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Winter in Victoria, Australia can be wet and cold, windy or icey, or resplendant with bright blue skies. It's the time of year where we really get muddy and start big projects in the garden that we wouldn't normally in the warmer months.

After some gentle prompting by @mountainjewel, I decided to upload a little walk through a small section of our garden - although the skies are blue, it's about 15 degrees celsius, though we both ended up in tshirts as we moved mulch, weeded and paved the new path in the garden.

This is my very first dtube video upload, so please be gentle with me. It's a little weird hearing my voice on camera but it might give some of you a thrill. Excuse the awful editing - to be honest I just wanted to see if the whole game worked, and it was nice out there so I wanted to get back on with it!*

Anyway, here it is - enjoy this very small area of our garden!

A little run down on some things you may have missed or I didn't talk about in the Dtube. The garden path is almost complete - Jamie did give up a little this weekend as there's so many other things to do and the jigsaw crazy paving out of messy bricks was going to take ages for him to do. Plus, we had so many other things to get on with.

J's being tidying out the big shed as he's got a landrover chassis coming down from Queensland, so he needs to fit TWO landrovers in there essentially so he can put Buttercup on a new chassis. So this essentially means he needs more room and all my gardening stuff needed a new home. As you can see in the video, an apple crate with corrugated iron on it works a treat, so we shifted everything there this weekend. I also put tarp and newspaper and mulch under the fig we chopped down and we're hoping that's enough to kill the last of it. It didn't bear fruit and it was getting into the septic pipes, we feared.

Little marigolds are popping up everywhere - I tend to shake the seed heads around and their bright colours cheer me up. Plan to make some calendula cream out of them soon. It can get cold and frosty here - and stunningly beautiful as the fog and ice transform the garden - but lots of vegetables soldier on. The beetroot does really well when it takes longer to grow. I've put a tree guard around my eggplant and some mulch, so I'm hoping it may survive the frosts, but I do that every year and it never works. I dug up my black chilli and put it under glass so that should be okay.

The swedes are about ready to eat - looking forward to having them with butter or roasted with rosemary. I imagine the broccoli and cauli won't be long - well, the first sowings anyway. We're eating a lot of chard and spring onions with brown rice at the moment, which is tastier than it sounds. Lots of garlic chives and sprung garlic too, as we call it - those rogue clumps of strappy garlic leaves that grow out of missed bulbs. It won't form real cloves as it's too close together but it's amazing as a leafy garlicky herb and amazing in scrambled eggs. We try to make do with what we've got as much as we can.

We dug up a whole heap of artichokes this weekend as we're replacing that bed with a native one, as it's just too hard to get water up to them and I'm sick of maintaining them. I've got enough closer to the vegetable patch, enough for our needs and then some. Can't wait until Spring - marinated artichokes and goat's cheese on sourdough toast - yum!

So really, the garden journal early June is all about the big tidy up, ready for Spring and Summer. As it gets super hot here it's important to prep all the plants at this time of the year - weed, fertilise, mulch, plant shade covers for micro climates, divide plants and figure out what we don't need. There's a LOT going on although not quite the prolific Autumn/Spring growth when things are really crazy in the garden.

Some other jobs we're doing:

• Layering grass clippings and so on for the compost
• Mulching to prevent weed growth
• Sorting out garden edging and weeding ready for a new path topping to come in next month
• Transplanting self seeded fennel and parsley
• Transplanting kale, kohlrabi, rocket and leeks from my mini seed growing bed
• Working out where we want to put the steam sauna
• Weeding and composting the raspberry patch
• Planting blueberries
• Weeding around the fruit trees
• Dividing up herbs like oregano and thyme to plant in random parts of the garden
• Tidying up the fire bath and cementing a chimney so it doesn't leak smoke
• figuring out where we want to put our outdoor shower set up

So as you can see, even though it's Winter in Victoria, there's a LOT going on in our garden as usual.

One of my favourite things to do on a winter's afternoon when the hard labour is done is sit in the bus and look out on it all, with the fire going and a cuppa or a stronger brew and listen to the birds. It's warm and cosy for tired bones, and I can postpone going inside to the house proper and the jobs that await me there. It's a little escape from the rest of the world, a place to be and dream.

Oh, and to figure how how the hell dtube works..

This is in response to @simplymike's gardenjournal2018 contest. It's a great little reminder to record and write about what's going on in our gardens and to share it with everyone in Steemworld. You can find the contest here.

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