Prepping the garden for a house sale
Well this week one of my lovely families advised they have taken advantage of the housing market in order to buy a bigger house down the street. This is fantastic news for them, but as they are halfway through converting their existing home into a food forest, it is awkward for me! I thought I’d take you through a handful of things we do to prep for a house sale, and will go into further depth later in a paid blog.
Gardeners will tear up your garden, non gardeners don’t want the bother
Essentially, keep it simple. Your garden needs to look like it doesn’t actually need maintenance. It needs to be really tidy, on the bare side, because a gardener will do their own thing in it, and someone who is not a gardener will want to feel like there isn’t any work to do.
In this case it meant ripping out the wildflowers underneath the feijoa trees. It’s fine to have a little bit of self-sown mess in your own garden, but it does look untidy to most people.
Really dark mulch is also fantastic. I just put it on top of the leaves and made sure it wouldn’t be flicked out by birds.
Cut down on transitional spaces
Chopped down a tree a year or so ago, but finding that the gap is a good place to stack your rubbish? Have piles of pots all over the place? Not when you are selling a house. Planting some quick fixes, and moving pots into garden beds, is a really simple way of making an area look tidier. Concealing tree stumps is a good move.
Tidy up your vege beds… but don’t worry too much
High value, fancy house you are selling for $1m plus? Tidy your vege beds. Anything less? You can be a bit less fussy. In this case we took out the weeds and anything dying from last season then just mulched it.
Transitional space + vege bed
Cute multi use garden bed + tidied vege area
Anyway, go and buy 33 Donald MacLean st, Newtown. The front tree by the feijoas is a mulberry, and there are all sorts of goodies in that garden (which unfortunately was ravaged by the recent storm, so some of the tree hedge looks a bit ratty!).
What I’m obsessed with this week
AI and weird recipes found online. It is quite obvious once you have the eye for it, which recipes are generated by AI and thrown out into the ether. I am getting the most bizarre dandelion based recipes- no, I don’t think I should pickle dandelion flowers? And I think that if I were to grow ginger in water successfully, it would put out at least one root?
See how both of the pictures are sort of… fuzzy? Like the camera couldn’t focus properly on parts of them? The top one, with its dreamy sort of vibe, is a good example of AI
All the same, I am finding some really cool recipes to try, which require my patiently waiting for the right time of year-
Still beautiful pictures, but no weird fuzz! The shapes all make sense. The jar isn’t perfect. And I hope this recipe works because it sounds great.
This obsession comes partly after the development of more AI photos of landscapes and planting plans- things looking impossibly perfect. I do worry for us humans, and our ability to temper our expectations now AI is thrown into the mix. I would really hate for newbie gardeners to feel like failures..
Roses growing on top of the fence without any sort of shoots going to the ground? Check. Lavender in the shade? Check. Extraordinarily tall standard flowering thing? Check. Oh lord the front RH corner is all zinnias even the potentially correct parts of this garden will implode in Autumn…
Here’s a real one (Hyde Hall herbaceous border). See how there is so much more green here, and fewer flowers? Herbacous borders also tend to have a big gap along the back so you can access and some plants aren’t sitting in full shade, but in the AI one there is planting hard up against the fence… Maybe we all just need fuzzier eyesight.
Anyway, be careful out there! Have a great week everyone :)