Kia ora!

So this is it! I have finally jumped on the bandwagon and decided to start a blog. And of all things, it’s about gardening. Well, for now it is. I think it will probably expand into other random things such as craft and baking/cooking too later on but for now this adventure is all about my attempt at growing a little herb/vege garden with little space and with a lot of help from my friends.

So the story is that I live 9km from the city in one of the Northern suburbs of Melbourne, Preston. I see all my neighbours have beautiful gardens. Olive trees, lavender and lemon trees are pretty standard around here and really flourish! Wikipedia tells me that Preston used to be a farming area of Melbourne back in the day in the mid to late 1800s with “an abundance of fertile land”. However, there was quite a lot of clay in the soil too which was used to make bricks. (These kinds of things are important to a budding gardener)

The original name for Preston was Irishtown. But in the 1860s Preston started to branch out into Bacon curing and specialised in other pork products! Kind of random. Urban growth (and consequently the residential population) in Preston started to grow in the 1920s and now its a bustling little suburb with upwards of 80,000 people from what I can estimate from the stats (last record I can find without looking too hard is 76,996 in 1991).(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston,_Victoria and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Preston_(Victoria)))

In Preston I live in a lovely new townhouse with my housemate Jess and boyfriend Tim. We have a deck and a small garden that the landlord has decided to put tan bark all over (with lots of clay underneath) and a few unidentifyable plants – many of which had died by the time we moved in. This means we don’t have much space. But the deck is large enough for a few plastic tubs and it is sheltered and gets a lot of sun. So I think I have a great starting position to see what I can do.

I have started reading up on gardening and have a number of books and blogs I am working my way through. Last year attempted to grow tomato (with levels of success), capsicum and chilli (not successful at all), mint, sage and parsley (successful). Back in NZ I had some success at growing thyme and mint and marjoram on my windowsill. So really I don’t have any experience growing anything substantial! This experiment is to see whether I can start with nothing and end up with something that is organic, edible, and done in a space that would be common to most city-dwellers without a backyard.

I am planning on testing out organic gardening methods as much as possible, asking friends for advice and re-posting things I find on the net that are interesting or useful to the common gardener like me. From what I can tell so far there is a lot of stuff out there for people who have huge yards or lots of time to research or build or plant from seed. That is not me. I have an hour or so when I get home from work (usually about 8 or 9pm) and the weekends. Therefore, this blog will follow my journey growing things like a everyday person might.

So let the experiment/adventure begin!