Am I becoming a gardener?
It is now two months since I started living in my own place and the most surpising thing I have how is how much gardening I have been doing.
It all started with the grass, which I mowed a couple of times using a borrowed lawn mower. While the edges in the backyard were easy to handle with some shears, in the front yard there was a ground cover plant blending in. I say ‘was’ as a few hours with the shears filled up my green bin and exposed a rock border.
My long term strategy is to have a garden that doesn’t annoy me. This means that the things that need doing don’t take much time or do not need doing very often. In the case of mowing the grass, I will at some stage add a concrete strip in front of the rock border to simplify future mowing.
For a week or two nothing annoyed me, until the bushes around the letterbox started to envelop the letter box and the bamboo down the side of the driveway started to rub against the car. An afternoon with shears solved those problems, but only for the time being as they will eventually grow back. The long term strategy there will be to remove the bamboo completely and put something else near the letterbox.
The outcome of this and other jobs (such as trimming back the other edge of the front lawn) is that I have been filling up my green bin every fortnight and it looks like it will continue to be filled up for many fortnights to come.
To enable this gardening I have accumulated some tools; spade, fork, shears, secateurs, gloves, broom, etc. While I did borrow a lawn mower a couple of times, I realised that I needed to get one of my own as I intend to get into the habit of keeping the grass mown.
To avoid the hassle and noise of a petrol lawn mower, I decided on electric. Granted, I did buy the cheap small electric mower from Bunnings, but so far it has worked out nicely. Although I haven’t quite worked out a good way to manage the power cable as running over it with the mower is not a good idea.
For the second year in a row I have missed writing a post for the entire month of January, the lull extending back to just before I moved into my place. A few times I started posts related to settling in, but none have been completed.
For the same reasons that I didn’t write any blog posts, I didn’t spend as much time as I should have preparing my entries that I cobbled together at the last minute.
My other two images are more recent, being from one of the short road trips that Damien and I have been taking in preparation for the three week trip to Perth and back. The trip in particular heading down the Great Ocean Road to Cape Otway and then back inland past a few waterfalls.
This is a 1.5 second exposure that is directly from the camera, which makes it all the more sweet that it was awarded a highly commended.
Unlike my other three entries this month, I did fiddle with this by changing the levels to increase the contrast and by adding a vignette. The judge did confirm a suspicion I had, there is too much vignette, something I will keep in mind for next time.