Purple and yellow and...?

It's nearly rose time. Nearly time to plant and nearly time to prune. I am a bit ahead of myself this year, because Babe #2 is due when all this should be happening so I'm quite keen to get things done before s/he arrives and I am pinned to the couch for the next six months.
I made myself a short-list of roses that I'm interested in (all climbers, this time). I couldn't help noticing that SP has annointed it with her own ideas... Is that a 'no' to Tess of the D'Ubervilles, or a 'yes,' I wonder?

I have three roses arriving soon: The long-lusted after Reine des Violettes for the front garden, a Strawberry Hill, also for the front garden, and a Munstead Wood for out the back. I used my usual buying strategy for these plants, which goes: Buy now, work out where to plant them later. 

Now, I have this section of front garden along the eastern fence, which looks endlessly crappy. The soil is particularly rubbish (sandy, water repellant, and dry dry dry), and the heat from the sun in the west over summer fries everything when it reflects off the fence. When we first bought our house I planted a banana passionfruit here. There's an old post here, when I was still optimistic it would work out! Anyway, the vine grew but never especially well. It never had a single flower, and obviously never any fruit! So, this week I pulled it out. Bang. Gone. Poor bugger, but them's the breaks.

(This shot is post-passionfruit removal, but before I'd done anything else)

 

I still want a garden bed along this fence and I have two main issues to address: the heat and the soil. For the heat - and I'm reeeeally hoping this works - I put beige-coloured shade-cloth along the fence, thinking that beige would be the least conspicuous. Then I stepped back and thought, 'Good Gods, that looks awful!' 

But, fortunately, looking at that section from further away it doesn't seem quite so bad, a bit shielded by the little ornamental plum tree (reddish brown tree) and the Acacia iteaphyllas on the neighbour's side of the fence (very pretty yellow shrub/small tree, terrible invasive weed in the Adelaide Hills, and many other regions of Australia...)

 

To help amend the soil I added several bags of neutral compost, most of a bag of cow manure and a few handfuls of Dynamic Lifter pellets. For good measure I found some worms in another area of the front garden and gave them a new home in here (a good indication of the poor nature of the soil: there were no worms at all!)

 

Then, to plants! Roses, obviously, where this disjointed post started. I want to put a small climbing rose at the bottom left of the photo, but which one, or what colour? That small shrub that I've left in place is a Myoporum batae, very pretty weeping plant which should make it to several meters tall (though I'll probably keep it smaller). Great plant for dodgy conditions. Next plant in line is a new Graham Thomas rose I couldn't resist getting from a Big Box hardware store. It's not strictly a climbing rose, but can get to over two meters tall and it's becoming one of my absolute favourites, see why? Man, I love that yellow...

(This is not my picture! I got it from here: http://placespill.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/graham-thomas.html)

 

Next in line will be my Reine des Violettes, which I'm hoping will end up looking like this:

(Again, not my picture, this image is from here: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/rosesant/gal0508135015639.html )

And that is the end of that space. Underneath there is currently a ground covering Eremophila 'Augusta Storm,' which I left because it was growing well and an Atriplex semibaccata (two more good plants for dodgy dry and hot conditions). I found some red 'Mrs Bradshaw' geums - my latest plant obsession' so I popped one of those in as an experiment, since I have no idea how they grow.  It's not a big space, really, but I'd like the purple and yellow roses to contrast (along with the mystery #3 rose... suggest colours/varieties to me! I'm leaning towards a red/crimson, maybe a Blackboy rose?)

Reconstructive surgery

Sometimes a plant just isn't happy. Take this little kaffir lime (Citrus hystrix):  Miserable; wonky in it's pot; losing it's leaves; covered in scale with accompanying ants. What to do? I had grand plans to plant it in our retaining beds (still being built right this minute, in fact, but that's another post) but it's so sad I wasn't sure it would be worth it. But I can't bear to turf out a plant - especially a relatively expensive one - on account of being a victim of neglect (probably never got enough sun; shouldn't have put that competitive rhubarb in there with it; not enough love AKA fertilizer and water etc). Some drastic measures are required. This may work, or it may not.

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First: take a deep breath and lop off most of the branches:

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Second (no picture, had wet hands): Put the entire contents of the pot into a bath of lots of water with a big dash of seaweed extract (to help with transplant shock and root development). I used the wheelbarrow for this. Gently tease out the roots from the bulk of the soil. Express some horror that after nearly three years in the pot the roots have barely developed and are spiraled and twisted (this plant was bought before I knew anything much about gardening and I must have chosen a pot bound specimen). Cut off the worst of the twisted roots, and trim the remainder to a manageable length. 

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Third: repot the plant - straight this time! - into a bag of good quality potting mix and water the bejeezus out of it. Leave it with all the other pots so you don't forget to water it. 

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Fourth: Pray to whichever gardening Gods you choose that this will revitalize and refresh the tree and this will be successful. Or just wish it luck :)

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If at first you don't succeed...

...Try, and try again.

Or, in the case of gardening in difficult climates and soils, do some research before spending any more money!

When we first bought our house, I ran out and planted a number of things. Mostly I got lucky, but one of my first failures was a couple of blueberry plants.

Mistake #1: Planting them up against that blasted (and blasting hot) Western fence. I've lost many plants against that fence now, and those that survive do not thrive over summer. All that radiant heat is a bad idea for nearly everything. Not to mention that a lot of blueberries are not very heat-tolerant at the best of times.

Mistake #2: Blueberries like acid soil, which is in short supply in nearly all of Adelaide and surrounds. I'm lucky: the soil in our yard happens to be a little bit acidic with a pH of around 6.2, except in gardening circles that's practically a neutral pH. Blueberries like a pH of between about 4-5.5. That's just not something I can provide for my plants in the ground, and I'm not about to go faffing about trying to alter it (too tiresome, potentially expensive, and a never-ending exercise).

The solution? Pots! And a couple of plants which hopefully will be a little more heat-tolerant (or at least are low-chill varieties).

Today I went out and bought four new blueberry plants (because I have four big pots to put them in). I had a chat to the girl at the counter about the plants, and she thinks these four should be OK in my area (hills, but not the cold-cold hills further behind Adelaide.)

My three 'real' blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) are 'Denise', 'Northland', and 'Sunshine blue'. They are all Northern Highbush varieties. I also have a Chinese blueberry (Vaccinium gaultheriifolium), which is a bit of an experiment as it's different to the other blueberry species commonly grown.

I also spent what felt like a small fortune on special 'rose/camellia/azalea etc' potting mix especially for acid-loving plants. I tell myself it's OK, because my SP adores blueberries and inhales them by the punnet, and they are usually really expensive to buy, and I've spent about 12 punnets worth of blueberry money on my plants and potting mix. If this goes well, within a few years we should be set up for fruit for most of Summer and Autumn, which will be super-nice!

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PS. The other little plants in the right of the picture are my latest obsession: Geums/Avens. I like the red ones, but I stumbled across these three yellow plants of the cultivar 'Lady Stratheden' at my local $2 shop and snapped them up as an experiment. Impulse buys being what they are, I haven't yet decided where I'm actually going to plant them..

Nepenthes

I'm doing a little experiment.

Nepenthes are my favourite carnivorous plants; they remind me of Malaysia, where some species are native to. Nepenthes are pitcher plants, with their pitchers dangling off the end of their leaves. I've never had one, because they're usually expensive and I'm not overly confident about growing them. Anyway, I found some in my local nursery, marked down to $6! Yes, please!

I brought one home and then got Googling: 'care of Nepenthes.' My new baby is some sort of hybrid, and there was very little information on the label, so I feel I'm flying blind here, a little bit.

According to the WWW, these plants are best potted up into a mix of sphagnum moss, peat moss, and orchid potting mix. I visited three different shops before I found some sphagnum moss, and I had a bag of orchid mix in the shed already, so I did a rough mix of mostly sphagnum with a big dash of orchid mix. I skipped the peat moss because you can't get real peat moss - I don't think so, anyway. It's not environmentally sustainable and not really a renewable resource, I believe, but I'll have to check that - and I've gone off coir peat after being told that as well as holding loads of water, it also holds loads of salts if you use tap water. I like to think that as the sphagnum moss was from New Zealand, it would be more sustainably managed. Anyway... What was I saying?

My new plant has a new home in a big vase, and it will live in the bathroom , because they like humidity and the bathroom is brightly lit. Wish me - and it! - luck. I will try to remember to update on my baby Nepenthes progress down the track.

My monster

Check out this 'baby': 724g in a single quince! Isn't he lovely?!

Quince is such a nice, fragrant fruit. Well worth the long wait for it to ripen. In fact, I picked this quince (and a few smaller ~500g siblings) a touch green because my poor tree was so overladen with heavy fruits that I thought the branches were going to snap in two.

Last year - the tree's first year in the ground - I had seven individual fruits, and this year I have fifteen. So, it's quite a productive little tree for one so young (in contrast, we are still waiting for the first of our three year old lemon tree's fruit to ripen).

It's been a remarkably low maintenance tree too. It is in an irrigated garden bed, but otherwise gets absolutely no special care at all. It doesn't get any extra fertilisers, or seaweed extracts, and I've never seen any serious insect problem or hint of disease on it. Every year I take photos of the blushing pink flowers, and then promptly forget to put any pictures on the old blog.

As I always do with quinces, I peeled them and chopped them, removed the seeds (and was generous taking the flesh from immediately around the seeds as this part can be quite grainy and spoil the texture of your finished product), and poached them in water, sugar, golden syrup, lemon and spices. I'm happy to say that cooking slightly green fruit hadn't been a problem and my quinces are just as much of a treat as always.

Internet recipes often warn you that quinces are very hard to cut, but I haven't found this at all; they are just as soft as their apple cousins. Perhaps it's the variety? My little tree is a 'Pineapple quince.'

Happy Easter, all xx

More chilli than you can poke a stick at

Pregnant woman loves eating chillis; who can see a problem with this statement?!
Our vegie patch is not doing brilliantly at the moment. Half because when it needed to be lavished with love, care, and water, I was in the throes of morning sickness and spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself rather than working in the garden, and half because a reasonable amount got wiped out by the endless hot weather we had about two months ago (all the bigger tomatoes, in particular). However, excuses aside, the four chillies I planted from a mixed punnet are doing brilliantly. My favourites are the blasting hot Thai chillies (prik kee nu, literally 'rat shit chilli,' because that is what they look like), which we like to chop up small and soak in fish sauce (prik nam pla, ie 'chillies in fish sauce!') and eat sprinkled on practically anything savoury. I also have the bigger varieties Anaheim (lots of fruit, but suffers more from what may be blossom end rot than the others), Cayenne (not prolific) and Jalapeño (also not especially prolific).
Yet again, for about the third year running, I promise myself that I'll try to shelter the plants over winter so they have a chance or survival. Being tropical perennials, there is a chance they can make it through the cold if protected, but of course this does rely on me actually making an effort and not leaving it too late!

Five Sri Lankan Oddities

1. Sri Lankans like to use place-mats and coasters.
2. Meals are universally enormous.
3. Double bed sheets must be nearly impossible to find, because beds are nearly always made up with two single sheets arranged vertically. The sheets are often folded into origami-like patterns as well.
4. Smoking is unusual.
5. I've not yet seen  single child selling or touting anything. I think kids here are actually in school or playing at home. This is a refreshing change!

Five things which are the same everywhere throughout tropical Asia:

1. Stray, mangy, emaciated dogs.
2. Terrible roads, open drains, bad or non-existent plumbing.
3. Dragging poverty in some areas (though no one here that I've seen so far seems to actually be starving...)
4. Bus drivers with death wishes.
5. Bananas, papaya, mango, pineapple, rice...

I had a photo too, but Blogger doesn't want to play today...