A gardening post

It isn't Spring yet, but with the wattle blooming vigorously you can imagine that you can see Spring from here.  (Various media types have burbled about Spring weather: so why is it -2C as I type this?)  However it is time to start getting stuck into the garden.  Well for me it is: Frances has been planting various things already.
My starting point is thinning and pruning.  The items that most need thinning are the strawberries.
Not only have a few tussocks of grass appeared, but the runners are all sprouting and there are a lot of dead leaves around.  After a bit of grubbing around things have been improved.
As these plants love acid soils we give them the most acidic mulch we can think of: pine needles.
These are acquired from under the various Pinus radiata trees planted along our drive.  This time the needles were garnished with mashed up pine cones showing that the Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos have been visiting the trees recently.  There is also evidence that wombats have passed through the area, but a but of added nitrogen is not a problem.

My other major project on 10 August was to finish pruning the grape vines.  While some varieties were quite modest in their vegetative growth last Summer (just requiring a bit of a trim) this lot had gone for broke.
They were disciplined rather severely.
Also, apparently requiring discipline were various things living under bits of timber and sheets of cardboard, which we use as mulch in the vine area.  I don't know what was there ...
.. but Tammie sniffled continually with her tail wagging presto vivace for 2 hours.  She had a lovely time (and as far as I could see didn't actually catch anything).

On the subject of Tammie, when I took her out last thing in the evening the sky was clear and the horned moon very bright.
This led me to consult a Lunar gardening calendar to see, post hoc if it was a good day for pruning.  Alas, they didn't seem to have an icon for pruning: perhaps if you are into that approach to gardening you don't like hacking into your plants?

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