Some visitors and gardening in rocky soils

Late yesterday morning  the bird sounds we'd been hearing became louder and we discovered we had some visitors.  A "splendid Blue Wren" in full mating plummage came for a visit to the alfresco area looking for insects and bringing 2 others with it. We think they were females. It seemed quite unafraid of us watching from our slide of the glass. It investigated the spotlight on a  chair, pecking at it. We now assume it was fascinated by it's own reflection but at the time we thought perhaps there were insects and webs on it. Eventually it found a small caterpillar. It shook it about a bit and then swallowed it in one quick movement.

Yesterday we got stuck into weeding most of the main garden bed. It had been over run with a variety of horrid weeds.  We got most removed from the bed and some extra soil was shifted to another garden area and planted two leucadendron's down near the boundary fence between the last silver birch and the manchurian pear tree.  One is,"Safari Sunset" a lovely red flowered plant   and the other an unlabeled yellow

















Today was to be a planting day. I got up early and collected 20+ plants, mostly tube stock in preparation for planting from in front of the house.

Now supposedly you are meant to rake your garden areas when preparing them to remove all rocks.  If we did that we've have nothing left. So I raked and dragged the rockier sections out of the way and left it at that. I left some rocks to be used as markers for later seed planting.
By mid morning the plants were all in.  A mix of native shrubs and ground covers.

Then it was off to the next town to market day to see what I could find there and to the nursery in the same town. I returned with 3 packets of seeds for baby spinach, baby carrots and chilli's as well as punnets of cherry tomato seedlings (8), garlic chives,sweet basil, baby spinach and 5 other small native plants.
After a cup of tea it was off into the garden to plant.  I also gathered 17 society garlic plants from my plant collection near the garage.  My plan was to plant the garlic around the outside of the vegetable area hopefully  reducing the "food" aroma  that will waft towards the bush where the rabbits live.
  The society garlics closest to the retaining wall need to be shifted. 3 of them are too far out of line.

Everything planted, I watered and headed in for a cold drink and a late lunch.  It's done.   The ground is dusty in parts, rich with added soil conditioner in other parts. These sections will be for non natives and veggies. I have to investigate some thing to help out our "ned kelly" grevillea as it's being overwhelmed by the enriched soil it's been planted in.