The backyard in the new house is going to need a lot of work to make it a productive vegetable garden.

This is how the back of the house looks before we move in...

The glass doors on the right hand side were put there by the previous owners in anticipation of building a deck. I don’t particularly want a deck however, so I was thinking that the doors were more useful for just increasing the sunshine coming into the house (the backyard faces north). After reading Permaculture by Bill Mollison however, I have learned that the best place to put a greenhouse is against the north wall of the house. So now I am thinking of extending from the laundry door (the middle one) to the living room french doors by adding a glasshouse. I have no idea how much that will cost, but its probably not an ‘immediate’ project!! In fact, I already know what the immediate project is - removing two trees from the block. We have three huge eucalypt trees on our 650 sqm block and they cast a lot of shade. The picture in my post on the 6th of October shows the one in the front yard, and this picture shows the shade case from the one in the back yard. In both cases the trees are on the northern side of the area, and the one in the front yard is simply too close to the house for my liking. It looks to me like a good way to damage our gutters and could be a fire hazard having a big tree that close. Plus, I want to control the shade over my vegetables so that I don’t end up with frost pockets in Winter. The third tree is an absolutely massive eucalypt, but that one is on the south-most side of the house, near the road. I’ll keep that one and attach a number of small bird houses to make use of it. Its a bit sad to cut down such large trees, but we are on a small block in the suburbs - not on a bush farm!

We need to speak to an arborist once we move in, because in ACT they have a regulated tree scheme, where if a tree is regulated the owner of the property needs to apply for permission to cut down a tree. From reading the tree regulation webpage, it sounded like all trees are regulated!! What a pain! I originally thought that would dry up demand for tree-professionals, but from what I’ve been told by my work colleagues, they’ve been getting a lot of business because it takes an expert to be able to read through the lines as to what is and is not a regulated tree. With the hefty fines, people are less included to do the work themselves.

Assuming we can remove these trees, I’d like to get them cut sometime over or just after summer, and the glasshouse is a project that I will plan for the winter after next.