Fun for the postie

A great week for packages! I got my apples and pears already:

And my roses finally arrived, minus the Abraham Darby, which was a bit of a bugger because it was one of two that I really, really, really particularly wanted (the other being Cornelia), but it did give me a great excuse to go trawling a few of my favourite nurseries to see if I could find one (and I did, woo woo!)

Next update will be plants in the ground. 

St. Cecilia gets a second chance

After three or four years in the front garden, my St. Cecelia (David Austin) rose has done little better than limp along. Today she got the heave ho, but with some last minute magnamity I've potted her up. 

The rootstock has been trying to take over from the day this rose was originally planted, so it's had a rather severe bit of surgery from a pruning saw to try to get rid of the problem. Too much? Will she survive? We shall see. 

Fingers crossed. She's bedded in half general purpose mix, half premium mix (because I ran out of GP mix), and a handful of Seamungous pellets to help the roots along. Hopefully some pot culture and a quieter and cooler position in the garden will do her a world of good, and she'll blossom for me. 

I had my usual assistant today too, though not so sure the beloved, white Moomin appreciated being used as a gardening tool. 

(Off topic: how sad is my lawn in the background?! Come back, warmth and sunshine; we need you!) 

Apples and pears, oh my!

I did it. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and clicked 'order' on six new fruit trees: three apples, and three pears. It's a bit extravagant, but this will really round out my little home orchard. All trees are on dwarfing rootstock, and I've chosen varieties that hopefully will one day see us eating our own fruit from February right through to July (November-January already well covered by other fruit trees in the yard. In order of fruiting, I am getting:

Williams pear (Feb-March) 

Beurre Bosc pear (March, Chef husband's #1 choice) 

Grand Duke Constantine apple (March-April)

Beurre D'Anjou pear (April)

Braeburn apple (May-June)

Pink Lady apple (June-July, my #1 choice). 

I don't have a suitable garden photo today, so in the meantime, please enjoy this Pablo Picasso painting, 'Poires et Pommes,' from 1908. 

Shopping trip

Anyone would think I was some kind of gardener...

Potato Tower

 I haven't bothered with growing potatoes for a couple of years now, because fun as it is, it's also quite a lot of effort and space for minimal return (I've found). Anyway, on my beloved Pinterest I found pictures and links to 'potato towers' (http://www.growinglotsurbanfarm.com/potato-towers-living-fence-posts/) and being intrigued, I thought I'd give it a whirl. I especially like the minimal amount of ground area this takes up! 

Anyway, all we have here is pea straw, four bags of bought compost, a bit of half-made compost filler from our compost tumbler to add bulk down the bottom of the tower, and two handfuls of Seamungus, one each one third and two thirds of the way up.

 From top to bottom the layers donuts) of potatoes planted in here are:

-King Edward (plus a couple of Kestral from one gone green in the kitchen)

-Bintje

-Nicola

-Royal Blue

-Dutch Cream

-Kipfler

Diggers afficionados will recognise the 'members' mix' of spuds here! No red  varieties though, I'd have liked some but they were not included in the mix and I didn't want to spend any extra money. 

Stay tuned; I will update as we go along, and fingers crossed this works well otherwise it's a bit of an expensive experiment!

Frost!

I am not an early-riser (at least not by choice), but at 9:30am our yard was still covered by this fine bloom of ice. So beautiful. 

Geums

Silene uniflora 

Pelargonium somethingorother 

Crassula (I wonder how it will cope?!)

And a blooming Winter Iris, for luck. 

June glories.

There is something very special about winter in Adelaide. The garden is quiet and damp, and completely lovely in a scruffy kind of way. 

'Sophy's Rose' is my June stalwart. 

'Cramoisi superieur' putting on a surprise show. 

Hidden hollyhocks under the apricot tree. 

Terrible photo of Chocolate Cosmos and Pelargonium reniforme. 

Pelargonium sidoides, love love love this one. 

Salvia leucantha under the apricot. 

Alyssum 'Snow White'

Acacia iteaphylla goes nuts at this time of year (red-flowering Japanese quince behind)

Mini gerberas and blue lobelia in a pot. 

Dwarf calendula, my favourite buff yellow. 

Fairy pelargonium (forget species) with a saltbush I totally forget the name of (Maireana erioclada?)

Pineapple sage, birds love this one (lemon behind). 

Rosa 'Crepuscule' under our bedroom window. Can hardly wait until it's bigger!

Volunteer nasturtium (one of lots, no wonder it's a weed in these parts). 

Lastly, the new garden corner, most plants in except for the roses which should arrive soon. 

Sorrel vs Chickens

Those chickens: fiends for anything green! 

This was June the first... Little sods!

But the French Sorrel is returning, ready to feed the chickens again the next time they get loose. 

Pity I can't quite say the same for some of the other plants that got eaten/dug up/trodden on. 

Next up, mulch.

Two bales of peastraw mulch, and a makeshift curved bench made out of spare recycled red brick (not fixed in place in any way, which is good because I want to tweek it ever so slightly to the left, I expect I'll do that within the next five years or so). 

And a box of some of my green recruits.  

I gave up planting after the first four or so plants after my toddler was getting a bit too helpful. Will get back to it later this week, right after I drop of that application to do a degree in visual art (yep, really!). 

Roses winter 2015

Presenting my new garden space! We have moved the chickens behind the shed and removed their old coop. 

Doesn't look like much now, but just wait and see...

Planning too many roses (however do you cut down the wish list?!) I have 14 noted for this space, plus lots of salvias, agastache, nepeta and buddleia (mostly small varieties), two dwarf fruit trees (apples? Pears?) and an inbuilt chair for sitting and thinking (preferably with a notepad, pencil, and bottle of cider). The space is about 4m x 4m square. Seems tiny, but I am a mistress at squeezing lots of plants in, and it's still bigger than done people's courtyards. 

Rose haul 2014

It's like Christmas! Fourteen new beauties here, the only one missing from my original order is 'Mme Berade' as it was out of stock. I'm now tossing up if I should seek further, or replace it with something else (top contenders are 'Lady Hillingdon' or 'Lady Huntingfield'). I've managed to plant all but three of these plants since Saturday, but its not easy with a poor sniffly limpet-baby boy. 

Rust and slugs

Hollyhocks in winter suffer more than their fair share of woes.

Oops!

I've accidentally deleted the last post, a case of slipped finger on an iPad screen, and no second chances. Never mind, it wasn't a good photo in any case. I had a browse through some old posts, I really MUST start uploading some real photos again. I've been window-shopping for camera lenses too, and with my tax return weighing down my back pocket, I may have even found one to buy to replace the one pulled off the table by my orangutang-armed baby boy (expensive mistake on my part).

Meanwhile, here are two phone-camera pictures of our very first blood orange! I was worried the fruit would be sub-par; such a small tree, and in its first year in the ground I really shouldn't have let it develop, but I couldn't bear to pluck it off. It was worth it. It was perfect.

PS Next week we four are heading off to Japan for a holiday. Can't wait!

Honest backyard photo

This is our backyard. Midwinter, retaining walls still under construction with their black plastic and piles of rubble and soil, and our patchy, un-mown lawn. It has been raining so much that lawn is under over an inch of water at the moment. That will drain once the rain stops, but that will take a few days (both the raining and the draining).  Still, since a couple more rows have been added to the wall, I felt it deserved a progress shot. Also, some honesty in blogging is always good. 

Mulching

Mulching, mulching, mulching; blah! Never buying a jumbo sized bale of pea-straw again, not unless I have a small army to help me shift it, and a designated week to do it in. The bale has sat there for months, taking up space in the driveway, slowly mouldering and getting wet and soggy and revolting, hence: the industrial-strength washing up gloves! 

Meet Morry

Perhaps I need to rename my blog to 'Gardener on a Budget,' or 'The Bargain Hunter,' or maybe just 'The Cheapskate.'

Today I picked up a lovely little grafted mulberry (Morus alba 'Pendula') for the bargain basement price of $99, down from $150. It's grafted at about 160cm or so (about 5') I think, so it's also much cheaper than the $225-295 price I was staring down the barrel at for a taller grafted standard (180cm, or 6') that I was considering for my green-cubby. 

Of course, today I was 'just looking' in the nursery and hadn't planned on getting anything, but this tree was calling my name ('Katie, Katie, buy me, buy me! Look how straight I am, and look how wide I am at the top compared to the others, and I'm on sale...') so my quick browse became a shop of 1 x tree, 1 x bag cow manure, 1 x bucket Seamungus, 8 x long stakes (two to keep my tree straight, and six to use to form a guiding boundary for the cubby). Yep, a bargain ;) 

I think I'll call him 'Morry.'