Villa renovations re-commence!

The villa renovations got credit crunched for a while, but are now resuming, yeahhh!

More on that later. First of all a quick update on what has been done since my last post.
As it hasn't been possible to do much work on the house itself, I shifted my focus to the garden. It's something I can tackle sporadically in nice weather, between work commitments, etc.

The Landscape Plan

I'd like the garden to look nice, but don't have the know-how or skills to figure out a "look". I don't know which plans like sun/shade/etc. and guessing at it means a lot of dead plants!!

So I got Ace Landscapes to draw up a landscape plan for me:

Above: The Landscape Plan.

It's about 95% perfect, and I now have a plan to work to. The intention is to work on it, one small area at a time.

Preparing The Canvas...

But first of all, it's been a matter of preparing the canvas, so to speak. i.e. clearing out all the stuff we don't like, to make way for the stuff we do want.

Above: the garden before the big tidy up: note the big pile of old branches etc. at the back.

Above: branches etc. have all gone! We filled up a massive skip (or "jumbo bins" as the kiwis call them).

And now, to keep the garden neat and avoid the build-up of more branches, palm leaves, etc. I've got a Sunshine Garden Bin.

It's a big wheelie bin that gets collected every 4 weeks, and it's less than $10 a month. They take away the garden waste and then recycle/mulch it, so it doesn't go to landfill. They don't take bamboo or flax, but we don't have any of that, so it's not an issue.

The challenge will be to keep the garden neat and weed-free over winter!

There's still more clearance work to be done before I can do much planting. Specifically, there are old tree stumps that need to be ground out. But that's a job for another day!

Landscaping the garden

I've decided that clearing the garden is a job for chainsaw-wielding professionals: it needs a serious blitz!


Before: this border was over-run with ladder fern and weeds.

So recently two of the team from Ace Landscapes spent a coupla days pruning, mulching and weeding the garden. They took away 3 huge truckloads of garden waste with them - and there's more to go!

This is Part 1 of re-doing our garden: getting rid of the stuff we don't want.

(Part 2 will involve getting a landscape plan drawn up so that there's a scheme to work to - and Part 3 will consist of implementing this landscape plan, which will probably be done in stages... so keep tuned for the progress!)

The guys did a great job... it would have taken Mr Kiwi and I more than a week (probably more like 2 weeks) to do the work that the Ace Landscapes team did in a day or two. Man they worked FAST!

The only problem with the much-emptier garden was that it revealed just how badly the paint on the fence along one boundary is peeling!


After: the border is looking a lot less cluttered - but it's revealed the peeling fence!
So last weekend Mr Kiwi and I made the most of the great weather and picked up a 10L tub of fence paint (British Paints - 4 Seasons) for about $130-ish from Mitre 10 Mega and blitzed the fence.

The colour we used ("Karaka") is a very dark green - it was exactly the same colour that was there before. It's a really easy-to-live with colour, as it's not too green (so that you'd be thinking, ew, that's really green) and not too dark (so as to be sombre). It makes a really nice backdrop to the lush green of the tropical plants in our garden.


After: the freshly-painted fence AND a weed-free garden. Lovely!



Above: unfortunately Minnie the dog ended up sporting a dab of "Karaka" on her (no, we didn't use her as a roller! She just has to check out everything we do very closely! And it was too nice a day to shut her away inside!).

Fortunately the paint is water-based so it washed off beautifully and she is perfectly white again :-)

Summertime is garden time...

It's been a quiet few months on the villa renovation front: too busy enjoying the New Zealand summer, and also earning the money for all the renovations I want to make!

At this time of year, it's nice to spend any spare time in the garden. Now I must admit, I'm not much of a gardener - I just don't have the required green fingers. I do appreciate a well-tended, nicely planted garden, but alas I'm just not skilled or motivated enough to do much about it. I give my plants some basic care, and after that the choice to live or die is all their own!

So imagine my surprise when last year's chillie plant not only came back to life, but is sprouting a fine crop of chillies! They're just about ready to pick, and I'll be freezing them for warming curries and casseroles in winter. Yum!

Another crop that's doing really well are my grapes: about 3 years ago I planted a vine of table grapes, and this is the first year they've really performed. In fact, I have so many grapes I'm not quite sure what to do with them all!!! Other than giving them away to friends!

They're very tasty - and have a strong, distinctive flavour. The variety is "Niagra" and I grew up eating these. In my native Switzerland we called them "Katzenseicher" which means "cat's pee" because of their strong flavour!

Though I'm a lazy gardener, I do always make sure that my two tubs outside the front door are looking smart: I just love coming home to some pretty flowers welcoming me! For summer, I've been enjoying big blue flowers with little white ones around them (I have no idea what they're called). The garden centre is a scary place when you don't know what you need, so I chose these 'cos I liked the colours. And as I was really busy with work, Mr Kiwi planted them up for me: he knows just how much I enjoy coming home to flowers. Aaaaah!

Here's Minnie keeping an eye on me while I'm taking photos!

(And a larger photo would reveal that our front steps are in need of re-building - the wood is just about rotten... the tubs are strategically placed to hide the worst of it!)