Category: Garden

Hello! Here ends another week – what have people got up their sleeves for the weekend?

I thought I would get a few more plants in the ground – both in the hothouse and the outside gardens.

First I had to make some space in the hothouse by removing the huge flowering broccoli! The chickens enjoyed munching on them very much!

I also had a 7th apple cucumber seedling that was very undersized in the punnet I bought a while back. The others went into the main vegie patch, but I nurtured the runt of the litter in the hothouse for a few weeks. Today it also went into the duck yard vegie patch

About 10 corn didn’t germinate in the first plot I planted, so I replaced them with some new seed today. The rest are sitting up so you can now tell where they are in the plot fairly easily. You can also see all the pesty weeds popping up!! There has been no seaweed on the beach for a while so mulching will have to wait!!

This afternoon we decided to start moving the rocks that Cousin Jeff kindly dropped off to us. I sensibly used a wheel barrow and took the slightly longer route to the new garden area. Jeff on the other hand…

Using high-tech rope, stakes and tent pegs, we outlined the edge of the garden

Jeff went missing – he was taking away my turf and didn’t return. I found him immersed in a new project of regrassing the area under the man-ferns!

Anyway – back to the real job for me…

I really should have quit there – but it was too tempting to just have a go at starting the garden wall.

Ok – so a did a bit more than just start it!

I really had to finish there as besides my back telling me I wasn’t being kind to it, I still had to cover up all the new seedlings and do general ‘Garden Closing Time Stuff’

I will probably leave a small walkway so I can enter the garden without having to scale the wall (yes I am exaggerating… it won’t be that high!) I would like to use newspaper and hay to kill the grass and backfill with topsoil and compost. I am aiming at a bigger herb garden.

We didn’t get inside until about 7.30pm. So it was a late shower/dinner etc. My electric blanket is on and beckoning me! (although I need to put Pip to bed and put some bread on to bake for breakfast)

Hope everyone’s week has ended on a positive note!

Cheers

Hello!!  Yesterday I promised flowers! So today instead of rabbiting on about which plants I fed blood and bone to, and my intense watering schedule – I am adding a bit of colour to my post tonight.

I had a very enjoyable hour, buzzing about looking carefully at what was blooming around the yard!

Lets start with the Granny Bonnet

This was so tiny – here is a photo with my grotty gardening hands cluttering up the shot so you can see the scale

And it looks like some raspberries are in the making

Flower intermission:
Jeff spent all day burning stuff! He cleared heaps of weeds, rubbish, prunings etc from under the macrocarpas. (The massive trees on our property) The chooks were enthusiastic about ‘helping’ and probably got a little smoked.

Anyway – Flowers

Hope you have enjoyed a virtual stroll about our spring garden!

Cheers!

I think I should have taken a lot more flower photos today. A lot more. Cheerful ones. Note to self. Take a bunch tomorrow. 🙂

Anyway, today we got a job done that I have been wanting to do for ages… put the shade cloth back up at the front of the vegie patch to give the plants a bit of relief from the wind.

Today we cut the shade cloth into sections so we could pull it taut better instead of one long length which we have done in the past.

On advice from a cousin a while back, when we attach plastic sheeting or shade cloth to something (or anything similar) we use polypipe and wide headed screws to fasten the whole thing.

We attached the plastic to the hothouse about 4 years ago in the same way and never had a problem with it. At first I thought we would use thin strips of wood and nail in, but the polypipe better for a few reasons. It doesn’t rot like wood eventually would. Its cheap, and you can just cut the lengths with a knife as you go – so minimal waste. Really easy to handle (flexible!)

Yesterday I cleared out the weeds & tidied my herb garden!

I evicted many snails

More ticks off the list.

Wind is still constant, which is drying the soil out… used my sprinklers today and attached to the bore and gave everything a decent soaking.

We (mostly Jeff) did a lot of burning off today – lots of scraps and weeds

I did quite a few other odds and sods today – weeded at Ruby’s, started cleaning out the hothouse etc. We didn’t get inside until about 7.30pm tonight!! I think I am about ready for bed!

Hope your day was  a good one

Cheers

Friday comes around pretty smartly doesn’t it?? I think I ended my week with a whimper rather than a bang.

I ended up in the garden, just pottering about. Put the water on the corn patch (that nothing has happened in) despite the call for rain. Its the wind that dries off the soil, so thought it best to err on the side of caution and water everything. (And yes its not just raining right now, its pelting down! 🙂 )

Remember this?

It now looks like this (or half of it anyway)

You should have seen the snails! (Oh thats right, you can)

The chickens got quite the feast of broccoli-fattened escargot!

I ended up buying two packs of plastic drinking cups… which really actually goes against my grain because I am not fond of disposables and we really try to limit our use of plastics.  But I really needed to get a bunch of little seedlings in the ground – it is the last month of spring after all – and I didn’t have enough containers to cover them.  The cups were the perfect size for the little seedlings – give them some wind protection at the very least, and hopefully against pests too.

For the first time I took time to mound up the earth around a few of the potato plants to see what happens

I have also noticed a bit of a surge in snow pea growth (I am SURE I have) since putting up the wind break for them

I was excited to see finally a few bean sprouts pushing up through the soil

The apple cucumbers look sturdy enough but I am not seeing massive size changes yet

Same with the pumpkin and zucchini in the duck-yard. Happy enough but not getting bigger.  I suspect we will really benefit from a good week or so of steadily warm weather (‘we’ – meaning the plants AND me!!)

The silverbeet I transplanted in early September has done well

Anyway, the wind was really crazy this afternoon and I finally gave up and came inside to peace and quiet! I just checked the forecast for tomorrow – showers and windy! Sigh. The rest of the week seems to be partly rainy/cloudy.  I think I should plan to crochet 🙂

Have a great weekend everyone – hope you have some grand plans!

Cheers

Sorry – thought I would digress from boring you with flower photos all the time 🙂

Quite a big day in the garden again – I am waiting for my electric blanket to heat up then I am going to be so happy to crawl in to bed!

Jeff’s OCD about the un-mown lawn got the better of him, so he concentrated on manicuring the place

I, on the other hand, decided to start doing something about the garden in front of the pallet fence

I moved on to the empty garden by the back veranda

Meanwhile, Jeff has finished the back and started clearing out weeds between the Lions Ear bushes

And what treasures did I dig up today? The usual glass & crockery, the obligatory nail and most excitingly – a pair of scissors!!

While I was watering and covering my seedlings back up, Jeff arrived on the scene with a pathetic bundle of fuzz. The blackbirds think nesting in our light fittings in the carport is the best place to bring up a family. This little baby took a tumble.

Now all of you in the know about blackbirds in Australia and pest species etc etc please look away now.

Very unsure whether this was a good idea – the parents won’t like the smell of human… But Jeff wasn’t going to start chewing up worms to feed baby birds, so chances had to be taken!

And one more creature from today… I went looking for a flower and found a dragonfly

Anyway, it was nice to get some of the non-food related gardens sorted out.

I reckon my bed will be nice and warm by now!

Cheers!

PS Occasional Extras on my Facebook Page

Hello – I didn’t catch up with Ruby today, but I will tomorrow, so hang tight, belated Ruby Tuesday coming.

Cousin Jeff dropped in with a ute full of rocks!! Cooooool!

During some work with his Pop, Cousin Jeff came across a farmers rock-stash and asked him what he was going to do with his pet rocks 🙂 Happily for us, they wanted to get rid of them!

Of course its so tempting to dive right in and start a new project straight away… but some grain of common sense filtered through my brain and I left them well alone for now.

I went about town and delivered 4 dozen eggs. It was an off and on again rainy day, but in the end, a long ‘off phase’ let me get a start on the raspberries. (Right now its bucketing down again!)

Lots of weeds/grass growing unchecked in among my beloved raspberries

I must say this was a tough job today – but only because of the wind! It was hideous! Does anyone else get totally skitty when working in howling wind all day?? It was driving me doo-lally!

Luckily the seaweed was fairly wet, so it didn’t just blow away as soon as it was out of the bag… keeping the newspaper that is underneath in place was a challenge! I might have said one or two swear words today…

Its not finished – I ran out of seaweed (and patience)

I am sure I will get back to the beach within the next week to stock up and finish the job. Just happy I made a good start.

I then took pity on my poor little snow peas! I had tied them back to try to get them to latch on to the rebar and grow up – but the wind was whipping through them like nothing else, so I found a bit of scrap shade cloth and made a bit of a wind break for them. It made an instant difference – they ceased getting flung all over the place! Now maybe they can concentrate on growing up and producing some flowers!

Hope your day was (or will be) excellent

mmmm – I am munching on a piece of cake right now as I type (because thats a sensible thing to do at something past midnight isn’t it??)

I finally got Ruby up here for the afternoon to see her party photos, have a cuppa and read out some of the lovely messages you wrote to her.

She really enjoyed it all. Happily on the larger computer screen she was able to see the photos reasonably well  – helps that I can really enlarge images too so she could get a better idea of faces.

And oh wasn’t Ruby chuffed to hear all your messages and notes from around the world! She said to me that she really couldn’t understand why I was writing about her – what on earth was I doing that for!!??  Then hearing your comments and messages for her birthday and about some of the Ruby Tuesday posts, she understood – how fascinated a lot of us are about hearing of a life in a time that is quite foreign to a lot of us! So thank-you all very much. It really made her day!

So the rain came back – with its customary off and on mode. And so windy!!! Poor little plants!

Anyway – I took a wander about the yard to do a bit of a photographic garden update.

And lets finish up with a couple of the pretties that were enjoying a drink from the sky today!

And last but not least – I’ll take as a promise for tomorrow! Its nearly there but I don’t blame it for staying tucked up during the wind and the rain today!

Cheers!