At the end of winter 2011 in Melbourne, Australia, I started to create an Alkaline Garden…watch my progress here!

This area was fully overgrown with weeds. About 20 hours to dig it all up, fold in natural compost and prepare the whole area, not to mention a few days of soreness to go with it.

We planted in yellow and green beans, peas, broad beans, red capsicum, red and rainbow beets, normal and rainbow silverbeet (swiss chard), carrots, tomatoes and plenty of salad vegetables and herbs. There was green capscium, parsley, and mint already established plus some progress on silverbeet planted a few weeks earlier.  Some are heirloom and some are just normal seedlings as heirloom was not always available.

The garden will be nourished with epsom salts and water and covered with straw to maintain moisture over the hot summer.

This is a huge plot, about 5m x 2.5m….	This area was cleared of all weeds and plants except the raspberry canes
Snail Central	Black spiders, red backs and white tips – all seriously poisonous
The Magpies love coming for a feast after digging up worms	Letting the ground settle for 2 weeks
	My digger had a mostly alkaline lunch
Much to choose from	Love that there is so much variety
Already established silverbeet/swiss chard	Already established mint
Other garden delight of Bird of Paradise	And ladybugs
I lay a path of roofing tiles to make the garden accessible for all	Red capsicum
Yellow ‘butter’ beans	Rainbow swiss chard
Basil in a pot	with spinach
Some parsley in the background, plenty of room for everything to grow	Final result