On a delightful day in early December, sunny and warm, but not too much of either, my Oxley blitz kicked off. The first two people to arrive were early, and dead keen to get started, but I made them a cup of tea and told them there would be plenty of gardening to go around. Around 9am more people arrived and we started to get stuck into what I had planned. The idea was mostly to convert a large chunk of the north facing lawn into productive food space. There were plans for an annual veggie bed, a sprawling pumpkin and zucchini patch, and a small orchard.

Soon the blitz was in full swing, and already taking off in unexpected and wonderful directions. I had never dreamed that people would be happy to weed nutgrass out of the lawn before planting the orchard and I had expected to do my best to ignore the nutgrass until my planned barrier of sweet potato took over. However people insisted that I let them weed out the nutgrass and soon eager blitzers were ripping happily through the dreaded nutgrass.

I had also planned a little path running alongside my annual veggie patch, but a couple of big, burly blitzers had another surprise for me and decided that we needed a properly engineered and laid path. They grabbed star pickets, mallets and bricks and swung into action.

By the end of the day, we had a beautiful no dig garden on what used to be an uncontrollable nut grass mound, a sparkling new path with a brick border, a wonderful herb spiral full of replanted herbs, a thai herb walk, a promising orchard, three trellises made from homegrown bamboo and a barbecue area planted with citronella grass for bug free picnics. The next morning I woke up to find a kookaburra perched on one of the trellises, so I'm not the only one to be very pleased with the outcome of the day! Thanks to everyone who is involved, especially the facilitators and thanks also to everyone who helped me with my design.