Well the change of season decided me that I needed to do some overdue jobs in the garden and give it a general tidy up. The back garden has been looking messy, leaves and weeds on the pathways and old overgrown plants in beds. Thankfully the start of Autumn has seemed to bring slightly cooler weather. I started out by pulling out the hairy melon vine from one of the beds. I'm still not sure what fruit it actually was. All the fruit had holes from fruit fly, a shame because there was a lot of fruit. There's just been so many flies around that the traps haven't been working. We decided to dispose of any fruit the flies were infesting in hopes it'll get rid of them. So the hairy melons went, vine and all, I left the watermelon, Shane thinks the skin is thick enough the grubs won't be able to get in…but I have seen flies on the two fruit we have growing so we'll see. I pulled all the fruit off the cherry guava too as these were totally infested -many were eaten by Horse and Bertie, but the rest went into a plastic bag in the wheelie bin. We are going to avoid planting anything new that might attract them for a few months-so no cucumbers, tomatoes, capsicum etc. That made selecting new plants a little tricker, but we ended up going for beetroot, more asparagus, silver beet bok-choy and purple carrots. Buying seedlings is the best motivation for me to get jobs done :) I got the tomatoes that had come up on their own cleared out of the side bed, and added in some soil improvers. In this bed I planted the silverbeet and purple carrots. Purple carrots both as seedlings, and seeds, which started coming up during the week. Something has been munching on the seedlings at night, but it's only eating a small section of the bed, so it's not time to bring the trap out….yet. In the big bed I staked back the asparagus fronds and cut back all the mint that had gone woody. We're going to devote this whole bed to asparagus-it basically takes care of itself and produces lots of spears each year. Plus its a long lasting plant that doesn't need replacing each year-and it's not a tempter of the fruit fly-win win! So I planted two new asparagus, but there's still room for more. In the bed where the hairy melons were I planted rainbow silverbeet, bok-choy and beetroot. I raked the paths to remove all the fallen leaves so I could spray the weeds, but it was overcast so I left the spraying to do on a fine day. During the week I sprayed the roses as they were starting to show signs of black spot. I'll do this each fortnight until they look healthier. They are already looking a bit better.
The beds really need weeding though, they are looking untidy. Mostly nutgrass-it seems to come back stronger each time we pull it out. I was reading up on it and apparently the bulbs live for years in the soil, and if the soil's disturbed and they are exposed to light and water they'll shoot. So this is probably what happens when we weed. Shane suggested we just cut the leaves off so the beds look neater and we aren't disturbing the soil-so might give this a go. Today I got the weeds on the paths sprayed-we had rain during the week so they were growing really well. I think I'll need to spray again just to get rid of them all-there were millions of tiny seedlings just starting to poke out of the rocks.
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![]() "And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." William Shakespeare Archives
February 2017
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