[Update: this post is a bit old, but I thought we should add some photos!]

It has been so long since we have posted. In between our last posts we have bought a house and got married!

On August 28th we moved into our beautiful new home in Wynnum, a suburb of Brisbane on Moreton Bay. Our house is a Queenslander “worker’s cottage” built in 1937 (so we were told, but we haven’t found documentation of the date yet). We love the Queenslander style — raised on stumps to increase airflow (and protect from floods and termites), with wide verandahs, high ceilings, and timber floors and walls (often called “VJ” or vertical joint walls).

We are now settling into our new digs and starting to get our fingers dirty. Since we have moved in we have put in a small vegetable patch, added a big black compost bin and arranged a garden waste collection service. We still have our Bokashi bins and are using all the juice to fertilize out garden. We then tip the contents into our garden compost bin.

We are enjoying the learning process of growing a garden. My mum helped us to dig and plant it the first month we were here (September). Unfortunately the soil did not look very healthy and there were hardly any worms so we added compost and mulch. We planted zucchinis, lettuce, rocket, spinach, aubergines, cucumbers, nasturtiums, green onions and herbs (mint, coriander, thyme and basil).

The Zucchini plant took off and we got a nice crop of rocket and lettuce leaves. Unfortunately none of the other vegetables survived. Also despite the zucchini plant looking healthy, the fruits were not maturing because nothing is pollinating them. Zucchinis need to be pollinated, otherwise they just shrivel and die. Mark hand-pollinated one fruit and it did really well. We have ordered some Sugar Bag Bees to try to overcome this. We did eat a couple of baby ones with the flowers still on in a Thai chilli basil duck stir fry. They were delicious!