After four years of hard graft, the permaculture garden is working well, but a spring clean and a little luck has transformed it into a sight to behold, writes Amy Willesee.

For the first time, our vegie patch has started drawing compliments not for its productivity, but for the way it looks. Up until now, it could best be described as having a face only a mother could love.

Admittedly, early spring shows this baby off in its best light. It is neat, well-mulched and verdant with late-winter greens. But more than that, my long-term plans are finally coming to fruition.

At last, the plot of annual vegies is encircled by established flowers, herbs and fruit trees, forming a kind of multi-coloured ring road. The trees now largely look after themselves but, even more exciting, beneath them lies a lush layer of dichondra and daisies in place of grass.

Dichondra is a lawn substitute with kidney-shaped leaves that tolerates light traffic and occasional mowing. When I first planted the fruit trees around the vegie patch, I intended to replace the grass surrounding them with dichondra because it doesn't compete with the trees for nutrients the way grass does.

Despite mulching like nobody's business, the kikuyu reappeared whenever I turned my back and I never even got around to sowing the dichondra. Then one day I noticed a small patch of kidney-shaped leaves under a guava tree. Dichondra had flown in on the wind, staked its claim and was on the march. Before long it had spread to the far reaches of my edge bed and beaten back the grass. It was cultivation karma.

The dichondra reinvigorated my beautification project for the edge bed. While the vegie garden has become effortless over time, the edge bed has continued to torment me: too much weeding in some patches, while other areas were straggly and bare. The added workload – particularly for plants that didn't even feed us – was weighing heavily on me. Something had to give.

After much soul searching, my solution was to ditch anything that wasn't working. The sage that didn't tolerate cold, the blueberries that hadn't grown in three years and the pretty little flowers that never bloomed all had to go. It was hard to say goodbye after the time, effort and money I'd put into them. But my priority was making the garden work, and once it reached the stage where I dreaded going out there, it wasn't working any more.

I turned my attention to the plants that were thriving. The lavender, daisies and white geraniums all love it there and look good year-round. None of them were originally priorities for the edge bed, but if they want to be there, who am I to stifle them?

It was like de-cluttering the wardrobe – simply getting rid of the junk allowed what was remaining to shine. Until next month, that is, when weed season kicks off again.

What I'm planting now

Basil, beans, capsicum, carrot, celery, coriander, cucumber, dill, eggplant, potato, pumpkin, radishes, parsley, rocket, rockmelon, shallots, squash, sunflowers, tomato, watermelon and zucchini.

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