We're online!

It's been 2.5 months without real Internet at home, but we're back online at last and I can stop fretting that I will exceed my phone download limit (which I did last month; horrors!)

Overall, this winter seems to have been remarkably mild... or perhaps I'm just coping with the cold and damp better?

As usual, I've had masses going on out in the front garden and the nature strip. This, in particular, is starting to come along quite nicely. It's not the best photo (I promise to start using my real camera again, rather than my phone!), but I hope you'll get the idea of what's going on out there. After realising that since the conditions in the nature strip were so awful (compacted clay overlain with dolomite, blasted by the sun and the wind and passing cars) so nothing was likely to grow very big, I added in a whole lot more plants. All up so far there are just over 50 individual plants out there, all of which are native to Australia (except for the gazanias which I am slowly removing), and the majority are indigenous to my area. The major players are my grasses, which I'm hoping will grow up and spill over and blanket the area. By the way, I have finally had the large tree in the front of the garden identified: It's a large-fruited blue gum (Eucalyptus leucoxylon ssp megalocarpa). I'm told the other, smaller tree in the background might be the same but I remain sceptical. The best news about the nature strip? Not just that plants are alive - if not exactly thriving - but I'm finding worms out there now! Wasteland no longer.


Another project I've got going on is the greening of the driveway, or rather, the strip down the centre of the driveway between the two concrete strips we drive on. It's another tricky area: west-facing, dark in winter and blazing hot in summer, and all the water from the backyard drains through it whenever it rains. Sometimes I think I'm mad. My neighbour certainly seems to think I'm forever gardening, and I'm sure I saw his eyes glaze over when I mentioned native grasses... Natives I've planted down the driveway include Isolepis inundata (a little rush) and Microlaena stipoides ssp stipoides (a little grass). I'm also trying out lawn chamomile, and creeping thyme I grew myself from seed. It took over four months to get as big as you can see here, so it's certainly not a fast grower, at least not during the cooler months.


Onwards and upwards! Spring is coming, and I am going mad for seed sowing in preparation. Will show you that next time.

Baby carrots too.

We're pulling carrots too, baby carrots. I'm very happy with them as I've not had much success with carrots before (they get eaten, or grow too slowly and I get impatient, or they are bitter). These carrots are little and sweet and lovely. They were all grown in pots from seed around other, more permanent plants.
We're having an odd warm spell in the middle of July. It's a dry week, but the sunshine overhead warms up my bones and I'll not complain.

Snow peas!

And quite a lot of them, too. A bit daggy, mind you, because I managed to forget about them despite their close proximity to the back door. Despite the black spots and bug-chewed bits, they're quite sweet and moreish (though Miss 2 declared 'not like thems,' of course). Nothing quite like a bit of mid-Winter homegrown produce, is there?

The Bargain Hunter

So, there is this giant hardware store (let's call it 'S') that has fairly recently opened up quite close by to me, in direct competition with another giant hardware store that is also quite close. I have discovered that S's attached garden centre often has the most amazing bargains. I think they buy up so-called unwanted stock from various places and then flog it off really cheaply. My first favourite bargain was finding caper plants for the basement price of $2.50 each. I was astounded enough that they even had caper plants, let alone for that price! Naturally, I snapped up two of them.

My second best bargain was three deciduous magnolia plants for $13.95 each. They're small pots, granted, but a bit of a gamble in my area and I'm not sure if it's cold enough so I didn't want to spend loads of money on them (I have 'Merill,' 'Stellata' and 'Susan'). Anyway.

Here is bargain #3 which I got yesterday: Five roses for $1 each. I could have taken up to 'six per customer' except that I could only find five that I wanted. For the record, I have three climbers: 'Golden Showers' (terrible name, isn't it?!), 'Zephrine Drouhin' (a pretty name to make up for the previous...) and 'Pinkie', then one shrub rose, 'Apricot Nectar' (because when I went to a rose show - where I was by far the youngest person present except for a number of small children who'd been dragged along by grandparents - it was the only rose which really caught my eye), and a ground cover rose called 'Our Rosy Carpet.' I have places for all of them - I think - except for the ground cover rose which I have no flipping idea where it's going to go.



And to think all that time I spent making lists of roses, muttering over the prices, and making agonising decisions about what to put where, and how X would have to wait until I could justify it, and Y was probably not quite gold enough, and Z wasn't a repeat flowering rose so I wouldn't get it, and then all it took was one ultra-cheap rose sale for all that ground work to go out the window and I just bought whatever took my fancy at the time. Typical!

Got a cold?

Horseradish is supposed to be good for that! And I can believe it too: today I pulled a whole heap of it out of my garden (I foolishly planted it in the ground as a gardening newbie, not realising it was invasive, oops! Time will tell if I got it all or not) and even out there in the chill air I could smell the scent from the roots wafting up around me.
These strange alien-like plants are waiting in the sink for me to attempt to process them, but I think I'll wait into SP is in bed as at least one of the web pages I've read re: horseradish processing compares it to chemical warfare!

Mmmm, pumpkin!

2.022kg (4.4lbs)! Not bad, hey, for a pumpkin self-sown out of a compost heap! There are a couple more on their way, too. I don't think they'll get so big since it's getting quite cold outside now, but I'm quite impressed with my free food.

(This post is just to stay I still exist! We are the Lurgy House at the moment but hoping to be back and blogging properly soon. I'm not sick, by the way, I get to be the nurse this time.)

Mini updates #5 and #6

We've moved in and I'm back at the old lappy! I am slowly trying to read all the blogs I have been missing (getting there). I feel I have 100 things to write about and am still playing catchup, so here are two more update snippets.

#5

Look! Look! It's a nearly completed and tidy house space! Very exciting :)

This shows some of the things I have been rambling on about for the last 15 months: 'Australian Chestnut' hardwood floors (really up to four different species of Eucalypt), high double glazed windows (looking east), Danish couches (new to us, IE second-hand), 'Parchment' wall paint (Solver), and good old ceiling-white paint on top. And I do believe this is the first appearance of D's fish tank on this blog? It may feature in later posts, on and off.
Still to do in this section: my photo wall, adding a rug or two, and a reshuffle of the furniture. I am pretty happy with this corner of the house so far, especially considering that from the point that I took that photo, if I'd turned about 180 degrees to take it you'd see complete chaos and it would look like a different house (with quite nice floors).


#6

The Great Fence Project.

This is what I've been attacking over the last month or so: planting a variety of fruit trees along the fence (mostly figs and citrus so far), and removing the clumps of old Agapanthus planted along there. Apologies for the dodgy photos; I didn't realise how blurry they were until I loaded them up! So far I have removed well over 200 individual Agapanthus plants (rhizomes?) This is, in short, a crap-load of hard work. They're surprisingly shallow rooted, but very heavy and bulky. I feel that rather than using a spade to remove them, I'd be better off with a machete. It's an unpleasant and particularly dirty task, made worse by the sticky and slimy gloop that the broken leaves exude.


It feels a little thankless, at times, to have been hacking away at the clumps for hours and only have cleared a small space, and then to have looked up and see the meters and meters of plants stretching away in front of me still waiting to be cleared. I persist because of all that lovely warm and sunny west-facing garden space they will free up once they're gone.
Bottom left of this photo is a representative of one of my new espalier-babies (a Eureka Lemon). I plan to try my hand at espaliering a whole row of fruit trees along this fence, but I'll devote a whole post to that later.



FWIW, many of these Aggies are going to family member's gardens. I feel a bit torn about it: I hate to waste a perfectly usable and useful plant (drought tolerant, fire retardant, endlessly green), but on the other hand a fairly serious environmental weed, though not a declared one, and often still available for sale, and mainly a problem when garden waste is dumped in bushland. If the old flower heads are removed before they scatter seed everywhere they're not really a problem (but still...)

Must go. Need to be up at the crack of dawn for the early-bird plumber tomorrow.