Some gardening topics

The weather has warmed up and we got reasonable rain in October, so things are happening in the both the flower and vegetable gardens.

At this point in the season the best thing around in the flower garden are irises.  We should have a brilliant display but for some reason many of the ones we have purchased are being a bit coy in the flowering area.  I'll pump some worm juice into them and see what happens next year.




We transplanted some yellow flags into a swampy area we created and they are doing nicely.
In the vegetable/fruit section the strawberries have begun to hit their straps.  This was the first lot I picked and we are now up to about a litre a day.  Quite a few of these are being hulled chopped and frozen for later use.
Rhubarb rhubarb!
About  year ago some carrots were planted
Moving on to really current things, w ehave decided that it is time - after a month of munching and cooking - to let the asparagus grow on for next year.
The broad beans are doing pretty well.  (I suspect they are snake habitat #1, so small dog is currently excluded from the vegie garden)
 Peas are also starting to hit their straps (or in this case, snaps).
I decided to let this plum tree do its own thing as we have rarely got any fruit from it.  So it has headed for the skies.
 Of course this has led it to go get lots of fruit.
So netting happened over at least part of the tree.  This was not easy - leading to the development of several new obscenities (including &*^%^%^^_+!@@@!#&*(&) as I navigated a heavy step ladder around the tree and sundry garden beds.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more