The other two apple trees have finally started blossoming! And they are both flowering at the same time so should be able to cross-pollinate. The tropical apples fruit are slowly fattening up, so they are looking more like proper apples instead of being long and skinny. The flowers on the Acerola cherry are turning into fruit too-super shiny green fruit -they are meant to turn red and then we’ll find out what they taste like. The Angel peach that was getting close to picking disappeared one day without a trace. We’ll have to wait quite a bit longer for another to ripen to see how they compare to normal peaches. I put paper bags over the other fruit in hopes of concealing them from whatever thief we have, but they blew off during the day-and one of the branches snapped. I wonder if there are any uses for green peaches. Our figs have started producing more fruit-here's hoping Horse won't knock them off this time. In the vege garden we’ve still been getting lots of asparagus, and we get a handful of Brussel sprouts each week-when the slugs aren’t destroying them! We found a slug repellent product that is meant to be safe for animals (couldn’t try anything toxic as the puppies would be sure to try it), we’ll see if it has any effect. The kale is still getting bigger- maybe we should pull out some of the plants-they take up so much room and it’s way more kale then we use. The watercress has started flowering-it seems to be liking the bowl it’s planted in and has doubled in size-it looks big enough to start picking now. Seeds from the old dill plant have started shooting-as have the shallots. I was worried the shallots weren’t going to come back again this year, but all it took was a bit of rain. I like when plants grow themselves (well when they grow where I want them to at least-we have tomatoes coming up in the most random of places). We’ve also got zucchini’s forming which should be ready in a week-the rain has really been speeding up everything's growth. The sweet potato has gone crazy it really does look like it grows every day. The tomatoes in that bed aren’t doing well-the plants are all curly and look stunted-think they’ll just come out and we’ll let the sweet potato take over. Nana posted me some plants from Gladys’ garden-a broccolini and a perpetual leek….i’d never heard of perpetual leek-the bag certainly smelt right when I opened it, so hopefully it’ll recover from its journey and produce a continuous supply. So far they seem to be coping with the shock of transplanting. All the daylillies we have growing started from some plants sent from Nana-they keep multiplying so we have lots of plants now. The have been flowering profusely this year. The agapanthus (also from Nana) have just started flowing too. I started spraying the lillpillies for scale over the weekend-we don’t have them as badly as last year, but I noticed a couple of branches were covered. Think we’ve gotten to them just in time. Last year they’d gotten to the point of producing the sooty mould and killing off large parts of the plant. The plants have only just recovered and are looking bushy again, so we don’t want a repeat. I found the lemonade tree out the back had a different sort of scale on it too with ants crawling up and down farming them. All the tiny fruit that were forming have fallen off. I gave it a good douse of the spray too. Will keep spraying every few weeks to try to keep them in check.
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We were half way to Bunnings on Sunday to look for roses when some research on my phone prompted a detour to Kalbar to go to Barton’s Rose Farm instead. We wanted more roses to fill a bed out back-the rosemary plants there weren’t doing too well-they were getting too much water. The bed was also looking scruffy with grass and weeds. We’d gotten a pretty rose called Bee Bop the other weekend, but needed a lot more plants to fill the space, and didn’t want to wait till April when the online ones would become available. The rose farm was lovely! Set among farms, it was an old house with rose bushes planted out front and a large Jacaranda tree in full bloom. There were rows of rose plants available to buy-soooo many to choose from. It was just as well we stopped at 7 since we had the Jimny and they completely filled the car. It was a very perfumed trip home. I got all the rosemary plants dug out-and transplanted the ones that looked saveable. Got all the roses planted- with only a few scratches on my arms-one of them was a very grabby plant. We got an assortment- white, red, yellow, orange, ranging from tall plants to ground cover varieties. Started mulching the bed after work on Monday-the mulch really neatens it up. I think it shows up the flowers better, and will hopefully suppress the grass coming up. Finished the mulching off Wednesday. I think we’ll be able to squeeze a few more plants in…there were some more at the farm I had my eye on.
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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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