Spring sessions

Salvia 'Tanzarin,' perfect. Just need a few dozen more to really make an impact. 

Volunteer sunflowers, glory be!

Fat 'black' poppies under the sunflowers. Not as dramatic as I'd hoped, but I grew them from tiny seeds, so I am ridiculously proud of them. 

Kidlets picnicking on the new lawn; the best part.

I see it now, the shape of the garden to come. It will be all I dreamed, and then some. 

What we are eating: December, 2011

There is so much going on in the garden right now, and we are starting to harvest some long-maturing crops planted earlier in the year as well as eating early summer veggies. It's all a bit fabulous!

The garlic I planted way, way, way back in April finally flopped over and the leaves dried out, so out of the ground it came. It was such a good crop to grow, set and forget! Needed nothing more than the occasional weed and it did it's thing (albeit very slowly, not a good one for the impatient).

The 'Early White' softneck garlic bulbs were quite small but came out of the ground largely intact and were easy to clean up.


The 'Early Purple' garlic is a hardneck variety. The bulbs are much larger, around supermarket size, but the skins tended to split or be absent from at least half of the cloves I pulled out and were a bit of a bugger to clean all the dirt out of. The skins were also very fragile and a number of bulbs were easily damaged by pulling and cleaning. As that's not good for storing the garlic, I crushed all the damaged bulbs and mixed them with oil and have frozen the mash to use as we go along (the oil makes it easy to just scoop out teaspoons of frozen garlic).


Now these, these are completely fabulous and I can't seem to stop raving about them. They are the first of the potatoes I planted in August. The potatoes themselves arrived in the post in June - you might remember I didn't know exactly what they were! - and I think they're fulfilling all the promise of that mysterious brown paper bag. Now, these particular potatoes I grew in green plastic potato bags and they suffered a Lack of Water while we were away and the tops died off in these particular bags so I unearthed the lot. There are still half a dozen plants growing well in the ground, and a few more still in potato bags for later in the season. So far we've had about 2kg of the beauties! Many of them were a lovely size which fit in the palm of my hand.


And an awful lot of them were the size of peas. After a thorough scrubbing, we boiled them up, then cooked them briefly in a pan with loads of home-grown garlic and parsley, salt, pepper and an unhealthy amount of butter. Despite their small size, they were delicious (of course!)
At my best guess these potatoes include Bananas, Cranberry Reds, Sapphires, and Pink Eyes (or are they Pink Edwards?)


We're also still eating mushrooms out of September's mushroom kit. You might wonder how we kept it going while we were away for a month? Well, I handed it to my mum who got about two mushrooms out of it, and then she went away for a while so she lent it to her mum who got a few more, and then it went back to my mum where it did nearly nothing, and then it came back to us and it's had it's first genuinely decent crop - 200g - of mushrooms, enough for one pot of mushroom sauce!


Added to that mushroom sauce was a glorious FAT Red Legs spring onion. I much prefer spring onions over normal onions. They are easy to grow (but much slower than I realised they would be) and they don't hurt your eyes when you cut them.


And for dessert? Muffins made with the first of the rhubarb.


And finally, though not for eating - unless they have seeds and then our future-chickens will get them - are my sunflowers. The yellow variety is beginning to open:


And the reds are open all the way and are much lovelier and more varied in their colour than I imagined they would be, shot through with russets, golds, oranges, and stems of deep purple.

Blooming beauties

Next update! This time on the flowers I've planted about the place.

Out the back, I had dreams of sunflowers and hollyhocks all the way along the west-facing fence. I sprouted loads of seedlings of the above, and planted them out. Unfortunately, the snails, slugs, and similarly minded critters thought this was a fabulous idea, said 'thanks for the supermarket,' and ate their way through nearly all of them. I had, perhaps, three or four dozen plants out there, and only half a dozen sunflowers survive (both dark red and yellow) and a miserable two, lonely hollyhocks are struggling along. The remaining sunflowers, at least, are not struggling. They are impressively tall and looking grander and more stately by the day. They are developing flowers already. This is one of the yellow varieties (I'm hoping it's an enormous Russian sunflower, but so many have gone that I can't remember what was planted where now, it may be an ordinary Sun King)


And this is one of the red sunflowers. These beauties had red stems even when they were tiny seedlings, and now that they are bigger they have a distinctive purple tinge to their veins and margins.


Most of my flowers are out in the front garden as the back is dedicated more to veggie and fruit growing. Slowly slowly the front 'rose garden' is taking shape. I never really meant to have a rose garden, but the 23 Icebergs already out the front pushed me along that path. We missed the first Spring flush, but they'll continue to bloom all Summer and Autumn.


Over Winter I added five David Austin roses to the front garden; all are apricot/yellow tones. They were Jude the Obscure (my all time favourite), Graham Thomas, Lichfield Angel, Crocus Rose, and Charlotte. Unfortunately, the Charlotte rose did not survive the winter which is a bit of a bummer, but the rest of them are thriving and have their first flowers or buds. The Graham Thomas is as lovely as I expected(but I was too slow with the camera!) and smells gorgeous. The rose pictured is Lichfield Angel. I notice, that just like the Icebergs, the rain leaves pink spots on the flowers! I am waiting eagerly for the other two roses to flower so I can see what colours they are in real life.


When we bought this house I planted a hedge along the fence of Hidcote Lavender. There is a definite 'wellness gradient' along the fence, I've found. The first two lavenders by the gate at the Eastern end of the fence did not survive, but as you go down the fence line the lavenders look better and bigger until the Western end when the look like this! So pretty, and by next year I expect they would have filled out more completely and will have more of an informal 'hedgey' look.


Then, on a whim, I planted a couple of Catmints (Nepeta spp) after reading that they are traditional in rose gardens (the pretty lavender coloured flowers are supposed to help hide the leggy stems of the rose shrubs). I have fallen in love with the Nepeta completely, and have already planted a couple more (in both lavender and white) and I'm trying to grow some from seed too, so I can have loads of it.


And then there's the borage, which I've been trying to photograph because the sunlight in those little hairs is so very pretty, and the Dodonaea viscosa purpurea, which has no flowers yet but is a lovely wine colour.



I have realised that I've unintentionally begun to create a rose garden with a white/lavender/yellow theme which should be quite nice if it all comes together as it looks in my head. Here is how it looks so far - without a rose in sight because they are all behind me! - getting there, getting there... I want to put in more silvery foliaged plants next, and more of the creeping thymes, and more Nepeta of course (and a few more roses, ones that are more yellow than apricot). That's my wish-list anyway, to begin in Autumn when we get back into a planting season. (Northern Hemisphere readers: Summer in Southern Australia is a bad time to plant most plants as it's very hot and much too dry. It's not impossible, but new plants need to be lavished with care or they will not thrive.)


That shabby brown plant in the top left is a native pelargonium (Pelargonium australe). It was looking wonderful before we went away, but has suffered in the hotter weather because it's in a bit of an exposed spot. The flowers are pretty though, typical pelargonium flowers, and I have started to collect a bit of the seed - they are fluffy and parachuted, like daisy seeds - to see if I can grow more plants from it (it can also be propagated easily from cuttings just as you could an introduced pelargonium).


Most of those plants pictured are on the western side of the front garden, the eastern side is very much a work in progress. This link shows you roughly what I have planned. The main eastern garden bed was just grass which I dug up, and then I transplanted a heap of the Icebergs into that space into a kind of wedge shape. There was a path down the side of the yard past the house here, which was dug up as we are bringing gas into the house from the street main supply. Until just a few weeks ago, this space was a giant ditch. It's finally had the gas plumbing put in and it's been filled FINALLY! I can't tell you how nice it is to be able to walk easily down there again! The roses are all totally fine and blooming - I had a picture which I accidentally deleted, oops! - but a couple of the other plants I had in here got squashed by plumbing/ditch-filling efforts. The gardener in me was horrified to lose a Lomandra (pictured!), a little Kunzea, and a chamomile (which may yet recover) but my inner-renovator is just happy that the plumbing is done.


Speaking of renovating, that's what I'll update you on next. :)

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!

Mid-September back garden tour

I have shiny new and uncorrupted camera cards so I am back to my old snap-happy self and to celebrate I'm going to share a dozen or so photos from the (mostly) vegie garden out the back of our house.

We've had a few little harvests lately:

There was a lovely big bok choy (growing in a pot with a baby plum tree).


And the experimental Greenfeast peas had enough fat pods on them to be able to cook enough for a side to dinner for three adults and a pea-'loving toddler.


And there are more peas on their way, although the whole plot is starting to look decidedly lopsided now and I don't anticipate it will last much longer.


There were a couple of baby beetroots (not my forte, not yet anyway!)


I was going to throw all these baby beetroot leaves into a stirfry - since the actual roots were so disappointing but I accidentally left them out in the garden overnight on Monday and it absolutely bucketed down that night and the were beaten down into the ground. Still, I thought the photo was too pretty not to share; those colours! Imagine the vitamins in them!


And, as ever, the rainbow chard is still providing loads of leaves for us for no effort at all on my part. It's not quite as vibrantly coloured as it was when the weather was cooler.


We've got more fruit and veg on it's way too.

There's the Aquadulce broad beans, which are taller than my waist. I have dutifully nipped out the top buds of each plant. Apparently if you don't do this they will not set fruit, and I can say that despite all the flowers over a month ago I didn't see a single bean pod until after I'd done the nipping.


The other broad beans - Bunyard's Exhibition, that I sowed much later - are only around a foot tall but producing flowers already. Now, do I do the nipping now, or let them get taller and then nip them? I always feel like I'm making up this gardening gig as I go along!


And for months and months I have been looking at the purple pepino flowers and moaning that they were doing nothing. And then, suddenly, there are at least a dozen fruit! I theorise that the weather had to warm up enough to bring out the pollinators (feral bees, no doubt). I don't know how long they'll take to ripen, and I don't know what they'll taste like (like 'melon,' I've read), and I don't even know if we'll like them but it will be good to find out!


Some of the recent sowings are doing quite well so far and not too attacked by snails, like these daikon which I'm growing in one of my Styrofoam boxes (the carrots have sprouted too, but are too tiny to photograph).


There's beans doing their thing. These might be butter beans, but I can't remember what I've put where (it is written down though!) For some reason, the beans in the pots sprouted weeks ahead of those in the ground. Maybe because the pots are warmer than the ground?


Oh gosh, I can't remember what these are either! Pumpkins? Cucumbers? Zucchini? Eek! It's a pot luck garden! These were sown in jiffy pots and then transplanted.


And just for fun, I've planted lots of red and yellow sunflowers, and 'black' and white hollyhocks along the fence. I'll write a whole post about this soon, I'm hoping.

The red-flowered sunflower seedlings have red stems and leaf veins too. These were planted in toilet paper tubes filled with seed-raising peat (I love that stuff!) I accidentally left the tube poking a bit above the ground but I'm sure it won't matter. Some bugger of an insect has had a nibble on a number of the sunflower seedlings which is a little bit irritating.


These are tiny baby hollyhocks. Some I planted singly, and some in pairs like these two, in anticipation of some natural attrition!

Seems such a shame that nasturtiums are a weedy nuisance when out in public! They are supposed to be total pest magnets in the vegie patch so it seems contradictory to plant them there, but the idea is that you attract the bugs - aphids especially, but also slugs, snails and caterpillars - to the nasturtiums and not to your vegies. However, I seem to have the healthiest, pest-free nasturtiums out there, and my brussel sprouts are absolutely covered in grey aphids and not fit to speak about (or eat, for that matter, might give the old brussels a miss next year)


It's a very exciting time of year, this ever-lovely Spring.

[and, even better, look at this! A new satellite photo of our little house:



It shows my still unfinished path out the front, the new extension out the back, the water tank which, thanks to the big downpours earlier in the week, now has enough water in it that some comes out when you open the tap, and finally no more huge pine tree! Compare it to this photo back in April:



Woohoo, rolling along quite nicely!]