Tidying up the shade house

I've been doing some work in the shade house, tidying and cleaning up, laying out gravel and rearranging pots. From an unkempt “jungle” it now looks like a less unkempt “jungle”. :D

 

Before – wild!

 

I started by laying out a gravel path but then decided to cover nearly the entire area with gravel because it just looked much cleaner that way. In some spots there are sheets of unused plastic bags (few layers) to help keep the weeds out.

 

 

Then I did the other side as well, while rearranging pots and plants left and right, putting up new beams and replacing old ones and getting rid of gaudy pieces of planks and beams.

 

Here’s the other side of the shade house all tidied up, used to be very dark and full of mosses and ferns here. Got quite muddy too when it rained.

 

Makes a nice cool place to sit around enjoying the plants now. The kitkats like it too but I do think they prefer the previous dark surroundings full of ferns before I tidied everything up. More places for them to hide while stalking birds and bugs. I don’t want them to hang out here too often anyway because there are always thrushes, magpie robins and fantails that come and feed on destructive caterpillars. My cats only scare them away.

 

 

Much cleaner now. I left pockets of pegaga or pennywort and pearl grass growing here and there. Some attractive fern weeds are left untouched as well.

 

I couldn’t decide what to do with this big upturned urn at first. Finally decided to put a big pot of Coelogyne asperata on top of it. This is the smaller green form, I’ve got a pot of the normal form which is much bigger and taller than this one. Too big to move!

 

The same pot on a different spot. I have a few big pots so I tried moving them all to the same area to create a Coelogyne corner…

 

However, I think I have gone overboard! LOL

 

Will update this entry again when I get more work done…