It has been a crazily wet last week... too much rain, and I'm quite thankful that our stormwater is handling it all properly now. However, there are a couple of low areas around our house that take quite a long time to dry out... and when it is raining properly, there is a huge puddle/lake starting to form!

The above spot is one low lying area... which will be fixed with the extended ag-pipe... once I get around to digging that particular trench. However, the mulching is the critical thing at the moment... with the heavy rains, followed by nice Sun... well, the weeds pop up like crazy... and I'm sick of weeding them out, only to fight the same battle a week or two later!

This is the other low lying area... This one will be a little bit trickier to fix... I think I could at least raise some of the muddy path so that it is draining towards the buried ag-pipe and water sump. This has always been a problematic part of the garden, as it collects the water from the slope as well as the broken gutter of from the neighbour... which reminds me, I should ask them to repair that!

There was a crazily heavy period of rain that lasted about 10 minutes the other day... and it completely overloaded one side of gutters on our house. Oddly, it didn't overload the place where it normally overflows... even though that section needs to have the gutters realigned again to flow towards the downpipes better.

I was thinking about it (my wife says I was fretting about it...) whilst our gutters did a marvelous impression of a waterfall... and I remembered that I hadn't cleared out that part of the gutters as there were workmen underneath when I was last on the roof. That would have explained why this section was a problem when nothing else was... and that this section of gutter never had been a problem in the past.

During a short lull in the rain... I popped up on a ladder (not the actual roof, I'm not keen on dying yet...), and yes... I hadn't properly prepared that part of the roof for a huge torrent of rain. The gutter guards were doing their job properly of keeping debris out of the gutter trench, but they do tend to accumulate debris in the flow channels of the tiles... and when they look like this... I'm guessing that most of the water flowing down the tiles just catapults right over the gutter!

... anyway, enough of house problems... our herb garden is starting to take shape nicely... with the parsley being a runaway winner in the growth stakes! A small rock border will help keep the soil in the garden bed instead of ending up all over the path!

One of the benefits of having an arborist as a neighbour is that when he notices that you are mulching your garden and your mulch pile is getting low... you will get a call saying that he has just taken down a tree and chipped it, and did we want a new pile of mulch? YES PLEASE! MMmmmmmm.. this pile has a really nice pine smell, in comparison to the last pile that was eucalyptus in smell!

At the moment, all the students coming to have music lessons have fun climbing up and down this!

Ooops... that is going to need to be tidied up when it is dry. I'm going to blow it all back in... it did look much worse... but getting into the road with a rake, and running off when there were incoming cars... well, we managed to make it look less like a tree equivalent of a bloodbath!

Whilst turning the clay earth for preparing to mulch... well, I was thinking about what to do with the bin section. We keep three outdoor bins here, and in the wet weather... they have been sinking into the soft clay when they are full... which makes it near impossible to dislodge! I'm thinking about putting down some pavers here... just so that they have something solid to rest upon. It doesn't need to be perfectly level... but just good enough so that they aren't mired in mud!

Ah... the first tranche of the new mulch goes down (on the right)... the mud and clay is first turned and rocks removed... then dynamic lifter and gymsum sprinked on... then turned again... then adding a bit of mulch, then turning again... then cardboard... and finally the top layer of mulch.

This will all prevent the weeds from taking hold... and hopefully improve the underlying soil over tie. We have to do this entire inner ring... and I figure that I will do a couple of square metres each day until it is all done.

We have a few trees up for assessment... we are hoping to fell a couple and do some major pruning on others. So, that will provide us with more mulch, and that will hopefully mean that we will have the entire perimeter and inner circle of the garden covered. Slow work... but it feels good to be out there working!

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