Garden plans coming to fruition

I was just reading a post on http://wifemothergardener.blogspot.com.au/ about a hedge they've just put in place and I was thinking just how important your long term plans for a garden are. It's the long term plans that help shape what your garden is to become and give your garden it's structure. When we started our garden journey we knew very little about gardening, we watched, fascinated as grass seeds turned into lawn in just six weeks and thought, "wow, let's try a garden". There was no real planing involved, we just bought plants and put them in a sat back and watched. Needless to say, our inexperience led to a lot of frustration and failures, but it was a great learning curve.
Luckily along the way we have made some good long term decisions. Our fences took a lot of our time and money to put in place, but have protected our garden and chickens from neighbourhood dogs. Our wicking beds were a well thought out and planned project to slowly replace vegetable gardens on the ground that baked dry in summer and washed away with the rain.

Our first wicking gardening bed, showing the initial wicking layer, the hedge growing behind it and the fence. All took a long time to put in place but well worthwhile

Our chicken coop, designed to fit our wicking beds and integrate our gardening system has made light work of turning over and replenishing those same beds. Our first hedge along the roadside was planted to hide the untidiness of the original garden beds, but also offers protection from the coastal winds and helps to create a micro climate the plants in the wicking beds thrive on.

My niece retrieving eggs from the chicken coop situated on the first wicking bed we built 

Our next hedge is on the house side and will help enclose the vegetable gardens, and give us a prettier view from our newly built pergola. The pergola was a long yearned for structure,marked out countless times with stakes and bits of timber, grinding through the think tank. It now gives us the perfect spot to entertain friends and family, and grow a much wanted grape vine, which will give us shade in the heat of summer and let the warming light in during winter.

The pergola under final construction, surrounded by four mini wicking beds which now hold grape vines. You can see my potting area over the back, not the most attractive thing to look at, so new plan now in place

My potting area eventuated from my desire to have a place where everything I need is in one spot, now sheltered behind our next great plan, a screen with our first flower garden situated in front. And so the planning goes on...

My parents and niece making the most of our new pergola area. Well worth the wait!

What are your long term gardening plans you're working towards or what plans have you already seen come to fruition?

Welcoming Alice and Wendy

Alice and Wendy arrived yesterday morning. I had no idea how they should be settled in. Would they be like dogs, would they try to run away, could they wander off and get lost. To be safe I put them in their temporary pen, our old chook house, just to let them have time to settle down and get a sense of their new surrounds. About lunchtime they were looking really calm, they had been wandering around the pen eating grass, digging, looking for bugs and had eaten some of their food and had water. I figured that was the sign that they had accepted their move, so we opened the door and let them out to free range around the garden. My other girls were already wandering around, but hadn't paid any particular attention to these new arrivals other than a brief glance through the cage. Things were a little different once they were out however. Alice and Wendy are much bigger than any of the other girls and were not in a socialable mood at all. Every time one of the girls came anywhere near them they puffed up and chased them away. I expected that there would be some confrontation, as the newcomers would mean a shuffle of the groups heirachy, but after the first few tries, the two camps remained separated. As I wanted to ensure they had sorted the bickering before they were penned together they spent the night separated as well. Today they all spent the day in the garden, there were a couple of small altercations, but still no unity. So tonight we are still in two separate chook houses and I'm wondering if there will ever be harmony in the garden again.
If you've integrated new chickens with existing I'd love to hear how you did it, any suggestions at all are very very welcome.

Alice and Wendy settling in the old chook pen.

Alice would only lay in a special box before, but she's taken to the lawn mower catcher already. Two eggs waiting for us there this morning.