Horizon Homestead

My new home has a couple of bare/hardly used garden beds, huzzah!

One such bed is long and skinny, and runs along one side of my driveway. It has a concrete border on one side, and a log border that’s rotting away on the neighbour’s side. It has one sad, remaining rose bush. there are other lovely rose garden beds, so I imagine this one had multiple plants at some point, and they’ve died. Queue a plan to stuff it to the brim, cottage style!

It’s about 7 metres long, and maybe 1 metre deep at its widest. I plan to fill the centre ‘strip’ first, and then through seeds and smaller seedings, fill outwards to the very edge as the year goes. The block doesn’t have a lot of colour beyond the roses, so I am excited about the opportunity to add some colour and food for me and the insects!

After getting permission (yay, renting), I set to work. Just like my veg patch which is now thriving, this bed is not big and wide, but long and narrow, so I’m trying not to focus on height/layers, and more on chaos and colour. I have chosen to do it in stages – about 1-1.5m at a time. This makes it more affordable when I’m buying plants, soil (to make it a little raised) and mulch. It also lets me pause and think about what next, and what flowers I want through the whole bed. So far, I’ve gotten to the rose, about halfway.

I have filled the bed with annuals, perennials, herbs and veg – mini capsicums, even an eggplant and zucchini plant are tucked in, growing happily now. I have sage, lavender, salvias, marigolds, petunias, cosmos, kangaroo paws and more!

Luckily, my local shops have had some great cottage plants on clearance in this hot summer, and I have been taking full advantage! I have big paper daisy plants, dahlias, and chrysanthemums that i bought for less than half their normal retail price, giving me some instant colour and shape in the bed. I have also tucked in tiny seedlings, and will soon be releasing my wild mix of seeds (flowers and veg) throughout, to get more growth over the coming months.

Multiple flowers I’ve added are great at self-seeding, and my hope is that as the bed matures with all these plants, any gaps can be filled through sees rather than relying on buying new plants.

What flowers, herbs and veg have you grown together? Do you like a chaotic-but-controlled look, or something more orderly?