Trouble ahead?

I have a problem that is rapidly getting waaaay out of control.

You might recall that a couple of posts ago I asked for some suggestions for an extra variety or two of tomatoes to plant this year. I was hoping to round out the small selection I had made so far.

Cherry Cocktail seedling bursting ahead as the first 'matoe of the year.

Well, I was given some excellent suggestions and have been anxiously awaiting my membership from Digger’s Club seeds to arrive so I could order my last season’s nemesis Tommy Toe again and make a couple more choices to join my early sowings of Amish Paste and Cherry Cocktail seeds. Some of the tomato seeds I had made a mental note to try to find after recommendations from my garden blogger friends included Cherokee Purple and Black Russian (thanks Meredith!) along with Black Pear (thanks Clare!)

Well, a couple of weeks had gone by and still the membership had not turned up. At this point it is prudent to admit that an attribute that I do not seem to possess is patience.

The pile of tomato seed packs, as yet quite small.

I was still fully intending to stock up on Tommy Toes and whiled away the days pouring over the Diggers on-line catalogue looking for the blogger recommendations, but couldn’t find any of them. I did however come across Wild Sweetie which sounded worth a go and Black Krim, which I knew I had read about on a blog somewhere, but momentarily couldn’t place it (!) Never mind, I thought, I should get it anyway. As the days rolled by waiting for my membership I got distracted and  ended up signing up with a web based vege growing challenge with Yates seeds and decided I needed to pick up a packet of Tiny Tim seeds to grow as part of the challenge. As it turns out I also have another packet of surprise Tomato seeds on the way courtesy of Yates.

Well, as luck would have it my Digger’s membership arrived with two packets of free seeds. One of those packets just happened to be of five mixed Heirloom Tomato seeds and I was at once both delighted and perplexed. I now had another forty seeds containing a mix of Burnley Sure Crop, Black Prince, Banana Legs (love that name), Aunt Ruby’s German and Tigerella. Of course, I am going to have to find somewhere to plant these now too. Who could possibly resist? But…I did really have my heart set on planting those Tommy Toes,  Black Krim and Wild Sweeties too, so I went ahead and ordered those. Well. You would have too, wouldn’t you?

Amish paste seedlings starting to make their way in the world.

To top it all off a friend dropped in a couple of days ago and we got talking about vege seeds. She suggested a website that I had not heard of before as having an excellent range of vegetable seeds…and I made the mistake of having a peek. As it turns out Eden Seeds just happened to have those elusive Cherokee Purple and Black Russian seeds. So…yet another order is on its way.

My newest arrival, a 'Tiny Tim' seedling emerging.

So, at last count I now have Amish Paste, Cherry Cocktail, Tiny Tim, Burnley Sure Crop, Black Prince, Banana Legs, Aunt Ruby’s German, Tigerella, mystery tomato seeds, Tommy Toes, Black Krim, Wild Sweetie, Cherokee Purple and Black Russian either sown in seed-raising trays (waiting for the last frost to pass),  waiting to be sown or on order. That’s a grand total of 14 tomato varieties. And I still have to find that Black Pear don’t I?

As an aside, so far I have prepared one small garden bed that will fit two or three tomato plants. It’ll be fine. Of course it will.

Spring digs her toes into the earth

I was going to say that my garden has been waking from her slumber over the last few weeks, but if she slept at all, she really had only the briefest of cat-naps.

One of my Japanese maples just starting to unfurl its first new leaves.

In winters past I would have said that nothing much happens from July to August, but now that I’m actually paying attention I can see that nothing stops around here, it just changes gears. And right now spring is notching up through the gears at a rapid pace.

Just a few photos of early spring to share this time round, winter coughs and colds have been playing havoc at our house, so changes in the garden are thanks to the efforts of spring digging her toes in, not me digging my fingers in the earth. I just hope I can get back out there before she turns her attention more fully to the weeds!

Sweet smelling hyacinth

Dutch crocus

This is the first year I’ve tried growing Dutch crocus, they are very pretty, but I made the mistake of planting them in my lawn and they are so tiny that they look quite lost. I might try transferring them to some pots for next year.

I love this time of year for the pansies and violas cheering up the garden.

Tiny tete-a-tete are having a great year.

cheers,

Heidi

An Emblem in Abundance!

Just 15 minutes walk up the road from my home is a patch of bushland we often go walking in. It isn’t pristine native forest by any stretch, but you can still see quite a lot of native species and some indigenous to this area.

Last weekend we saw the best display of our State’s Floral Emblem, Epacris impressa, the Common Heath that I think I have ever seen.

Maybe it was just that it was such a bright display of colour on a dreary sort of a day, but my daughter and I were as delighted as if we had come across a forest carpeted with bluebells.

Sorry about the splotch, it was starting to rain!

The Common Heath has a scrubby and narrow kind of habit with short spiky leaves. It can grow to over a metre, but to be honest I’ve rarely seen a tall specimen. Common Heath flowers are fluted bells and range from almost pure white through a soft pink to a very vivid, deep pink.

A mid pink example.

It is a very hardy native, particularly if our local bushland is anything to go by. It is growing in rocky clay with little by way of topsoil and only a thin mulch of eucalypt leaves, from the trees that suck most moisture from the surrounding soil.

I now have it on my list for when we finally finish clearing out the old plum trees and my garden of native plants can start going in. Yet I have to stop seeing plants I want as it means I yet again have to resist the urge to get one. I’m gathering quite a collection of plants sitting in pots while I figure out what to do about the old plum tree stumps!

If you are interested in reading more about the Common Heath quite a detailed page can be found here.

cheers,

Heidi

Here we go again!

I’m not too proud to ask for wishes of good luck. Or advice. Maybe it should be the other way around, but never mind

It's purchased seeds for now, but I hope I'll have more luck with seed saving this year.

The thing is that my fingers are itching to get back into growing tomatoes again. Yes, I know it’s still only August and frosts will be around for a while yet, but I have a sunny window sill and a covered area…and well… I just need to be growing tomatoes again!

These little tomato seeds have a lot of hope invested in them!

This year I am going to try growing four different varieties of tomatoes. No, I don’t know where I’m going to put them all because that would be sensible and I can’t be caught developing those kind of habits!

OK, so some of the tomato choices are already made and seeds put in seedraising trays on a sunny sill with the vain hope that the cats won’t tip them up. So far I have Amish Paste and Cherry Cocktail sitting alongside some capsicum and basil in a big tray. I am about to get some more Tommy Toes seed because I’ve somehow lost the last lot of these seeds and I’m determined not to let a tomato get the better of me.

Any recommendations for one last one to try?  I’ve finally treated myself to a ‘Digger’s club’ membership, so I can order quite a good variety or heirloom seeds.

Oh and just to change the subject a little, I have a lovely new Lumix camera courtesy of my tax return. It’s just a point and shoot one, but I’m quite taken with it!  Here are a few early pictures from the garden (still getting the hang of it all).

Self sown pea that grew from some pea straw mulch.

Hellebore...not sure of the variety.

Rosemary in flower.

A sunny little viola.

Tete-a-tete daffodils are springing up everywhere right now.

Heidi.

Regrowth.

The weekend before last we went for a walk in the bush at ‘Lyrebird Walk’ near Mirboo North, which is about half an hour drive to the South of where we live.  I wanted to see how the bush was recovering from fires about 18 months ago.

Since the fires I have driven through the area quite a few times on the way to different places for my work, but haven’t had the heart to stop until now.

Many of you would have heard of the devastating Black Saturday fires that burnt on February 7th 2009. The fires that caused the damage to this  forest did not happen on the same day, but only a week or so prior to Black Saturday, during a lead up week of very hot and dry weather. If you are interested in reading more you can find some information here.

I was surprised to see that many tree ferns with burnt black trunks were already recovering very well.

I will not dwell too much more here on the devastation and sadness that came from the fires, but rather show you some pictures of how the bushland is recovering.

These eucalypt saplings are already waist-high and busily trying to outcompete each other.

Tiny fungi on burnt bark. The tip of my daughter's finger gives perspective!

We were happy to see plenty of signs of plant life recovering almost everywhere we looked. Not only that, but there lots of bird life to be seen, including Flame Robins, Kookaburras, Cockatoos, Rosellas, Blue Wrens, Yellow Robins and ‘Treecreepers’.  Big wombat sized holes and lots of scrapes in the mud showed that the local wombats were resident and in the mood for pre-spring renovations.

A yellow tailed black cockatoo surveying its surroundings.

Not a great picture, but here are some Australian icons for you - Kookaburras!

A little green shoot taking off. it's hard to tell from here, but it is a seedling nestled in the older tree.

Undergrowth re-establishing itself.

Farmland adjoining the forest.

Things to Remember About Winter

Here I am again back in the blogosphere! I ended up being away for longer than I thought and probably won’t be blogging as much or visiting you all at your blogs as much (at least in the short term), but I will try and peek in and say ‘Hi’ when I can.

'Mother Maple' waiting for spring

You know what the great thing about this blog is?  Well, it’s great that I can record what is happening in my garden and what I’ve learnt through trial and error (or what I haven’t learnt despite having done the same thing over and over), but best of all it can remember things for me!

I swear that I live life like a goldfish. Every baking hot february with the temperature stretching toward 40 degrees centigrade, I forget that it gets cold in winter. Well, yes I know it gets cold, but I forget that it can get toe curling, steamy breath, frozen windscreen and above all chilly toilet seat cold some days.

Tiny native violets are in flower now.

Likewise in July I have completely forgotten about days that can be so hot they can clear kill a tender green plant in one go. I forget sleepless cicada buzzing nights and sunburn under 5 minutes without a hat. The height of the seasons always come as a bit of a shock.

So, for posterity’s sake, things to remember about mid-winter in the Gippy Garden are:

1. We do get occasional hard frosts, enough to kill the new growth on the lemon tree (but the lemon tree is fine) and the Jacaranda sapling (which isn’t so fine).

2. In July lots of little self sown pansy and viola seedlings start to emerge. I read somewhere that some consider violas a weed, but nothing cheers me up in the garden faster than a little self sown ‘Johnny Jump Up’.

3. In July many of my camellias are coming into their best, especially the japonicas.

My favourite camellia 'Brushfield's Yellow'

Lovely 'Desire' camellia

4. Clay mud is not so much fun to garden in. In summer I had visions of lots of cool but dry days to garden in. It has been a wet winter and digging around in the mud is a bit different to what I was anticipating!

5. Nothing sleeps for long. It is not that long since the trees lost all of their Autumn colour and yet there are signs of new life already emerging everywhere I look.

The first Hellebore well underway.

6. Earlicheers and Paperwhites are up and blooming (along with my first ever little crocus), hyacinths are almost there and many more daffies are on their way.

7. Our heating always breaks down in June/July. That is a very important note to myself!

What sticks in your mind most about your opposite season?

Taking a break

Hello everyone,

First of all apologies for not visiting anyone’s blogs much in the last couple of weeks and also for being a bit quiet on the blog front myself.

"But it's my turn to squash the seedlings!"

Just to let you know I’m having a short blog break as I’ve gone from being a bit unwell (nothing major!) to a complicated patch of life that needs my attention for a little while. I have and will be lurking here and there but all I seem to have to say at the moment is largely “……..” so I’ll be back when things have settled down a bit and I can fill in the dots!

"Summer squash"

All the photos are of my favourite plant flattener ‘Possum’ accompanied occasionally by ‘Melvyn’.

I've used this one before I know, but a picture is worth so very many words sometimes!

Happy gardening ! I’ll be back in a week or two

Compost Worms. The perfect pet for the lazy gardener!

It is just possible, thanks to the humble compost worm, that I can officially label myself ‘Not quite as lazy as I thought I was’.

Why? Because I recently read in a popular Australian gardening magazine that worm farms were ‘just too much effort’ to maintain. Now that is lazy.

I think you would be hard pressed to find a garden helper as low maintenance and hard-working as a compost worm. Well, maybe an earthworm. Or a microbe…but that’s not the point!

To be fair, I think the writers were judging the effort required from the first couple of weeks of setting up the worms, which still isn’t anything like herculean, but is not really an indicator of the level of effort required once the worms are established.

Draining lovely 'worm tea' for the garden.

I put my ‘worm farm’ back into use in January. I did muck about a bit for a week or two getting the worms set up and working out how much compost to feed them. I worried that I would accidently starve them so I overfed them more than once, but I think it is a pretty standard mistake to make.  Worms eat very little when they are settling in.

If you do accidentally overfeed your worms it is easily solved. You can transfer the excess to the compost bin or add a little lime (I did read somewhere to use dolomite lime, not garden lime…but I’d already added garden lime before I’d read that and the worms are still there happily chewing away).

Worms feeding in the recently added second level tray. They will gradually move up into this tray, then the next, allowing the castings in the lower levels to be used.

Now, in early winter, I check the worms a couple of times a week (I was peeking in more often in hot weather)  and I might feed them on one or both of those occassions…or not. If there is still food they haven’t finished, I just keep going past the compost worms to the compost bin with my scraps.

There are a few basics to keep in mind for compost worms, such as:

• Avoid onions and limit the amount of citrus and other acidic scraps (having said that, my worms seem to be quite partial to strawberry tops)
• Avoid meats and anything cooked in oils etc
• Keep the worms in the shade or undercover (mine have done just fine under ‘Mother Maple’ through the hot summer)
• The worms might need a little water added if it is hot and dry, but generally the food scraps and the worms ‘output’ keep things nicely damp. It doesn’t hurt to flush them out from time to time anyway and it means you get some (slightly more dilute) worm ‘tea’ (ok, yes, wee!) a little faster.

The first tray is now almost ready to 'harvest' for castings (it does not fill all the way up as the next tray sits quite deeply into it)

Many places also recommend that you chop up worm food finely and I’ve seen pictures of people putting worm food in a blender… but I have not found it necessary to do anything but tear larger pieces of compost up a little. If you’ve got a bit of a mix of compost that is older/softer (such as overripe bananas – worms looooove bananas) and some newer stuff they will manage ok over the course of a few days without the aid of a food processor.

And as for the benefits? My plants love it! A little diluted worm wee is just the trick for a plant suffering from transplant shock, a plant that is looking a bit sad and tired, or for helping newly emerged seedlings get a good start in life.

My daughter's 'Chocolate Lily' that had almost died before a couple of doses of worm wee.

The worm wee must be good stuff, because I’ve just discovered that the little Chocolate Lily Arthropodium strictum (that has flowers about the size of a thumbnail) should flower here from September to December and I don’t think it is flowering because it is about to die!

It is recommended to use worm wee as you would seaweed preparations and suggested that you dilute it anything from one part in 5 to 10. It is good to know that even if you used worm wee without diluting it doesn’t burn plants like other fertilisers would. However, it is better to dilute it as you can make it go a lot further that way.

Winter Solstice – Who Feels The Warmth of The Sun Today?

At last! It’s here! The shortest day of the year!

Those who read my earlier post whining about the days closing in will know that I’m not so excited because today is such a short day, but because tomorrow will be longer. It may be imperceptible, but I will know it is true in my heart of hearts!

So, here in the Gippy Garden I am celebrating my own little Winter Solstice Festival.

As the sun reaches its ‘lowest high point’ for the year today I thought it might be a good chance to see what manages to get a little sun on its face, to help me judge planting positions better for the coming year. I’ll have to try to remember to do the same at the summer solstice for comparison’s sake.

What is thriving in your garden at the solstice, be it summer or winter?

Melvin the cat demonstrating just where the midday sun falls, a cat is always a reliable measure!

Uh oh, didn't realise that the sun does not hit the ground at all during the shortest days in the butterfly and bee garden.

Beetroot just making it into a bit of sun. The sticks are to stop the cats snoozing on them.

I've sown a few peas here...I think I'll sow some more in a sunnier spot...

...but they are starting to emerge!

Coriander experiencing a total eclipse thanks to 'Possum'. No wonder they look a little flat!

Apart from looking at what is – and what isn’t – getting a little sun, let’s have a look at a few things that are doing well at this time of year. While lots of things slow down and have a bit of a sleep, there is never a time when everything stops and you can’t find something growing around here.

Lovely lemons!

My daughter's 'paperwhites' about to flower

Lorraine Lee rose peeking out from behind the Feijoa

A Grevillea. Lots of Australian native plants flower at this time of year - so I need more!

An 'Early Pearly' bloom looking sadly upon her lost petal.

'Debbie' camellia peeking over the fence and just starting to bloom, promising more colour to the winter garden.

My Garden Bouquet (MGB) for June – Winter White

Each month I challenge myself to come up with something to put together for the monthly ‘My Garden Bouquet’ Meme hosted by Noelle over at Ramblings from a Desert Garden. For once I’m running a little ahead of time, rather than behind, but Noelle would welcome you to join in and you can find out more about it at the end of her latest post.

The Monthly Garden Bouquet is a good challenge to have, because it makes me look more carefully at my garden. It also makes me think about the work I need to do to make it more bountiful throughout the seasons in future.

My effort this month is as informal (ham-fisted ) as always, but is unusual for me in terms of colour…

'Early Pearly' camellia, with 'Winchester Cathedral' rose and 'The Swan' rose buds.

A white and silver toned bouquet is very restrained for me, as I generally go for colour. Soft colours maybe, but I do instinctively reach for colour. Unfortunately the few flowers in different colours that were available in my garden clashed with each other, so I had to think again. My eyes turned to my lovely soft white camellia.

Sorry about the shaky image! The foliage is Feijoa and buddleja leaves

My ‘Early Pearly’ camellia has been the star of the garden since mid April, when, true to it’s name, it starts flowering before any other camellia in my garden.  My ‘Early Pearly’ is still a fairly small shrub, but it has a lovely soft weeping habit and beautiful dark green glossy leaves. It also has the loveliest white flowers that emerge from pink tinged buds. The petals even look pretty when fallen and shattered beneath the bush.

Delightful 'Early Pearly' camellia

I was quite frustrated that my bouquet photos were all either washed out by the flash or slightly fuzzy in the low light without it. I must sit down and learn more about photography one day. Another thing to add to the ‘to do’ list! Still, what’s life if there are no new challenges on the horizon!