I've heard soo much about vertical gardening of late. I'm not sure where the hype has all come from but from what I can gather this method of gardening has been around since the 70's. There is an idiosyncratic artist/botanist by the name of: Patrick Blanc (oh sooo french) I just love his work, he gets to landscape buildings, inside of hotels, you name it he has probably done it. Amazing stuff, check out his walls - such a visual feast for the eyes.

Succulents were decided on, drought tolerant and of course beautiful. Vaguely I remember seeing a project in a magazine which was made from succulents..after lots of searching on the net finally I thought...I've never found a place in my gardens for them - one which didn't make me feel like they were just put there because there was nowhere else they seem to go.  I'd seen some other garden beds with succulents which were amazing but for it to look good in my eyes they need to all be succulents, that kind of garden never really appealed to me on a large scale.  But now we could have a whole succulent garden 'contained'.

My search for a variety of plants went on a bit.  I brought some from an ad in Gumtree as well as visited all the nursery and plants wholesalers I could find.  Nothing reasonably priced but I did score a few good pots with loads of rosettes of house leeks at a bargain price of $15 from a Nursery in Preston. I got some ground covers too. The saviour after many trips around town was the La Trobe Uni Market on Sundays.. there we snagged a whole tray of mixed babies for $60.. less than your $2-3 a pot I have seen.  Happy Days.. we are ready for planting.

This project is neither extravagant nor on such a large scale but still.. a type of vertical garden which I see as my own artistic expression. A girlfriend and I with the help of the lovely men in our lives (and power tools) set out on a mission to create pieces to hang in our own gardens.

In a nutshell wooden boxes were made to hold the growing medium, they were then made into 4 squares  (to help the medium not all fall to the bottom when vertical), with steel mesh and weed mat put on in the front.  The boxes were then filled with mushroom compost and potting mix.. the backs were screwed in place (made from some perspex offcuts) we turned them over and created holes in the weed mat to plant out our garden.  We put wood surrounds to frame the boxes and them painted them with Petina paint - a kind of effect paint to give it a rusty effect.

This morning we stirred about 6:30am to find that all was still dark... for a moment I sigh to see the days are now getting shorter.  Goodbye summer, I love summer so much, the warmth and sense of freedom you feel when it's warm is liberating.  The summer fruits, berries especially my favourite... oh how much I love anything berry.  So far we have in the garden a blackberry (dwarf I'm hoping it stays), a blueberry and of course strawberries and a cherry (all works in progress... very small and just establishing)  I digress, back to landscaping.  The season is changing and we need to get ready!

Over the last couple of weeks on a Saturday a friend of ours Phil has been over to help put in a path and set up the base for our greenhouse for our aquaponics setup.  Believe me, 7am starts in the backyard I am not used to, eagerly the whole household gets up to help which is exciting!.

We started with creating a path from the back gate, along the garage to the vegie patch and all around it.  Firstly we got some hardwood edging and stakes - with a string line of course we set out a fairly.. :) straight path about 1.2m from the garage, with a curve at the end to go around the back and to the fence.  We laid a whole heap of vinyl down (courtesy of Brendan and his love of all things vinyl).

We then (well poor Mat went back and forth to the garden centre with the trailer) 6 tonnes of gravel to lay over it all to be compressed next weekend.  Needless to say most of the day was spent shoveling and smoothing out to create a somewhat even surface.. we'll see how it looks next weekend once compressed, then some nice river rocks will be laid on top.