Hello, I love you,

Won't you tell me your name?

First batch of strawberries from the front garden this spring. Variety name long lost! These get no special care whatsoever, just water over summer and whatever fertiliser runoff happens from the other plants nearby. 

There's a few happy mulberries in there too. 

On the run

Strawberries

Handfuls of joy

Finally: I've cracked it! I have enough strawberry plants to be able to pick - and eat - an entire handful of strawberries in one go! Completely fabulous and delicious, but don't ask me what variety they are because I have so many different ones now that I've forgotten what is planted where. Many of the backyard strawberries suffered in today's 33+ degree Celsius heat - they are always the first plants to swoon dramatically the moment it gets to 25c - but the plants out the front have been in the longest, are the best mulched and must be the best established because they look just fine. Woohoo!

And they're in!

Finally, my little plum trees are out of their pots and in the ground. There are six trees in this space: the first four are planted in pairs (a method where you plant two trees in one space and from then on you treat them as one tree, if that makes sense? It's a space saving/variety increasing method). These plants are D'Agen and Coe's Golden Drop in the first pair, and Santa Rosa and Satsuma in the second pair. The next tree along is a Wickson plum, then lastly is a damson plum. Behind all this, but very small, is one of my favourite Australian natives shrubs: Myoporum bateae, which should cope with the shade from the fence really well. Up the back is also some raspberries (both native raspberries, Rubus parvifolius, and an exotic variety, which I got from MIL's garden). Underneath the plums, along the entire wall, are over forty individual strawberry plants, all taken from runners off my older plants (I seem to produce strawberry runners prolifically, rather than the fruit we'd all prefer!). At the very first part of the wall, beside where the steps will be, I've planted a small David Austin English rose: Sophy's Rose. I've even scattered some seeds about: Yates 'Accent on Blue' seed mix, to help bring the pollinators in. That sounds like a lot, now that I write it out! I can hardly wait to see it all start growing and coming together. Next up we're making my raised vegie beds.

Edibles update (long)

I am making up for a slow posting in November by posting nearly every day in December so far... and I have five more rough drafts full of photos waiting in the wings, too!

So, as you know, we recently spent a month away on holidays and left the garden care (IE watering) to someone else. When we got home the garden was overrun with weedy grasses and thistles, and to my horror a couple of my veggie pots looked like this:


Eek! We'd had an early November heatwave, and some plants got frizzled! For the record, that pot of strawberries and the other heatwave casualties have been lathered with love, water, and Seasol and all are showing signs of recovery, thank heavens! And once I got weeding like a madwoman, the rest of the garden didn't look such a shambles.

But, onto the good news: Tomatoes!
Lots and lots of tomatoes are on their way, and the 'dwarf fig tomato' (Diggers) out the front in my rose garden has a few red fruits already (which I have eaten as I did my rounds deadheading all the icebergs).


Pepinos!
I planted my pepino back in March or thereabouts after buying the plant for $2.50 at a market and having never eaten it before and no idea what it tasted like. I have since seen plants in biggish pots selling for $20, but mine has grown to at least four times the size of a $20 version in about 8 months. I got a bargain! I first noticed the flowers in June, so it has been a long wait over winter and spring for ripened fruits, but now there are flowers on the bush again already. It's quite a low scrambling and floppy shrub, about 1m across, and some of the stems are self-layering along the ground. The leaves are dark green and quite lush and tropical looking in our Adelaide garden. Occasionally something will nibble on the leaves but overall it has been pest and disease free.
The fruit are a muddy yellow colour and striped with mauve, and they don't taste too bad. They're not fabulous, not hugely delicious, but they taste quite a lot like honeydew melon and can be picked and eaten straight off the bush after a quick rinse under the garden tap which is always nice. The skins are edible but a little on the tougher side, but easy to peel, and I haven't found any seeds in any of the fruit yet.


I have loads of plants growing in Styrofoam tubs now, thanks to reading about it on KMKG's blog. The plant at the bottom of this tub is some sort of mini melon, but now I can't remember if it's a Minnesota rock melon, or a Tigger melon. The plant above is... I don't know! It looks kinda like basil, but has no scent so I don't think it's a herb at all. I think it's vegetable that I planted but then forgot to label, as with the melon plants. This tub is a clear demonstration that I must remember to label everything more diligently! I will have to wait and see what I'm growing here, it will be a surprise, I just hope it's not a weed which I'm carefully cultivating in a prime position...
Other herbs, however, like this apple mint are doing brilliantly and are rapidly becoming massive. What's the bet I will regret planting this one directly in the ground? It's in my 'difficult' spot, out in the front garden on the dark south side of the house. Over winter this area gets soggy and almost no sunlight, which I'm hoping will help keep this mint in check.


Unlike the poor potted strawberries above, most of the plants I put out in the front garden are doing very well despite getting minimal water. We get a couple of strawberries a day (so still not the overflowing baskets of berries I dream of), the only issue is trying to get the fruit before the millipedes do.


Still out in the front garden, my new Pineapple quince has seven fruits on it, which leaves me with a dilemma: the tree was only planted over winter (though it is about 6 feet tall). Will it be able to support the fruits? Will they get too heavy and make the slim branches snap? Or will they take too much energy from the baby tree? Should I remove them now, or can I leave them to ripen? Still, one way or another, these fuzzy fruits fill me with joy.


Another delicious 'fruit' I am waiting for is my rhubarb. Also planted in the front garden in amongst the roses, this plant is doing brilliantly and it huge with chunky stems one inch across which I'm eagerly waiting to redden so we can eat it.


Ironically, this teeny tiny unhappy rhubarb is planted only 1m away from the enormous one, and came from the same bag of rootstock! It's so small I had to go poking around in the borage to see if it was still there. Why one plant is 20 times the size of it's brother is a mystery, makes me wonder how different the soil must be even so close by.


Along the fence by the rose garden, facing west, is my banana passionfruit. It was one of the first plants I planted when we bought our house. I have childhood memories of eating these passionfruit when I was a child out of a family-friend's backyard. In the last 18 months it has grown enormously but still not a single flower has ever grown on it. Does anyone have any idea how long a passionfruit vine normally takes to flower? I have read that an excess of nitrogen with inhibit flowering (the vines will make leaves instead), but to be honest I'm a bit slack with fertilizing so I don't know if that is an issue or not.


And lastly, a little promise for the future: the raspberries planted all along the above fence. These babies I dug out of MIL's garden over winter. I had perhaps 10 plants all together. A couple have been lost since I planted them out, but most have survived and while they are small I am hopeful that they will be as wonderful as they are in their 'homeland,' here at MIL's. I don't know what variety they are, but I do know they are delicious.


Happy weekend gardening, all!

Next post: a bit of a floral update.

More on strawbs

On Friday I promised I'd do a gardening post next, but I had my wires crossed and needed to do the second-hand love post first, then the gardening one, so you get two in one day today :)

About a week ago, or a little more maybe, I got the next round of bare-rooted strawberries in the post. This time I'd bought Cambridge Rivals and Aromas.


And in true Katie-style, and direct contradiction of my pledge to label things properly, when I unwrapped them I happily snipped the labels away from the plastic, cut away the plastic wrapping, popped my new plants in glasses of water, and then realised I hadn't paid any attention to which label went with which bundle so I didn't know which was which. Thanks to a helpful person on the Diggers' FB page I think the Aromas were the ones with more leaf, but I can't be sure.


I went off and spent my birthday money on a couple of strawberry pots (which are surprisingly hard to find!) and some terracotta dishes. I would have liked glazed pots, but there was nothing in either shape to be had. I splashed out on premium potting mix too.
I potted them up, and couldn't help thinking, as I laid out their roots, that they looked just like a group of ladies settling down to afternoon tea with their skirts spread neatly around them.




Then I took a picture as a record, and admired how lovely and tall my Aquadulce broad beans are getting in the background, and how lush the nasturtium is (on the right) and then I realised how crooked those pots are!


And then, just for fun, I took a picture of the whole potty shambles along that garden bed there :) Man, I can hardly wait to have my backyard back so I can do things properly.


Just FYI, in that first polystyrene container is 20 pots with freshly sown Anigozanthus seed. The first batch which was sown in Summer had about a 5% germination rate, and then they were all frizzled off by the heat; I'm seeing if I have more success with them in Winter. Also in this pot is half a dozen experimental Goodenia amplexans cuttings. They have no rooting hormone on them and varying amounts of stem/leaf. Basically I gave my Goodenia bush out the front a bit of a haircut and then stuck the trimmings in pots to see what will happen. (Top left fluffy plant: a Rodanthe paper daisy I couldn't resist at the garden centre the other day.)


Speaking of things out the front, here is a progress shot with my back to the house looking out to the road on the Western side of the garden. Bottom left twig is the Fuyu persimmon, top left barely visible twig is the Nightingale persimmon, along the fence is the lavender hedge, and along the wall is the latest Lomandra border which I have creeping around the corner to intersect with the lavender. Also visible are the concrete upcycled pavers I'm hoping to start setting in soon, and a pile of crap I need to get rid of.


This week I will also take a picture of the rough draft of my front garden plan for you. I've only been meaning to do it for two or three months!

A package full of promise

On Friday I got something lovely in the mail: 10 'Kamu' bare-rooted strawberries.


I did the right thing and took them straight out of their plastic packaging and popped them in a glass of water to wait until I could plant them (actually, you're supposed to put them in the fridge, but it's so cold here I think the kitchen windowsill is good enough, especially overnight).


Today I was able to plant them, I'm sure they've been unfurling their leaves already. I have to say that these mail-order (internet-mail-order) strawberries have a far superior and stronger looking root system than the poor dears I bought in packets from a hardware store last year.


I had to scrounge around to find enough pots. The actual strawberry pot is on indefinite loan to me from MIL (nice new pots are expensive, have you noticed?!); I evicted some shabby parsley from it to make way for it's new inhabitants. The other pots I unearthed from the shed. They might prove to be a little too small, but I figured better to get them planted up ASAP and if they outgrow their flats I'll upgrade them to the penthouse suite later.
(For my own record purposes, they are planted in a mix of new premium potting mix, old used potting mix, compost from a bag, and a big sprinkling of dynamic lifter pellets)


Here they are settling in to their new homes, hanging out of the windows and enjoying the fresh air.


This one, in the maroon pot, has suffered a small toddler-related incident already, not irreparably, thankfully!


[Last night, very late, I was left to my own devices on the internet, unsupervised, looking at plant sites, my credit card muttering to me in distress from across the room. I caved: I have also ordered 10 Cambridge Rival and 10 Aroma strawberries, and I might have ordered a fig tree or two as well... Can't have too many fruit plants about the place, I figure.]

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

Propagating and preserving.

At the moment, in the midst of Summer and the growing season, it feels like there is so much going on that it's just easier to take a photo and make a note.
I cut most of the chillies from our Thai Chilli plant - it was a Christmas gift - and have laid them out on a wire rack on the concrete to dry. Not across the wires -they weren't fat enough- but between them to stop them blowing away. We haven't actually eaten any yet, the plant has been at my mother-in-laws after we forgot to take it a month ago, so we don't know how hot they actually are.



Many of the strawberry plants have sent out runners and so I've put some of them in pots, with a twig fork to secure them, to grow on properly, and later be cut free from their parents. I want lots and lots of strawberries, and it's a nice bonus to know I can buy half a dozen plants and they'll multiply so easily for me. Here's to many years of strawberries to come!



Yum!


My beetroot and cauliflower seeds have already sprouted mere days after being sown. It's so warm at the moment; the weather is perfect perfect perfect. That would be helping.


I am dutifully keeping the kangaroo paws damp in their pots (all recycled from previous purchases).


And, to my amazement, I already have a teeny tiny Sturt's Desert Pea sprout! Can you see it? Guess that hot water works on it's own after all :)


And I caved in and bought two American pomegranates today. The carbon footprint on these beauties doesn't even bear thinking about. Bad Greenie! I think I will plant my own pomegranate tree and then I can eat these ruby-jewels to my heart's content. I only need to decide on a variety: The American 'Wonderful' , or the Russian 'Rosavaya'?

What we are eating this week...

The golden zucchinis just keep on coming, there was a butter bean (yes, just one!) and lots of bok choy, but only briefly because I forgot to sow more until we'd eaten it all! The bok choy is a little bit pre-eaten by caterpillars, but you'll get that when you don't use poisons.




And for dessert, the occasional strawberry. Quickly learning that if you want a whole bowl of strawberries, you need lots and lots of plants. Half a dozen is not enough, not when the fruits ripen one at a time! They are delicious though, even when you go thirds with husband and child, yum yum.

Purple Capsicums.

I picked a capsicum today, a purple one, although I think 'black' would almost be a better description as it was almost that dark and hardly purple at all. I have been eyeing it off for some time, wondering when would be the right time to pluck it from it's parent and today was the day.


When I cut it open I found it was a virulent green beneath the skin.


I stir fried it with zucchini, onion, garlic, and tomato. To be perfectly honest, it was a little on the bitter side, although still quite edible.


In other gardening news, we are mere days away from picking our first yellow zucchini.
I am astounded at how fast they have grown!


I caved in and bought a pink-flowered strawberry, which is very pretty indeed.


And the nasturtiums are doing beautifully. These are from the local nursery, and not from the nature strip. I wonder, though, if they'll self-seed everywhere and I'll regret the bright colours, as I have an idea for a 'black and white' garden and the fluorescent oranges here won't quite fit. I did splash out on both black and white nasturtiums recently, but they have no flowers just yet.