A half-finished corner

A day spent digging, until the weather came in, at least. Doesn't look at all spectacular, and the lawn is a little worse-for-wear (since it's had half a tonne of soil and rocks on it for the past six months), but very happy to have that little white cherry tree (centre) in place at last.

For those playing at home, that assortment of twigs and trees from left to right is (not including the trees right along the fence): the grafted weeping mulberry, dwarf white cherry, thornless lemon (at back), my beloved Moorpark apricot (largest), and the dwarf black cherry (far right).

Underneath so far, and so small most are almost invisible, are a couple of volunteer broad beans, three Salvia leucantha, two Penstemons (I think "blackbird" possibly, cuttings from an unknown variety in my mother-in-law's garden), one surviving peony (forget which), "Munstead Wood" David Austin rose, a prostrate caper, some Gaura from self-sown seedlings transplanted from the front garden, "Sandford" raspberry, and far too many Oxalis pes-caprae (Sour Sobs) that I just can't seem to stamp out. That seems like a lot, now that I make a list, but there is more depth to this area than appears in this 'in-progress' shot. And, let's face it, I tend to over-plant. 

From Saturday, there'll be a couple more plants in here because it's ROSES COLLECTION DAY! Wheee! 

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 :)

Gardening update

Just a wee one today, little bit ranty.
The garlic I planted is doing well and growing fast.

My broad beans and experimental out-of-season peas have all sprouted beautifully.

 




But, but, but... so have the sour sobs. AARGH!

The problem with sour sobs, my most-disliked garden weed, is that they make a thick, suffocating carpet, swamping any other poor green things that happen to be trying to eke out a living in the vicinity.

These beastlies have gone mad in MIL's vegetable patch, and now they have turned up en masse in my 'new' garden beds, the ones that were previously lawn. Now, having been lawn last year, I don't remember there being so many. I guess the grass kept them down. But now, freed from their constraints, the bulbs that have clearly been lurking in the soil have gone, 'whoopee! Let's make a run for it! Our time is here!'
One of the other problems with sour sobs is that they are almost impossible to get rid of, propagating by little bulbs in the soil that hardly ever come up when you pull the plant, no matter how careful you are. Apparently, if you pull and pull and pull the plants, over some half  dozen years you will deplete the bulbs' energy reserves sufficiently and get rid of them that way. You can also poison them - best done when the plant is flowering - but I see this as a last resort only to be employed when in dire straights.
What is the solution? I cannot let them run riot in my garden; I will never be rid of them. So I am trying something out in both my and MIL's garden. I am sort-of 'hoeing' them down, scraping them from the soil and hacking them into the ground whenever they appear. I will let you know how this goes. I wonder how many times I'll have to do it over the season?

Weeding

On Sunday I finally got around to pulling out some of the weeds that were colonising the front lawn and rose garden. I got two buckets worth out of the lawn alone. Thanks to all the rain, the ground was very soft and they came out beautifully. Rather worrying was the number of soursobs I pulled out. This little South African number (Oxalis pes-caprae), introduced into Australia as a garden plant, is a serious space/light competitor and even though I'm told they aren't taken very seriously, as they aren't around the entire year, they are the bane of my gardening life. And this is why: This little bugger had a root over 60cm long! It was out of the rose garden and the roots were under the mulch, not the soil, which is why it came out intact.


All along the roots grow little bulbils and it is those thingums that are the real problem. Soursobs spread by bulbs, and lots of them, in fact a lot of the time they don't set seed at all. The bulbs are quite obvious in the photo below. It's a long, long process to get rid of them. As I prefer not to spray poisons in my garden, I'll be pulling these suckers out for years to come. I'm hoping the key will be to never let them get out of hand in the first place. So, one bucket of weeds for the compost, and all the soursobs to go into the green waste bin, along with their bulbs!



I finally got out the back as well and stated to clear swathes of weeds. Quite embarrasing, some of them had become quite enormous. Wish I'd taken a photo of some of them with something for scale, but all I have is a photo of three piles of weeds which don't look nearly as impressive her as in real life. I think I'm going to leave them just where they are so they can moulder and break down into compost and get dug into the soil later.


Weeding is quite therapeutic sometimes. There is something very satisfying about pulling out all those plants you'd rather not be there, especially when you have a personal vendetta against some of them. I have to say, however, that all the thistles and grasses made be wish we had a rabbit to eat them. I have fond memories of collecting thistles for our rabbits and guinea pigs when I was a child, of letting some of them get big just so the critters could have a treat.

Home and Away. 24-12-2007

Has it really been more than a year since I last posted? Dylan says 'well that's cause we've been home' but we haven't! I guess our becoming annual SEA-trip earlier this year was such a non-event for us that it didn't warrent posting about? No, it wasn't a non-event, it's just that when you revisit places sometimes some of the charm and wonder is lost from them The long and the short of it is, for this upcoming trip we've chosen to go somewhere we haven't been before: The Philippines.

We're becoming more grown-up backpackers now, no more self-enforced privitations, we've bought super-expensive travel pillows to take away! We also have an exxy head-lamp, a digital SLR each (ahem, yes, insured seperately of course) and multi-vitamins. So grown up are we.

Yes it is the day before christmas, that day of excess, meaning lost in a flurry of spending and eating. I see myself coming full circle with this: From the usual childhood joy at presents and lights and trees; to realising I couldn't be christian and rejecting the idea entirely and then struggling everytime this so-called festive season rolled around (for what was I celebrating, exactly?); to now when I think 'bugger it, just enjoy it anyway'. So we pinched a couple of branches off a radiata pine down by the rail line (and did the environment just a small service by reducing the photosynthetic abilities of just one noxious weed), added lights, red baubles from Target and paper-mache balls from Oxfam and voila! Christmas is in the house, in the corner by the fish tanks, on top of the filing cabinet covered by a shawl from India, next to the Lao woven silk wall hangings, under the temple bells from Thailand and the coloured prayer flags. Hmmm.

So anyway, what's coming up in this life? Well, working Christmas day of course, then off to Mama's for dinner, then madly working, packing and somehow cooking half the food for Dylan's sister's wedding which is on New Year's Eve, celebrating with Dylan's family and friend's all night, expected hangover on New Year's Day then on the 2nd of the new year, off to Melbourne, the first of far too many flights to Angeles, Philippines (alleged home of 10'000 prostitutes, thank you America) for our other life.

'Tis all for now, expect lots of posts about snorkelling to come or Greenie Whining about Coral Bleaching and other assorted environmental destruction ;)

Cheers Big-Ears, and Happy Festive Season for whatever you choose to celebrate :)