Our Kitchen Garden

As many of you will be aware, for the past 2 years we’ve been renovating our current home here in the Southern Highlands, however the one part of the renovation process which we never fully got around to finishing, was our exterior, and our garden. Specifically, our kitchen garden.

The planning for our “potager” has been 2 years in the making, but for a long time we “uumm’d and aahh’d” about whether we would put in a pool and the exact location for our kitchen/vege garden and how big we should make it.

Anyway, long story short a few months ago we decided to just move forward and get it done! Enough indecision already. It’s still not quite finished, but we’re almost there (just the fencing and a bit more planting to finish off), so I thought I’d share a little progress with you and some of the flower haul that I’ve been receiving from my new roses, snapdragons and dahlias!

Above is how it looked just after we planted everything. I’ve since removed the scattering of mulch that my husband loves to put everywhere (eye roll!) as it made it much harder to weed. So far, we’ve planted:

lettuce, parsley, spring onion, chives, rosemary, mint, strawberries, capsicum, kale, chillies, celery, rhubarb, tomatoes, and also some dahlias, snapdragons, roses, gerberas and geraniums to add colour and prettiness. We also plan to add in carrots, cucumber and zucchini.

And below are some shots from today. It’s been raining for the last 4-5 days so the weeds have sprung up, and my husband hasn’t been able to make much more progress on the fence, but we’re nearly there!

Once the fence rails are finished the fence can be painted, the edging finished off, and I can plant the roses so they’ll start growing up and over the fence. It should look really pretty in another 12 months once the roses are more established and once the side leighton green hedge has grown up and thickened, and it can then get a sharp haircut! A nice neat hedge is always a great backdrop for a pretty kitchen garden.

I can say with absolute certainty that there are few better feelings in life (for us anyway) than being able to go out to your backyard to harvest your own produce.

It also gives us so much joy to look out into the backyard and look over a pretty little kitchen garden. Without a doubt the flowers add so much visual appeal to the space.

I’ll share some more progress of our kitchen garden and exterior – click here for a mid summer update!

N xo