The Duke of Conceptual Architecture

As much as many of my friends want to believe, I’m not entirely doing nothing with my time. A large chunk of it and my energy was devoted to the garden this weekend.

Sara and I live in what people from Alice Springs condescendingly call an apartment – and what most other people call a town house. We have a small courtyard – emphasis on small. Before my arrival, Sara and I had discussed a small joint project – The Garden – to liven up this small and presently lifeless space. Sara began the inital work by getting rid of the dead shrubs occupying what can only best be called a “garden strip” – a 60cm deep patch of soil that runs along our back fence.

She also bought some pots, vegetable seedlings and inherited some potted plants that are coming together to form our small veggie patch and potted garden.

Anyway, as much as our strip of dirt fit the local aesthetic of Alice Springs, it was time to push forward with our project. So, I figured out what we had to do to prepare the soil for what we had by now decided was going to be a native plant garden strip. I spent many hours figuring out we had to do very little for a specifically native plant garden. Energy well spent. Therefore, I broke the weekend’s work down into two tasks: selecting and buying mulch and preparing the soil. The latter was easy and only took a couple of hours perusing the nurseries around Alice Springs to fulfil. The former ended up being a back breaker. There were still so many roots in the top 20-30cm of soil that had to be pulled out. They had also successfully wound themelves around another obstacle – the drip irrigation system. Because of these two obstacles and the awkwardness of having to work along a back fence, I had to adopt some unorthodox positions a cortionist would have been proud of to properly loosen and aerate the top soil.

In the end, the soil looked good – crumbly but a little sandy. This is backed up by my unearthing several worms in the process. However, these worms are no longer with us – having dug them out of their deep abodes, two seconds of exposure to the Alice Springs sun was enough to fry them to death. I also found a couple of spiders too, who also departed the scene with their lives in tact, unlike the worms, and fled for the neighbour’s more tranquil setting.

After half a day of labour, we had a mulched and slightly more aesthetically pleasing garden strip!

Check out my flickr account for a probably more interesting visual story of how my thumb is developing its green-ness.