mum can enjoy her beautiful new space.
Modelled not off the Granny Flats available through our builders but rather their latest award winning, energy efficient house build that we loved the look, feel and efficiency of, we added the high cathedral ceilings and large verandah that truly has the best views on the property. Many a cuppa and wine and cheese evening will be enjoyed out there. It is so light and bright, warmed with timber floors and the element we are all the most excited about, the walk-in pantry where mum can keep all of her garden preserves from the veggie garden and orchard, literally right outside her door.
In other news….
FOLLOWING (over on Insta):
WRITING:
The Life at Little Oak Farm Story, chapter by chapter, as part of the paid subscription here on The Garden at Moorfield. The story takes you through the decade long process of our leaving behind a busy and uninspiring life in inner city Sydney and our tiny studio apartment for 32 acres and a falling down farmhouse in southern Tasmania. Hugo wanted the byline to be, “Pushing shit up hill, figuratively and literally”, which would have been a very accurate description of the journey of the trials and tribulations of growing food and flowers, and rearing animals, on a very steep block with no idea what we were doing, for a good long while. To me, however, it is also the story of how overhauling this once unloved, almost two centuries old farm into the beauty we left behind, the very vision we’d always had for her, changed us more in the end than we changed her. It is the story of how I found my path to gardening, the path I think I was always intended for and how in creating her gardens, I found peace with a hard and haunting past, and have never looked back.
Vegetable Garden Guide Part 2 - As we build the vegetable garden here at Moorfield to a growing stage I am busily writing the next stage of the Vegetable Garden Guides.
Garden Gadabout Free Editions - Our Garden Gadabout section here on our substack will continue to ramp up come spring when the gardens of those I visit and photograph, and whose owners I interview, start to wake up but in the interim, these are part of the paid subscription content on this site. However, in the short term I am putting a series of albums together of open gardens and gardens I have visited as parts of tours, with an overview of each for all subscribers, free and paid. These will be in your inbox in the coming week or they will be able to be found in our The Garden Gadabout section, along the top navigation bar of the homepage.
READING:
A few other wonderful writer’s here on substack chatting gardens, country life and cooking…...
- by the famous Garden Designer, Jo Thompson who generously supports our page and which I am still a little dumbstruck by.
- by Michelle Crawford, keeping up on all her news now we are not just over the river from her exciting projects.
- by Maggie Mackellar who I read religiously and lulls me with every word, every time.
- by Sophie Hansen, who I don’t think does anything I don’t love and who I must say, takes up the greatest real estate by one author in my cookbook collection.
- By Lady Jo, an old friend in Tasmania, who will make you snort a cup of tea out your nose and who writes about a myriad of things including her life in a seaside cottage in Tassie, that she shares with her incredibly talented partner, Sarah Bird and their family. Sarah incidentally did the artwork found within the pages of Maggie Mackellar’s latest hardcopy book, “Graft”.
PLANNING:
The Glasshouse - currently the base and a big thank you for all the instaland gardener’s who are giving us lots of great advice @urbanfarmer2570 @rythdale_cottage and @my_urban_edible_garden having built their own.
More earthworks - The use of our mates dingo digger to peel off the layer of twitch in the rose garden paths, carve out the sunken garden in one of the Dry Pool Garden Terraces and form the shape of the upper terrace of this garden area for the arbour going in there. Also, digging out a pathway to mum’s house.
BUYING:
Woodchip, manure, pea straw and planting mix. There are piles everywhere!!
PLANTING:
Bare root roses, bare root Malus Floribunda and bare root berry canes. As well as drought tolerant perennials in the Dry Pool Garden.
WAITING ON:
The arrival of the last of the bareroot roses so I can get them in before we head overseas in 5 weeks, as well as the remaining bareroot fruit trees being added to the orchard this spring, and the raspberry canes to the Berry Patch in the Vegetable Garden.
JOBS FOR NEXT MONTH:
Prune all of the roses, I will be doing a video of this and sharing as part of the Rose Information we keep in Rose Guide 1 and Rose Guide 2.
Finish all the lasagne beds and planting in the Dry Pool Garden.
Scrape back twitch in the rose garden and put in composting paths and erect the central teepee to each bed.
Scrape back the Green Room garden area and mulch and also prune the London Plane Trees to form neat crowns and no lower growth preparing them to become a living pergola now they are established.
Make any remaining veg beds up and put in all composting paths in this area.
Add in the temporary composting paths in the Dry Pool Garden and sow the lawn.
Plant out the remaining potted trees before spring arrives.
Turn the compost and turn again and again and again. I’ll be doing it weekly to really getting it heating up and breaking down.
Brushcutting…….so much brushcutting.
And hopefully, if Hugo’s schedule allows, the base of the glasshouse to go in.
Plant out new fruit trees and raspberry canes (when they show up) and weed around all existing trees.
Weed the Portuguese Laurel Hedge along the Long Border and Orchard and the Long Border and add compost, seamungus and pea straw.
Phew! Until we see you in August……most likely exhausted. 😂
Thank you all, as always, for being here and taking the time out of busy lives to accompany us on this journey. Pip, Hugo and family xo