Our third working bee was held on 16 August. Rain was threatening but the sun was out too so there was a huge bright rainbow over Matai Road – a good omen if you believe such things! Also good to see was the plants we’d put in only 3 weeks ago were all doing well.

We had more planters to build along the fence and had put the call out for bath tubs as we thought that might be an easy way to do it. Kind offers to an appeal on the Neighbourly website netted us two, which Scott and Yvonne collected, and Holly’s connections got us a _lot_ of unwanted fence and paint as well.

The builders assembled and after surveying our raw material and scratching our heads, we arrived at a plan. Chris set about installing the bath tubs and Wayne, myself and some junior helpers set about deconstructing the fence for rebuilding into raised beds later. We agreed shipping pallets were the way to go for compost bins, but would need to score some in spring once they weren’t so in demand for firewood!

After lunch the rest of the crew arrived. Yvonne and Holly brightened up our main beds with the paint. We drilled more holes in the tubs for drainage and gardener extraordinaire Diane Turner appeared with some builders’ gravel to put in the bottom. Neil and Andrew filled them with soil, planted out garlic and leeks, and set up our small plastic composter.  Joanne and Anne neatly stacked away our newly acquired fence pailings and 2″ x 4″ for next time and Chris knocked together a great table just in time for serving afternoon tea on, including muffins and biscuits made by Tracey-Lea and Diane.

The bathtubs were pretty easy to set up which was good, but their low volume was a drawback. We have lots of soil piled up that needs to go somewhere before we can set up the potato patch, so the next order of business will be to knock out some larger planters all along the fence to put this soil into.

Our newly bright and beautiful beds

New table, bathtubs and composter