Well it’s been a bit busy the last few weeks-going north to visit family and having family come stay with us-so I’ve been very slack on the garden updates. There’s been plenty happening though. With the weather starting to warm up, we’ve started fertilizing all the plants to give them a bit of a boost ready for spring. The fruit trees and vege garden have had blood and bone and the plants out the front have had a mix of urea, potash and a slow release designed for natives. The citrus have also had some Epsom salts and soluble zinc sulphate added to replenish soil nutrients. We’ve started putting on GroundBreaker too. Our soils here have a bad habit of going hydrophobic-it’s very discouraging looking at the soil and thinking it’s well watered only to dig down and discover it’s bone dry just under the surface. Groundbreaker helps the soil take up the water-and starts working right away-ahhh instant gratification! Out front, some of the natives have been flowering-the grevillea near the shed and the carport, and the tea trees in the front garden bed. The snowflakes are in their ugly twig stage-but we’re just waiting for the seed pods to open then we’ll cut them back at ground level. Shane hadn’t liked snowflakes because they looked so spindly and lost all their leaves for part of the year-so I’d gone round last year ripping them out…and new plants grew back from the roots left in the soil. The new plants grew really fast and were very bushy, and we liked them. So they’ll all get hacked back savagely this year in hopes they come back even bushier. Out back the fruit trees are doing well-we have fruit coming! The blueberries are both fruiting-tried our first blueberries today. Shane spat his out because it was so sour-I liked the sourness. The citrus plants are doing well. The mandarin still has loads of fruit. Very glad some were ripe for our nephew to pick-he loved them and kept going back for more. He also liked chewing on fresh bokchoy leaves-who said kids don’t eat greens! I was super excited to discover our lime has blossoms. I’d glanced at it and thought there was a branch of dead leaves, but when I went over it was pretty purple blossoms. Also discovered the Lemonade plant has buds starting to form. The strawberries are fruiting-but so far all the ripe fruit have had slug and ant holes eaten in them (Bert still eats them ants and all). I put some ant sand around them today, and put some beer traps in place for the slugs. The peach has gotten loads of blossoms and is forming little peaches-I’ve started putting the exclusion bags over them-fingers crossed it keeps the fruit fly out…and deters the birds….and deters Horse who has taken to shoving his whole squishy face into the bush nearly breaking branches. It seems like over night the mulberry plants decided they were tired of being naked and grew their leaves, then the next moment we look up to discover millions of fruit forming. In the vege garden the broccoli have been growing-the heads are forming much faster than I remember previous years. The kale and brussels sprouts have shot up now the slug attack seems to have died down. There are tiny sprouts forming up the stalks. Beer traps are the way to go! We got some proper slug trap containers to use too-they have a cover to stop the water from the sprinkler getting in and are green so settle into the garden less noticeably. There have been a few peas coming out on the sugar snap pea plants-unfortunately a few plants have been eaten back by some night time critter-we really hope it isn’t another possum. Touchwood it’s only eaten a few things so far. The celery look ready to pick-I got some dips this week in anticipation. The pipes we put around them seem to have worked keeping them straight. We’ve had the first few asparagus stalks come up-still at the spindly stage so not yet an edible size. We also had our first onion-small but it was very strong flavour. The sweet potatoes are still going-well the original ones in the small bed are. The cuttings I tried transplanting look like they’ve died. We got some new seedlings to plant in the big bed today, when they get established we’ll pull out the vines in the small bed if they haven’t already died back. Some of my bulbs have started flowering-the freesias and the gladioli and the tuberose. The bluebell leaves have gotten bigger and I think the daffodil bulbs have come up now the tarragon plant that was shading them has died back. The society garlic is also flowering, and the plants are filling out to create the garden border as I was hoping they would. We got two new fruit trees at the markets today too-a Brown Turkey Fig and and Acerola Cherry. Shane's going to get the new automatic sprinkler hooked up soon.
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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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