'Is the squlch truck coming?' said my grandson, because he's two, and he can say cute things. He means 'mulch truck', and it's a delight to watch him watch the squlch truck arrive - twice, as we got two lots of 3 metres delivered, one for the front garden and one for the back.

You might have remembered me talking last week about birdscaping and digging a new bed out the front.

The bed on the right hand side is full of natives and attracts tons of birds. It also makes the house sit nicely in a bush landscape rather than just a house on an empty block. When we first arrived here, there were just a few tiny trees and that was it. Now it looks like a bush block and we're proud of it.

So I finally planted a few things - firstly, right out the front as a bit of a screen I planted this Red Dawn banksia. They go well in drought and the birds love them.

The weather has been perfect - not a drop of wind, and sunny skies, so it feels great to be out in the garden. With Jamie at work, I have to keep myself busy, so it's good to have the garden when there's no surf.

I didn't have much luck finding tons of plants for the front garden, but I did find two ground cover grevilleas which spread to about a metre and a half and about 30 cm high, with small yellow flowers. Annoyingly, I have to put some chicken wire around the smaller plants as the rabbits like to nibble the young flowers. Soon we'll be putting in a rabbit proof fence which should keep the worst of them at bay.

I also bought this banksia which will have gold and black flowers - the shape is great and it should be easy to prune to less than 2m x 2 m which will be plenty big enough for this bed.

With Ned's arrival, we had to get the tools out and shovel some mulch. He wasn't very good at it, I must say. Two year olds are not precision gardeners and more dirt ended up in the mulch than mulch in the dirt.

Still, it was good fun. He was quite insistant we got up from relaxing on the front deck every now and then to do another wheelbarrow full of mulch.

'Grandpa squlch?'

'Grandma squlch?'

He is a hard task master that's for sure. Still, by the end of the day we got it done, so now it's a matter of hunting for a few more plants and waiting for it all to grow. You bet I'll be writing about progress for upcoming #gardenjournal posts, right?

With Love,

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