Smells like summer

An advantage of our unseasonably warm autumn is that we still have some basil doing splendidly in mid-June. 

Impatience

That's what I'll call this one: I haven't even filled up all of the cells yet (ran out of coconut coir, my choice of potting media), but I couldn't resist getting a punnet of mixed lettuce ('baby cos') and filling up a few of those tempting pockets. 

Volunteers

In amongst the weeds, a little forest of self-sown coriander seedlings; brilliant!

And if I knew for sure this was edible, I'd totally eat it (but I don't, so I won't!)

Potting up tomatoes.

I promised ages ago to show you pictures of my seedlings, but as usual I haven't got around to it, so today here is just a selection: perhaps a quarter of what I have been growing. A lot of these are going to family-members vegie gardens, because there is far more here than I need. Last year I had perhaps 10 different tomato varieties and we were inundated with fruit for most of summer and well into autumn; this year I am trying to be more circumspect.
All of the bigger seedlings I'm going to plant directly into the garden. The smaller plants I'm going to pot on and give away. Known varieties here are Amish Paste (the biggest seedlings, prolific and delicious, great for cooking), Black Russian (one of the better known heirloom varieties) and Wild Sweeties (tiny taste bombs). I'm also growing a ten colour heirloom mix, and a currant mix, both from Diggers.
Incidentally, today I'm also going pot on, or plant out a punnet of sage babies, and another of marjoram. Those are the ring-ins in the pictures.
Which varieties of tomatoes are you growing and eating this year?

My bug fighting kit

Weeks and weeks ago I planted a round of sunflowers and hollyhocks against the fence... and some buggers ate over half of them :X I was not impressed! So disappointing, to put all those hopes and sunflower dreams into the ground and have them disappear into insect bellies virtually overnight. Luckily for me, I had more on the go to put in at a later date. I got my gear together, and I was more organised this time. I have experience with this after the earwig epidemic in my garden last year.

I had sweet soy sauce (Kecap Manis), cheap vegetable oil, and a bottle of ultra-light beer I found left in the back of the fridge after a party. Do snails like light beer? I hope so!


I also had a little stash of recycled tins and plastic containers. I would have liked to have more but I only remembered to start saving them up earlier in the week.


I use the containers, the beer, the soy sauce and the oil to make insect traps. Here's a photo of one of my efforts last year. I can't say for sure if they actually kept the insects away from my plants, but they certainly attracted a lot of bugs who fell to sticky - and beery - ends.


If you've never tried this before, all you do is bury your container with the opening flush with the top of the soil and add a good splash of beer, oil, soy sauce, or a mix of all the above and then sit back and wait. Every so often you tip out the bug soup and top it up again with fresh attracting gloop (be warned, bug soup stinks).

I now have a row of insect traps all the way along the fence, each about two feet apart, with my seedlings all planted nearby. I planted out a second round of butternut pumpkins today too (the first were also eaten) and I am so keen for them to survive the hoards that I have a beer trap, and an oil/soy trap for three seedlings.

So good luck, new sunflowers (Giant Russians and a solitary Prado Red);


Best wishes, hollyhocks;


Thinking of you, my coriander and dill.


I would have liked these babies to be a little bigger and more resistant to attack before I planted them out, but we are off on a month long holiday in only 10 days and so it was now or never. Pleasepleaseplease let them not be eaten this time!

Happiness is a nursery voucher

Ah, my family know me well! What better gift for this junior gardener than a garden nursery voucher? The good thing about vouchers is that they tend to make me buy things I wouldn't normally be able to justify. As I'm trying to make my garden mostly edibles, I don't get very many purely ornamental plants because I think I should be spending money on the edible stuff first, especially since I don't generally have a lot of money to spend (it's worth noting that even though I'd like some new shoes and clothes, I'm buying plants instead!)

Anyway, the other day I got to spend a very pleasant 40 minutes wandering around the nursery choosing some plants. I probably could have spent longer there, except SP was getting very bored and threw her sock away in protest (and I couldn't find it either, yet another small sock lost into the ether.)

On this visit, I bought a white creeping thyme, tansy (a new one for me, I've never grown it before), chamomile, delphiniums and the piece de resistance: a white hellebore (Helleborus niger). I love hellebores. They're a kind of unassuming plant, the flowers tend to tuck their faces down towards the ground as though they're a little shy. They're supposed to be able to cope with a lot of shade, so fingers crossed it does because I've planted it in my 'difficult' area, the one behind the new rose bed on in the front garden.


I can never leave well enough alone though, and went to another nursery the next day (no voucher this time, just a credit card!) and bought half a dozen other new plants: a few more native grasses, and a white azalea - another plant I've never grown before and I'm hoping will be happy in the south shady patch.


SP just had to check that I had bought the right plants.


I just love the way that Poa australis holds it's leaves in a spiral shape when viewed from above, although I think this is more obvious in real life than in my photo...


Here's where most of those new plants went... in my new rose bed! Yes, I've finished moving the Icebergs. I should have taken a picture after I'd put in the other small new plants as well, but of course, I forgot. The part at the back is the difficult shady/damp spot.


And last but not least, a sign I must be doing something right. An earthworm. The fattest earthworm I have ever seen. That is a full sized spade it's oozing over!


To be honest, I don't actually like worms very much. They give me the creeps, even though I know they're good critters (deep inside, under all that shiny, slippery blobbyness...eugh). But so long as I don't actually have to touch it then it's ok. When I first started putting plants in under the roses I didn't find any worms at all. The previous house owners had brought in 'garden loam' and then plonked in the roses and that was that. The soil was, well, hard to explain because it wasn't really anything. Very little organic matter, and some of it even smelled a little bad and might have been anaerobic. Every plant I've put in has gone in with a 'starter' of compost, manure, blood and bone and Seasol, and slowly but surely it's paying off. Most of my plants are happy and healthy and the worms are there, migrating from Heaven knows where, busily burrowing away and doing their earth-moving thing. So I'm happy to see even the fattest worm in Adelaide, even if he-she did send a cold finger down my spine.

For Mama

When I wrote about planting my persimmon tree almost a week ago, I mentioned that it was part one of my gardening that day. Well, now here is the sequel - the secret squirrel sequel, which could not be mentioned because part two was a gift for my lovely Mama for Mothers Day.

It's a blue ceramic pot filled with seedlings of parsley, chives, sweetheart strawberries and, of course, pansies. Later in the year, when the pansies have finished, miniature daffodils will appear and take their place.

Happy Mothers' Day to all mothers young and old, but most especially my own.
Katie xx

Further to the Persimmon Post

Remember I mentioned that my Fuyu persimmon tree had arrived? He is now in the ground with his own little patch of ground covers.
For this gardening escapade I needed all sorts of paraphernalia. The 'soil' out the front is that dreadful brought in 'garden loam,' which is basically sand tinted brown. Therefore no plant goes in the ground without a generous sprinkling of cow manure, compost, blood and bone, Dynamic Lifter, and a healthy scoop of coir peat for bulk.  

Unfortunately, the first pictures of our persimmon don't look like much. That's because he's just a twig right now. Quite a tall twig, about 3 feet, but still just a twig nevertheless. You can barely even see it against the roses. Originally this section of the garden was white gravel (yuk, hate gravel in a garden! I presume it was put in by previous owners labouring under the misunderstanding that gravel is low maintenance). I've removed the gravel, ripped up the suffocating weed-mat, and pinched some of the bark mulch from under the roses. I'm not big on bark mulch, but since it's there already I'm aiming for continuity.

Around the tree I have planted thyme, oregano, sweetheart strawberries and pansies. There's also Tete-a-tete miniature daffodil bulbs, but we won't see them for a while. It doesn't look like much right now, but give it a few months and we'll see some ground cover action. 

Now, for some time the Iceberg roses have been bugging me. They should be lovely, and indeed the actual flowers are, but they're somehow a bit boring. And I think I've finally figured out why. For starters, I would never have planted roses in a neat grid, but I knew that already. No, it's something else. I've been reading a book called 'Garden Design Details' by Arne Maynard, and there's a whole section in there on vertical elements and I realised that's what's missing from the front garden: there's no variation in height, everything is at the same level.

So, it's not the greatest photo in the world, but you may get a hint of what I'm trying to achieve here. The persimmon will become a small tree, arching up and over the roses to the right and framing the house and garden. Over time I will fill in the garden bed in front of the tree (I have plans!). I might have to bring in more bark mulch even though I don't like it much. I don't think there's going to be quite enough available for continued plundering as I did today.

This is only part one of today's gardening efforts. There will be a sequel later in the week; stay tuned!

A Tour of MIL's Garden: part two

Today we're staying inside and looking out. I thought I would show you the view from the kitchen window, where you would stand to do the dishes (when pressed), or to make coffee.
When I look out of one window, I am looking across the lawn which I showed you last time. The tree which I could not remember the name then of is a Silk Tree. It's also called a Silky Acacia, or Mimosa - how appropriate then that I love it! My old travelling blog - now defunct, with the posts imported into this blog - was called 'Mimosa Dreaming,' named for the little touch sensitive plants you see all over the side of Asian roadsides which I adore (even if they are essentially weeds).

Anyway, I digress. In this last week underneath both the silk tree and the philadelphus have appeared Autumn's little heralds: translucent crocus. I can see them from the window, poking their pink noses out of the soil and mulch and opening their faces up to the cooling sun.
I have fallen in love with crocus after seeing pictures of them in Wife, Mother, Gardener's Blog. Beautiful beautiful.

 Pull back now... Right outside the window are the stairs below the Japanese maple (the leaves not yet turned). A couple of bird feeders are here, attracting magpies, firetails, wrens, and C's 'favourite' pigeons (most print-friendly shout from C to the pigeons: 'get out of it, you great fat turds.' Poor pigeons. I think that's most unfair, even if they do bully out the tiny firetails.)

 By the step to the left: a little pot-pond. Lovely idea, pity about the mosquito wrigglers...

 And by the steps to the right, my most favourite plants in MIL's garden (although hard to pick favourites), the blissful calm white Japanese wind flowers. They sit in a dense violet carpet and are shaded by fuchsias.I have looked and looked, high and low in various nurseries and I can't find any white windflowers to buy for my own garden, only pink, so that is another autumn/winter job to add to the list: talk some of them from this garden to my own (they spread well, so I would not be denuding the population too severely!)

And then the fuchsias, beloved by the birds, which extend all along the back of the house and up the driveway. They are special, nostalgic plants for D, who remembers his mum showing him how to 'pop' the buds before they open. Now he cannot pass a fuchsia plant without popping a few flowers along the way. I think they look like ladies dancing, their pink skirts whirling out past their legs.






And last but not least, on the kitchen windowsill itself, a couple of sprigs of thyme and oregano that I accidentally weeded the other day, roots intact, which I plan to put into pots to see if they can be resurrected.

Before the storm...

There's a storm on the way, but I took advantage of a calm and warmish afternoon to get out into the garden again, SP sitting in her bouncer under the verandah with her Scrunchy Doll. I finally planted the potatoes I bought weeks ago (they're Desirees), four of them in my temporary vegie patch along the fence (it doesn't get enough sun I think, and I'm dreaming of raised beds in 'Ocean' corrugated iron), and two in two big pots which is a bit experimental. The pots are only half-filled with potting mix (and a dash of cow manure) and I'm hoping to be able to top them up as the plants grow, as per old-school 'pototoes in hill' method. After that exciting event, I wandered around in the dying light and took some photos of what's going on out there. It's getting warmer in the days, I think, it just not quite so bitingly cold and it's actually starting to feel like winter won't go on forever. So, here we go!

My snow-peas and broad beans are coming along nicely, and I was thrilled to notice there are going to be flowers soon on the jonquils I planted under the letterbox!

I'm not sure how well bluebells do in 'marshy soil' though, AKA that bit where the water-meter leaks (note to self: call water-people to come and fix it).


I did a spot of shopping at the nursery the other day, bought some Snap-dragons for old-times sake; a memory of my great-grandfather in England showing me how to 'snap' them.

Also bought myself some mints, creeping-thymes, and yet more seaside daisies to further the campaign to pretty-up the front garden. If you look very very very closely, you can see them as a few specks of green in the right-hand corner of the garden bed, near the blinding-white gravel (side note: gosh, we have such a cute front fence!)


But they look much nicer close-up.

(Pyrethrum)



(Creeping Thyme)