My little mate

I am pleased to announce the arrival of my new gardening companion: Our little boy, Owen. At less than three weeks old, he's already been out in the Ergo (sling), wrapped in a woolen blanket, keeping me company while I prune the roses and my baby plum trees. If Miss Three, Emi, is our SP (Small Person), does this make Owen our 'ESP,' Extra Small Person?

 

 In other news, I've just eaten the last two raspberries off the bush. Raspberries in June? Oh, yes! I am as surprised as you are. And they were delicious :) These are an unnamed variety that I dug out of my Mother-in-law's garden a year ago. I love it when a free plant performs well. I have six other - known - varieties of raspberry scattered throughout the yard as well. If I have my way, we will be overrun with fruit in a few years. I can't think of a nicer fruit to be overrun with, either. The varieties I have should provide fruit for us from December right though to June, if the past six months are anything to go by.

 

Last but not least, another bargain which is proving itself a brilliant performer: A David Austin Rose I bought from an online store in a kind of 'end of season run-out' sale.  It's called Sophy's Rose, and it's proving itself almost impossible to photograph accurately. I appreciate this Hipstamatic snap is especially dodgy and not even in focus, but so far it's been the closest representation of the colour I've managed to get (real-camera photos are even worse, and show it as a hot pink colour). This photo on the David Austin website is a little closer, though my roses seem to glow more than that. Sophy's Rose is a glorious burgundy-wine-red colour, warmer than the red in the lower rose in my picture, but not as pink as the one on the top. 
Furthermore, it's still blooming in June and the plant itself has done wonderfully for one just planted last winter, not showing any signs of the blackspots and yellowing leaves of the roses in my front yard, and even still has a generosity of leaves.

Anemone de Caen

I think that dreaming about something -literally- is an indication that something is preying on your mind a bit too much. Dreaming about 450 Anemone de Caen bulbs would be an indication that you need to stop procrastinating and plant the poor buggers.

I love anemones of all kinds (oceanic varieties included), seriously love them. I bought these bulbs around 18 months ago. I had a vision of sweeps of blue and white beauties in and around the roses. And then, not long after my bulbs arrived in the post, I lost them. Like, proper lost, turned the house upside down, couldn't imagine where they could have possibly gone. I started to wonder if I'd actually accidentally thrown them out. Then, about two months ago they miraculously turned up in the study. Bingo! Now I could plant them. Except where were they to go? The rose garden vision has changed, or rather, has filled up in the intervening year with other plants (mostly native, which these anemones are not). What to do, what to do? So, the bulbs have been sitting on the kitchen bench for weeks and weeks now, getting pushed aside, while I've been trying to decide what to do (short of listing them on eBay!). In my dream, some of them had flowers already...

So, in they go, and this afternoon at the latest. It's a bit late to be planting them to be honest, but better in the ground than stashed at the back of the laundry cupboard for another year. The plan now goes: whack them in, in random clumps, wherever there happens to be a space.
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Today's job

After a strained groin muscle and two attempts at spraining my ankle out in the garden in the last fortnight, it has occurred to this heavily-pregnant woman that it might be time to take it a bit easy, before I find myself unable to walk in labour... Time for some non-strenuous work out there.

I found some garlic bulbs in the cupboard, neatly labelled, from last year's harvest. Normally they would have all been eaten months ago but this time, morning sickness put me off using them completely and so I have plenty left to plant (not to make this post entirely about pregnancy and garlic!)

I'm planting Dynamite Purple, Early White American, Cream, Melbourne Market and Australian White (not pictured). I love garlic as a crop: bung it in, and off it goes with almost no maintenance or care required at all. It will do better, however, if kept weed-free and fed.

String of peas

This plant is commonly called 'String of Pearls,' but SP says it looks like peas and I think that's a better name so String of Peas it is. It's Senecio rowleyanus (although my label read 'Senecio rowleyana, I wonder if someone wrote that incorrectly deliberately... assuming that Wikipedia has the correct name?)

Anyway, I came across a cheap little pot of the plant in the local Ikea (I do like them for their selection of cheap little house plants) and snapped it up on impulse. Fortunately, the web tells me it's relatively low care (though not NO care; I don't believe any plant ever really is). I've potted it up in another Ikea pot I've had floating around for a while. It did have a baby bromeliad slowly growing in it... and then the cat ate most of it and so I had to turf it out. The pot doesn't have great drainage - only a very small hole in the bottom - so I've filled the bottom inch with gravel, then potted up the plant in a mix if about 1/4 sand (borrowed from the retaining work D is doing out the back) and 3/4 ordinary potting mix. Cactus mix would have also been appropriate if I'd had any.
 

Let's hope the cat stays away from this one; the leaves are poisonous and not to be consumed.

Purple and yellow and...?

It's nearly rose time. Nearly time to plant and nearly time to prune. I am a bit ahead of myself this year, because Babe #2 is due when all this should be happening so I'm quite keen to get things done before s/he arrives and I am pinned to the couch for the next six months.
I made myself a short-list of roses that I'm interested in (all climbers, this time). I couldn't help noticing that SP has annointed it with her own ideas... Is that a 'no' to Tess of the D'Ubervilles, or a 'yes,' I wonder?

I have three roses arriving soon: The long-lusted after Reine des Violettes for the front garden, a Strawberry Hill, also for the front garden, and a Munstead Wood for out the back. I used my usual buying strategy for these plants, which goes: Buy now, work out where to plant them later. 

Now, I have this section of front garden along the eastern fence, which looks endlessly crappy. The soil is particularly rubbish (sandy, water repellant, and dry dry dry), and the heat from the sun in the west over summer fries everything when it reflects off the fence. When we first bought our house I planted a banana passionfruit here. There's an old post here, when I was still optimistic it would work out! Anyway, the vine grew but never especially well. It never had a single flower, and obviously never any fruit! So, this week I pulled it out. Bang. Gone. Poor bugger, but them's the breaks.

(This shot is post-passionfruit removal, but before I'd done anything else)

 

I still want a garden bed along this fence and I have two main issues to address: the heat and the soil. For the heat - and I'm reeeeally hoping this works - I put beige-coloured shade-cloth along the fence, thinking that beige would be the least conspicuous. Then I stepped back and thought, 'Good Gods, that looks awful!' 

But, fortunately, looking at that section from further away it doesn't seem quite so bad, a bit shielded by the little ornamental plum tree (reddish brown tree) and the Acacia iteaphyllas on the neighbour's side of the fence (very pretty yellow shrub/small tree, terrible invasive weed in the Adelaide Hills, and many other regions of Australia...)

 

To help amend the soil I added several bags of neutral compost, most of a bag of cow manure and a few handfuls of Dynamic Lifter pellets. For good measure I found some worms in another area of the front garden and gave them a new home in here (a good indication of the poor nature of the soil: there were no worms at all!)

 

Then, to plants! Roses, obviously, where this disjointed post started. I want to put a small climbing rose at the bottom left of the photo, but which one, or what colour? That small shrub that I've left in place is a Myoporum batae, very pretty weeping plant which should make it to several meters tall (though I'll probably keep it smaller). Great plant for dodgy conditions. Next plant in line is a new Graham Thomas rose I couldn't resist getting from a Big Box hardware store. It's not strictly a climbing rose, but can get to over two meters tall and it's becoming one of my absolute favourites, see why? Man, I love that yellow...

(This is not my picture! I got it from here: http://placespill.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/graham-thomas.html)

 

Next in line will be my Reine des Violettes, which I'm hoping will end up looking like this:

(Again, not my picture, this image is from here: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/rosesant/gal0508135015639.html )

And that is the end of that space. Underneath there is currently a ground covering Eremophila 'Augusta Storm,' which I left because it was growing well and an Atriplex semibaccata (two more good plants for dodgy dry and hot conditions). I found some red 'Mrs Bradshaw' geums - my latest plant obsession' so I popped one of those in as an experiment, since I have no idea how they grow.  It's not a big space, really, but I'd like the purple and yellow roses to contrast (along with the mystery #3 rose... suggest colours/varieties to me! I'm leaning towards a red/crimson, maybe a Blackboy rose?)

Reconstructive surgery

Sometimes a plant just isn't happy. Take this little kaffir lime (Citrus hystrix):  Miserable; wonky in it's pot; losing it's leaves; covered in scale with accompanying ants. What to do? I had grand plans to plant it in our retaining beds (still being built right this minute, in fact, but that's another post) but it's so sad I wasn't sure it would be worth it. But I can't bear to turf out a plant - especially a relatively expensive one - on account of being a victim of neglect (probably never got enough sun; shouldn't have put that competitive rhubarb in there with it; not enough love AKA fertilizer and water etc). Some drastic measures are required. This may work, or it may not.

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First: take a deep breath and lop off most of the branches:

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Second (no picture, had wet hands): Put the entire contents of the pot into a bath of lots of water with a big dash of seaweed extract (to help with transplant shock and root development). I used the wheelbarrow for this. Gently tease out the roots from the bulk of the soil. Express some horror that after nearly three years in the pot the roots have barely developed and are spiraled and twisted (this plant was bought before I knew anything much about gardening and I must have chosen a pot bound specimen). Cut off the worst of the twisted roots, and trim the remainder to a manageable length. 

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Third: repot the plant - straight this time! - into a bag of good quality potting mix and water the bejeezus out of it. Leave it with all the other pots so you don't forget to water it. 

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Fourth: Pray to whichever gardening Gods you choose that this will revitalize and refresh the tree and this will be successful. Or just wish it luck :)

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If at first you don't succeed...

...Try, and try again.

Or, in the case of gardening in difficult climates and soils, do some research before spending any more money!

When we first bought our house, I ran out and planted a number of things. Mostly I got lucky, but one of my first failures was a couple of blueberry plants.

Mistake #1: Planting them up against that blasted (and blasting hot) Western fence. I've lost many plants against that fence now, and those that survive do not thrive over summer. All that radiant heat is a bad idea for nearly everything. Not to mention that a lot of blueberries are not very heat-tolerant at the best of times.

Mistake #2: Blueberries like acid soil, which is in short supply in nearly all of Adelaide and surrounds. I'm lucky: the soil in our yard happens to be a little bit acidic with a pH of around 6.2, except in gardening circles that's practically a neutral pH. Blueberries like a pH of between about 4-5.5. That's just not something I can provide for my plants in the ground, and I'm not about to go faffing about trying to alter it (too tiresome, potentially expensive, and a never-ending exercise).

The solution? Pots! And a couple of plants which hopefully will be a little more heat-tolerant (or at least are low-chill varieties).

Today I went out and bought four new blueberry plants (because I have four big pots to put them in). I had a chat to the girl at the counter about the plants, and she thinks these four should be OK in my area (hills, but not the cold-cold hills further behind Adelaide.)

My three 'real' blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) are 'Denise', 'Northland', and 'Sunshine blue'. They are all Northern Highbush varieties. I also have a Chinese blueberry (Vaccinium gaultheriifolium), which is a bit of an experiment as it's different to the other blueberry species commonly grown.

I also spent what felt like a small fortune on special 'rose/camellia/azalea etc' potting mix especially for acid-loving plants. I tell myself it's OK, because my SP adores blueberries and inhales them by the punnet, and they are usually really expensive to buy, and I've spent about 12 punnets worth of blueberry money on my plants and potting mix. If this goes well, within a few years we should be set up for fruit for most of Summer and Autumn, which will be super-nice!

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PS. The other little plants in the right of the picture are my latest obsession: Geums/Avens. I like the red ones, but I stumbled across these three yellow plants of the cultivar 'Lady Stratheden' at my local $2 shop and snapped them up as an experiment. Impulse buys being what they are, I haven't yet decided where I'm actually going to plant them..