Visit Sandy Bay Avril & Brett 2022

It was great to visit Avril and Brett's garden at Sandy Bay because they so convincingly show us how a garden can be both ornamental and productive, and how with creativity and planning every available space can be used.

Avril and Brett grow their vegetables in beds surrounded by box hedges. A parterre (I looked up the definition) is a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths.' Yep, that's what we saw here, a parterre.

Add to this that it is very unusually positioned in their front garden, and you have a garden that might be unique in Tasmania.

Avril and Brett chose to put their food garden in this spot because, before they extended their block two years ago, this was the only area that was large enough and sunny enough to grow vegetables in. But it is also quite a windy area and the box hedges filter the wind! Things need to look inviting if they are going to be seen by anyone going past, and so their idea for a parterre vegie garden with espaliered fruit trees along the border with the street was born.

 

Ask the Box plants and they will tell you that they are very happy with this design. This is partly due, of course, to the fact that the beds are fertilised regularly to grow produce. Avril explained that once a year they cut with a spade the Box plants' inward-growing roots, so the plants don't take over entire beds.

The paths in this area are covered in artificial grass that has weathered over time, so it does not look artificial anymore. It means no weeding or mowing the paths.

 

Throughout their garden we saw that every space is used, and often for an ornamental display of food-producing plants. The young seedlings behind the hedge on the left, for instance, are broad beans. Very ornamental too are the mini-hothouses in the right-hand photo. They contain capsicums.

 

The fence with the property to the right used to be just past the old leaning-over Almond tree (photo above). A few years ago the property next-door was for sale. Avril and Brett bought it and changed the boundaries to give themselves more space: a few more metres space on this side of the house, and a large new area at the back of the property. They planted a new young Almond here (photo on the left above) and will probably remove the old leaning one once the young one starts producing.

These photos are a bit further along this fairly-recently-widened side of their garden. Ornamental bushes on the left, you might think. No, they are flowering broad beans and a productive lemon tree. And more fruit trees have been planted on the right to use the extra space they now have. Their new Avocado is not very happy yet (photo on the right), so they have given it a screen to give it some shelter against winds that can be quite strong here.

 

Most people walked straight past it, but on this side of the house, tucked against a brick wall for heat, is a choc-a-bloc little hothouse, a really good use of space.

And then, walking a few metres further, we see Avril and Brett's bee-hive, on their first floor balcony. It is around 11am, the sun is out, and the bees are busily entering and exiting the hive entrance under the glass partition, but we, below, are not bothered at all, because their flight path is right over our heads, and away into surrounding gardens. In spite of the darkened glass the hive is in quite a warm spot, so on the balcony-side Avril and Brett have placed a screen around the hive, and on it grows a grape vine that helps cooling things down. Brett told me that the bees very much like it when the grape has flowers. You can find more about their hive in the second half of Starting out Keeping Bees on the Food Garden Group blog.

There is so much fruit in this garden!  On the left a Moorpark that (mid October) is obviously in a good spot.  The citrus on the right is an orange.

The photos above show an Apple tree in their back yard that is (Avril and Brett guess) at least 50 years old. There is a mystery here!  How can this tree produce two types of apples (one of them Golden Delicious), if Avril and Brett never added a graft, and you can't see where it was grafted in the past?

The group came up with three possibilities:

• Possibility 1: the original tree was grafted, but the tree is too old to see this anymore. The graft was Golden Delicious. The root stock 'escaped' and is producing its own apples, which (and this is unusual for root stock) are large and nice to eat (Brett told us).

• Possibility 2: it is common practice to plant two fruit trees in one planting hole to encourage cross pollination and more fruit. What looks like one tree is in fact two trees planted in close proximity a long time ago.

• Possibility 3: two varieties of apples were grafted onto the root stock in a type of grafting called top-grafting (see A Look at Grafting on the Food Garden Group blog). The tree is just too old to see this anymore.

Avril has agreed to contact me when both varieties of apples are ripe on the tree in March. That might make it clearer which branches are which, and help end this mystery.

 

The boundary change with the next-door property also created a wonderful new area at the north-facing back of the property. This area looks nice and tidy now, but two years ago it was completely overgrown by large weedy bushes, so a lot of work has gone into it already. Avril and Brett will develop this area further, but are still pondering what to do.

 

Behind the lettuces that are grown here you can see a Pepino bush. It is one of Avril's many South American plants. The photo on the right was taken in early August when the last Pepinos on that bush were ready to eat.

   

Avril (photo above) talked about other South American food plants they have, and showed us Yacon. She explained that its tubers (photo below) taste a bit like pear and can be eaten raw in salads or cooked.  

The porch on the right below is Feijoa, another native of South America, that produces small sweet fruits.

 

Avril and Brett are regularly away for work, so they installed two automatic watering systems, one for the front garden and one for the back garden. The systems make the garden pretty resilient in their absence..

Their Holman Dial Ezy Gardener water timers (photo on the left) are connected to mains power. The photo on the right shows two small black boxes (left-hand side of that photo). They are solenoids (valves that are opened and closed electrically by a water timer). Brett bought these at Irrigation Tasmania (43 Derwent Park Road, Moonah). They find their watering system to be really reliable.

Many goodies arrived on the produce tables (see below), and left with a new owner within no-time, and a great morning tea was had by all.  Thank you, everyone, for your contributions!

Avril commented how nice it is to show your garden to people who are genuinely interested, and how nice it was to receive people's feedback and new ideas.  Other people talked about the camaraderie among those who come and how you go home with a whole lot of new info and new energy to do things in your own garden.

Thank you very much, Avril and Brett, for hosting this visit! You inspired us to think outside the square and create gardens that look great and that are full of productive plants.   

May your crops thrive,

Max Bee