Well obviously they hadn’t met me yet….either that or their definition of easy care is substantially different to my own. You see, my definition of easy care is what you give to a mature native plant – it gets watered whenever it rains, gets fertilised when bugs die in the soil and the only pruning it gets is when branches get broken off by over zealous birds or the occasional visiting stray cat. I really dig natives for this reason – they are the original easy care plant and perfect for the climate around here.

Not so with evening jasmine…..it wilts and dies if it doesn’t get at least a weekly drink and I have lost one of the plants due to complete neglect of its needs for water and plant food. I also lost one gardenia for the same reason – it turns out it was of a less hardy variety than the two that survived. After some panicked pruning, frantic fertilising and zealous watering (albeit with recycled water), three of the original five plants have sprung back to life from the very brink of death. *hehe*

So if you’re like me and have a substantial black thumb instead of a green thumb, you might be interested in some plants on offer at your local Bunnings. I headed down there to pick up a couple of replacement plants and they have this new Mighty Tuff plant range designed specifically for plant killers such as myself. I got two Euryops virginatus gold plants, which are a small shrubby plant which when flowering have little tiny yellow flowers all over.

If it’s still alive in six months, I’ll take another photo. I certainly hope it lives up to its reputation.

I reckon it looks pretty jolly good….not bad for a couple of DIY hacks I think.

Which prompts me to bring up my Top 10 Reasons to hate DIY!

1. Splinters and sawdust get everywhere…..and I do mean everywhere
2. Nothing is ever as easy as what it seems
3. To make it as easy as it seems, it is helpful if your builder can pour a concrete slab in a perfect square. Ours apparently could not.
4. Downpipes although necessary make the job more of a PITA than it already is.
5. Repetitive manual labour, if you’re not accustomed to it, makes you very sore very quickly.
6. Cats incessantly complain about you being outside working hard and not being able to be inside serving their every need….consequently they make it their aim in life to keep you awake the majority of the night so you cannot get the sleep you need to recuperate properly.
7. Being too sore because you were doing a lot of DIY over the weekend is not a good enough excuse to call in sick.
8. The washing that you thought was safely hung around the corner of the house has to be rewashed because it is covered in sawdust, thus wasting water.
9. No matter how good a job you do, someone always has to find the one part of the project that went a little awry.
10. The only people who appreciate your hard work are those who actually helped put it together and can appreciate how difficult it really was.

Providing the weather continues to co-operate, it should be all done by tomorrow morning or afternoon.

But what happens when you remove ground cover and leave bare soil? Bingo, wind and water erosion of the soil. Around 2003, we noticed that the slap was starting to show underneath on the side of the house. I tried planting a native ground cover but as soon as I started watering it, the weeds started popping up to life and pushed out the plant. The weeds were not giving up without a fight. So in the absence of any real idea to do in that area, the weeds have been allowed to take up residence again just for the sake of keeping the soil there.

In the backyard, erosion hasn’t been so much of a problem. Although the plants were all killed off, we let their remains rot into the ground to increase the fertility of the soil. Plus we just couldn’t get the roots out, even once the plant was dead. Since all the nasty weeds were killed off, a new breed of weed took over. It doesn’t look like turf when mature, but when mowed short it is passable so I have let it hang around town on the pretence that it really is turf so that I can look out my window and see something green that doesn’t resemble something evil from Lord of the Rings!

2005/2006 were very exciting years here, it was the year of the patio and fence – an event that brought us closer to the year of the Dog, which is as yet undertermined. You see as much as I love my kitties, I love dogs equally as much and I would like to have my own doggie again. The fence went up and we tested it’s keeping in powers by hosting a lovely yet excitable labrador of my friend. It kept her in just nicely and we are looking forward to having her here again in November until we get our own doggie. That brings us to 2007, the year of the deck!!

And it has arrived, albeit in parts that have been piled nicely in our patio area. Let me show you a before shot of what we are working with. You can see our lovely weed turf popping up there after a nice flush of rain. That lovely green spot there is where the pink spa is going to go. We have had the spa sitting on our patio for around a year or so….we figure this summer it should actually get some use – that is after I eradicate the population of spiders, cockroaches and creepy crawly population that has set up residence inside the spa.