How to give your garden a xmas makeover...
1. Create a daybed/or reading nook in your garden. Whenever you want a quiet moment or the weather is beautiful, you will find yourself gravitating to this spot with a book and a cup of tea whenever you can.
2. Update with new brightly coloured cushions and matching accessories to your alfresco.
3. Put in a herb garden. Planting herbs you use regularly such as mint, parsley, rosemary, basil and sage is a fantastic extension to your kitchen, and you are more likely to step outside to snip some fresh herbs for your cooking if its just a few steps away.
4. Liven up a dull space with a vertical garden. Can be made simply using some leftover pallets.
5. Add a tree. - For shade, fruit or simply to provide some vertical scale to the garden.
6. Paint your fence. - So often I go into gardens where the fence has been left unpainted or its a light colour. The best fence colours is a dark colour, so then the fence blends into the shadows of the planting. Opposite to interiors, a dark fence will make the garden appear bigger.
Recycling filing cabinets as planter boxes...
Being a Landscape designer, I am often specc'ing products into my clients gardens that I can rarely afford myself. One of my big loves is rusted steel planter boxes. I custom design these to fit into particular spaces, and they take up a lot less room than building in a brick version. The offer a great contrast to other surfaces around them and the thin nature of them means more soil and space for the plants.
When I purchased my little town house with its tiny courtyard, I knew I wanted to plant bamboo, to provide a little privacy, but also to block out the ugly walls of the two storey townhouses. I wanted the bamboo to be in planters so there was no fear of them getting out of hand, or growing into neighbouring gardens. So of course steel planters were the perfect solutions. But there was no way I could afford the outlay to purchase the number required to put around the perimeter of the garden.
Pinterest to the rescue! I was scrolling through one day and spotted an old filing cabinet that had been spray painted a bright colour and it was filled with home grown veggies.....yum.
So off to the tip I went, and purchased 3 x 4 drawer cabinets and 1 x 3 drawer cabinet for under $100. Then to Bunnings and purchased some Crommelins Blackseal and spray paint in a hammered brown finish (2 cans per cabinet)
First, I removed and discarded the rails etc, then drilled a heap of holes in the bottom for drainage.
Painted the insides with 2 coats of Crommelins Blackseal to slow down any rusting from the inside out, following the manufacturers instructions.
Once that is dry, then comes the fun part. Using your chosen colour of spray paint, coat the outside of the cabinets several times. Make sure you get a good even coverage to all exposed areas, again to help protect it from surface rust.
I then added my drip irrigation. This was fed through one of the holes in the base.
Locate your planters where you want them. Once the soil is in, they will be impossible to move!
Use a good quality potting mix and add your plants. These are Slender Weavers Bamboo (Bambusa textiles gracilis) which are fast growing, grow well in narrow spaces and get to a height of around 3m.
Today (2 years later) some of the canes easily reach 3-4 metres. The Liriope gigantia is going gangbusters and the pots are standing up strong. They could all use a little touch up paint, but rusting is not a problem yet.
