Spring vignettes

Just some happy snaps on this Sunday from my mother-in-law's glorious garden. This garden is 3/4 of an acre, overall, and so too hard to describe or photograph in one, so I have settled for taking photos of little individual plants, groupings, or scenes instead. Enjoy!

We are looking out at the wisteria draped over the pergola as it flowers for the first time this season;


The soft scent of jasmine fills the air by the picnic table, behind the Japanese maple;


And then there's lilac, lovely blowsy lilac.


The roses are covered in a russet flush of new growth;


The azelea over by the far fence has had more flowers than leaves for months;


The orange and yellow of these sunny tulips looks especially good against the blue-violets of the bluebells;


But, to be honest, I am very fond of the drifts of bluebells all on their own;



These are MIL's favourite tulips in a velvet purple-burgundy, except they are planted in a bit of an obscure patch in the garden and are not so easy to see;


And last but not least, the white clematis over the front gate is beginning to blossom to welcome visitors who walk down that path to the house.


Have a good week, everyone xx

Holding pattern

Today the sun shone, then it rained, and then the sun shone again and then MIL's garden gleamed and sparkled so bright it could have been sprinkled with fairy dust.


Meanwhile, inside I'm admiring the progress of my greening potatoes on the windowsill. The brown, earth covered ones at the right are a few of the seed potatoes I have bought. The green ones at the left - which have been on the windowsill for longer - are ones from the supermarket which went green before we could eat them. I have lots more seed potatoes, but I might stagger the planting over a couple of months, although I'm not sure it will make much difference to when the individual plants mature.


Now I know you're not supposed to plant supermarket potatoes in case of disease, but I'm going to give it a go and put them in pots so they're excluded from the general garden. I dithered and dithered about whether to get big cheap black plastic pots or to go for planter bags, and in the end - after thinking about this for literally weeks, which is a long time to be thinking about what to plant potatoes in! - I have ordered 6 x 45 litre planter bags. I thought you could only put one seed potato per bag, and I was having visions of my backyard being filled entirely with pots, but I've since learnt that you can put several seed potatoes in each pot/bag which will save me a lot of space and money.

The rest of the potatoes - my certified disease free batch - will be planted in the garden using a No-Dig method. For this I've referred to Peter Cundall's The Practical Australian Gardener, where he tells me it goes like this from the bottom up:

1. Green manure crop, flattened/lawn/mown weeds/bare earth
2. Seed potatoes, 30cm apart and rows 60cm apart
3. Straw material fluffed up and pile at least 50 cm high
4. Water thoroughly
5. Sprinkle blood and bone and added potash (10%), one handful per square meter
6. Animal manure - several shovelfuls per square meter
7. More water

I was having a slow Sunday so I made a diagram in paint (click to enlarge):


It's important, I've read, to make sure all light is excluded from the seed tubers, and if the straw seems to flatten down too much over a few weeks (to less than 15cm) then you can top it up. If the tubers have sprouted through the straw already then just pile your straw around them but not over them.

I've also been doing some reading on whether or not to cut the tubers. I found an interesting document here. It's not all relevant to the home gardener - for example I'm not going to pile my 800g of seed potatoes more than six feet deep! - but it's good to know that each seed tuber or piece should be between 1.5-2 ounces (that's about 45-60g, or the size of a hen's egg), and that higher yields are generally associated with larger seed pieces. In short, in my little bag of seed potatoes I'm better off leaving them alone rather than being greedy and trying to double my number of plants with the aid of a sharp knife (but, if you do decide to cut your tubers, you need to let them dry out again afterwards for a few days.)

So, there you go! I've never really done much research on any of my vegetables before I planted them until now, but I'm hoping it will pay off in my potato yields. We'll just have to wait and see!

Patience, Grasshopper, patience...

Friday afternoon in MIL's garden.

We had a little break from the rain this afternoon - gone is our Spring preview from earlier in the week - and went for a bit of a wander out in the back yard and took some happy snaps. The garden is going to burst into life soon, just watch...

The jasmine is covered in flower buds;


Any minute now the daffodils under the roses will be open;


The hydrangeas are tentatively unfurling their leaves;


And the big wattle tree has already made a head-start with stems of yellow blossoms.


Finally, a quick 'hello' to my new followers :) Keep reading and commenting, I appreciate it! xx

Lime time

Today it's glorious outside, it might even be warmer outside than in the house. I can even venture outside barefoot. It's the kind of day where we've opened every window and door to let the sunshine in. It really feels a lot like Spring already. An early Spring? That would be nice, a good way to balance out the early Winter! SP and I made a bit of a tour of MIL's garden, to see what may be seen out there on this radiant July day.

First up, I looked to see how all my propagation of four weeks ago is going. The raspberries I dug up don't look like much from a distance, in fact you could be forgiven for thinking they'd died, but up close their little green noses are poking out of the stems and soil. Yesterday I dug up half a dozen extras, hoping for a raspberry filled Summer;



The white Japanese windflowers are also doing well, as are most of the correas;



But the jury's still out on the penstemons. They're all looking a bit limp and wan;


We cut a whole heap of coriander, and I mean a heap! I chopped it all down and have frozen it in water to use at our leisure. There's still three times this again in the garden;


We found a splash of unexpected brilliance in the red leaves of a rhubarb;


And a sweet surprise from a ground cover pelegonium - or geranium - which has been hiding in the violets and soursobs, I didn't even know she was there until she showed her blushing face;


And lastly we looked at the lemons and limes.


SP helped me collect some of the 'balls,'


So expensive in the shops, and so abundant in MIL's garden! If there were ever fruit trees that paid for themselves in greens and golds, then citrus are it in our Mediterranean climate.



I hope you're all enjoying your Sundays. xx

Not quite snow

Yesterday morning it was very, very cold. Now, we do get light frosts up here in the hills at MIL's house during Winter fairly frequently, but because I'm not an early-bird (at all) I hardly ever get to see it. But yesterday there was still frost all over the ground at 10am, ample time for me to get dressed, have my coffee etc, then go for a wander out in the garden with my camera.

This first shot was taken out of the window by D, because he didn't want to go outside!


Apparently I am made of sturdier stuff and I went out and got closer...


...and closer still. It looks a little like ash after a fire, I think.


We could only hope the frost might knock off the soursobs. Ha!


But the ferns and grasses with their lacey garlends are so beautiful;



and look how the frost covers the raspberry leaves, but not over it's veins. I wonder why that is?


Something a bit special and rare for me, who would think that Winter could be so lovely?

Winter Wednesday #3

Today's scruffy Winter bouquet is brought to you by leftover roses, magenta Penstemon, and stems of leafy Correa alba, in celebration of Winter Wednesdays, because even now it's nice to know there's enough out there in the garden to make a bundle of flowers.

Stay warm, folks xx

Winter Wednesdays

You just don't get this in Summer:
Lovely afternoon light, untainted by a bright sun, on yellowing wisteria leaves; they look like they are drifting under water.


For Hazel, for her Winter Wednesdays (it is still Wednesday for another hour, here in South Australia, and it was about 8 degrees here this afternoon, and icey cold on my feet because I was silly enough to walk on the grass barefoot in my quest find nice things outside!)

No surrender!

In April I planted garlic in both my veggie garden, and in MIL's, and it was quickly swamped with my 'love to hate' weeds: soursobs, and back then I wondered how many times I would have to weed out this crowding green fiend. Today makes weeding #2, and you're about to see why.
These plants are something else, they really are. These shots are from MIL's garden.
Somewhere in this mass is garlic:


Here's the whole bed from a distance. There's also coriander and capsicums tucked away in the background.


The coriander has managed to rise above the soursobs (it's actually trying to bolt but it's too cold), it's doing fabulously; so lush! We need to make lots of luscious SEAsian food to use it up.


The rainbow chard in the next patch over also needs some attention.


This morning there was a gap in the clouds so I was able to clear the garlic section of the bed. When I say 'clear,' I mean 'rip out random handfuls of weeds, leaving lots of roots and bulbs in the ground ready for round 3 in a few weeks.' Then it started to rain so this was as far as I got.But I will not give in! I refuse to surrender to the green hordes!



But, weeds aside, I did something positive in the garden too. I collected a whole heap of dried Nigella pods (and a couple of green ones for luck). Nigella, or Love-in-the-Mist, is one of my cottage garden favourites. I've looked high and low, but couldn't find either seedlings or seeds in any stores, so I have to do it properly (ie not cheat and buy it in a packet!).


I crushed up all the pods and took most of the big bits out of the bowl, and was left with at least a table spoon of seeds, masses for 1 minute of pod collection, and 30 seconds of crushing! I think I'm going to sprinkle it in my rose garden and down the fence line and let it go nuts. It self-seeds readily (or at least it does here at MIL's) so I'm hopeful of a lifetime of those soft and frothy blue and green flowers.


PS. I have some exciting news relating to plants and gardening, but I have to be a bit Secret Squirrel about it for a little while yet (but as it's Australian plant related, perhaps it should be Secret Bilby instead?) Stay tuned :)

Winter Pledge

Every Winter I've ended up curled up in a ball on the sofa, heater blasting, watching terrible daytime TV and moaning about being cold.
Well, not this year. I have realised several things. Firstly, I need to harden up. This is Adelaide, it's hardly the Arctic. Adelaide winters are kind of damp and enervating, a little bit soul-sapping. A bit like I imagine a London winter must be like. It doesn't snow, our water pipes don't freeze, leaving the house each day should not be a challenge. Secondly, I have a high-energy toddler now. Sitting inside every day, while she bounces off the walls around me, is not an option any more.
So, what am I going to do about it?

I pledge to leave the house if it isn't raining; to find something every day that's good about winter; to limit my complaining; to not let winter get me down.

Starting today.
So today, SP and I played in the garden and then went for a walk. We saw clear blue sky with high drifting clouds, we heard the swish and crunch of pusher wheels and feet in bright autumn leaves. We gathered late white iceburg and pink carabella roses and penstemon and made a scruffy, unkempt bouquet with them, and we were treated to a spectaular sunset where the whole world seemed to blush.





Little edit, because I forgot to mention these people earlier, but I must mention posts from Hazel Dene, Veggiegobbler, and Fat Mum Slim who are all thinking along similar lines to me as we Aussies head out into the cool of June :)

A garden for birds

I have been trying to photograph the Firetails that hang out just outside the kitchen window. Firetails are small, very fidgety birds, and needless to say, none of my pictures so far have been particularly fabulous. There are a couple of bird feeders outside the window, and they skitter into them, and skip about the wires, and scatter the seed into the violets below (there's a bit of alliteration for you!). Then they jump about in the undergrowth looking for the lost seeds.


They like to hang out in the fuchsia patch, the shrubbery gives them good protection and a safe roost. They don't actually nest here, I've never seen a nest anyway, but they must stay nearby somewhere since they are 'largely sedentary' (according to the link above).


Lorikeets have been visiting the bird feeding stations too. This photo is the best I could do. It's not such a bad shot of the feeding post, the hydrangeas and azaleas and the senescent wattle trees, but click on the photos and you'll see a larger version with brightly coloured blurs that represent the birds.


When I mentioned the bird feeders to a guy I worked with briefly a few years ago, an Uber-Greenie I didn't particularly like - unusual for me, since I like almost everybody - he smugly told me we shouldn't feed the birds but only provide water. To that I say, 'Sod You.' If birds come into our garden it seems only fair to me that we provide something for them to eat, since we've not left much natural habitat for them out beyond the fencelines.