I'm thinking sunflowers don't like being transplanted...

I planted a number of sunflower seeds in the front yard recently as an 'instant' plant to fill some of the space in the front yard, and they've been coming up really well in the areas where I shifted the soil significantly, such as the circles in the middle.

However, none of the sunflowers planted in the strip along the front of the house have sprouted, and I think it has something to do with the quality of the soil.  Instead of taking the hint and mulching, I decided just to 'transplant' some of the sunflower plants from one of the circles to the bad soil strip. 

Before transplantation:

One day after transplantation:

Lesson learned.  Tomorrow I'm going to head to the nursery to pick up some mushroom compost for the front yard.

Lucy 1 - Weeds 0

So, after a week or two of living in my house, I noticed that the weeds were descending.  It's been a particularly wet winter in Hobart this year - apparently the wettest in the last 100 years - and then along came heat just as I moved in, resulting in weed city (in hayfever land).  Of course, there's just one of me and a substantial area of garden (although the front was a little less dominating that the back), and so I couldn't (and still haven't) tackle the entire weed problem in full straight away.

So I bought some weed matting, and dug up the weeds in the three bottom patches, covered them with the matting, and went away and plotted my next move of attack.  I've been doing a 6-week vegie garden course at Adult Ed, and at the time I was just about to start the course, so I didn't want to pre-empt things.  Good thing too, as I was soon to learn about such wonderous things as 'soil theory' and compost.  I wish someone had told me years ago that there were consequences to re-using potting mix over and over and over...

Here are some images of the 'dormant' beds smothered in weed matting.  Note the growing weeds in the background (I swear they were growing about 5cm/day)