Visit Mornington Ailsa 2025

On a cool autumn morning, we gathered at Ailsa’s impressive property in Mornington to see how, in the past 10 years, she’s overcome some significant issues with her plot to create an incredibly productive garden. Keep reading to see why most of us who attended went home a little inspired and a lot jealous at what we saw.

I’ll start with the big positive: Ailsa’s soil is quite good. It’s free draining (the slope helps there) with a fair component of volcanic soil. No gardener underestimates the value of good soil and most of us strive for years to build ours up to not-too-bad, so it’s nice to find a gardener who didn’t have that struggle. Not that there’s been no room for improvement in Ailsa’s soil, it’s 50% rocks! But the rocks aren’t all bad, they came in handy for building gabion walls to help create much-needed terraces.

 Which brings us to the most obvious hurdle Ailsa faced when building her garden: the slope. Pictures don’t do it justice; it’s very steep.

To carve anything usable out of the land, terraces, steps, and connecting paths have been created. There’s a studio built between the house and garden that makes an intermediate level. Above the studio, those gabion walls were instrumental in taming the slope.

With all those various levels, it’s far from the easiest property to manage but the results speak for themselves. Food, flowers, succulents, and ornamentals all are flourishing, even at the end of the season.

 Of course, being a food garden group, our focus was on the enclosure at the top of the property.

Seasonal vegetables, berries, and perennials are all grown in raised beds and pots in this enclosure. The netting is draped over tubing attached to the fence and arced to the ground. This keeps the local fauna out and the produce harvestable.

With the land tamed and the animals exiled, Ailsa had one more problem to overcome: the invasion by roots and runners from neighbouring properties. On one side of the property there are a significant number of trees that have sent their roots under the fence and through Ailsa’s garden, greedily enjoying all the TLC she puts into her beds. At the back of the property, twitch snakes across the boundary invading the beds there. Ailsa’s solution has been to dig down, build up, install barriers, and plant in pots. It’s been a back-breaking labour of love when she digs out soil (whose stones make it into the gabion walls), lays down a membrane (primarily a pool liner as it’s durable and can keep out unwanted roots) to fill beds and pots ready for planting. And by "pots" I mean containers of any description.

 

To underscore the success of this approach, Ailsa pointed out a blueberry plant that was in the ground with no barrier. It was clearly struggling. Beside it is a young plant created from a cutting from the same plant in a "pot" (council black bin), protected from neighbouring roots. The difference between the health of these two plants is quite a stark contrast and illustrates how competitive plants can be for limited resources of water and nutrients.

One of the unintentional advantages of the structure of Ailsa’s garden is that there are many sheltered spots where plants that aren’t fans of strong winds thrive, like the citrus in the courtyard between the house and the studio.

And, most strikingly, the Hass avocado tree (with a newish Bacon graft) that is heavy with fruit, and the fig tree that is producing tasty figs in abundance.

Both the avos and fig trees are less than 10 years old – and yes, we all did gasp at that. They look like they’re closer to 30! A combination of the good soil (complete with their surfeit of rocks – but, hey, some plants like rocky soil), shelter, and skilled tending by Ailsa has yielded incredible results. We did try to pry any secrets from her, but she swears she’s home a couple of days a week when she is in the garden watering, she uses weed-mulch, as much to avoid carrying the weeds up and down the various levels as to feed the plants, occasionally she applies a blood and bone, and once a little super phosphate – that’s it! In the end we settled on the well-known fact that location makes all the difference when it comes to gardening.

Thank you, Ailsa, for opening your home and being so generous with your explanations, answers to all our questions, and your figs! You can see one of the 2 morning tea tables in the picture below – some of it provided from Ailsa’s garden including a plate of figs.

Thanks to everyone who brought food to share, and goodies for the produce table.

Double thanks to Max and Gaye for again organising another wonderful visit.