I LOVE the tree!

Ach, I will miss the colours of my house!



Japanese Maples are such good value all year round, but bestest in Autumn/Winter.



I wanna take my trees with me! They were one of the many reasons I bought the house and also one of the reasons I spent alot of time on the roof clearing the gutters!
So I won't miss the raking and mulching, there is only so much one compost bin can take..




A gift from Cyclone and Betty Boo

Getting started on the garden

I've just posted some tips on a forum I hang out at and I thought I would extend them to here.

Here are some earlier entries - ME GARDEN
You will also see the reason why I haven't done anything with mine lately...

Anyhoo - so you have made yourself a space for some herbs and vegies, and not sure what to plant? Head over to Gardening Australia website - it's awesome. They have a magazine too.

I also HIGHLY recommend Diggers Garden Club they do excellent books and mail order, have the most PERFECT gardens you can visit. The catalogues are insane and you can go a bit nuts. I had about 8 different tomato varieties at one stage....

Op Shops are a great source of old magazines with advice on what to plant in the area you are in without spending a bucketload on the new ones...I arrange them into month order to avoid confusion (easily done these days).

Plant what you eat/buy most of.

When you buy your seedlings, always grab a couple flower punnets too. When planted out the patch can look a little bare and rather underwhelming and some colour always looks good.

If you have grown from seed, like I did here or if the seedlings look a little floppy you can stick the plastic drink bottles over the top for extra protection till they find their feet.

Crushed up eggshells can be a great way of keeping slugs and snails off the seedlings...but it never worked for me.

To keep stinking bloody cats away (they can sniff out freshly turned soil a mile away), buy some wooden kebab skewers and put them all over the place, pushed about halfway down. Keeps them from planting THEIR arses and digging to conceal the evidence. Mesh can be a PITA.

Happy planting. Will update on how to keep away the bastard that will EAT all your produce before you do.

Oh - and if you don't want to sacrifice your fingernails - scrape them over a bar of soap before you head to the backyard.

Update on my garden.

So we lovingly planted hundreds of tiny seeds and misted them with water each day, patiently waiting to see tiny signs of life.
Then the dog ate them. Scattered the pots and rolled in the soil. Sorry folks, the dog really did eat my homework!

I also haven't had too much time to get my butt into the vegie patch lately, the scorching heat we had in November knocked lots of plans on the head...but I'm still going to blame the dog tee hee


Disco dog – killer of Sweet William….

Sunday Afternoon Seed Raising

Time to get some seeds in! I love having masses of floral colour all around the house - near the front door, outside all the windows, pots and pots all over the deck. It looks cheerful and distracts away from all the crappy bits of this old house.

Now, you can go to the garden centre and pay HEAPS for 'pots of colour'. If you are in a hurry, go for your life but it's totally unecesarry. It's more fun doing it like this -


Old seedling trays, seed raising mix, empty soft drink bottles and a few packets of seeds.


Add children



Line the seedling trays with paper. You can see I have used pages of my Tax Pack. I save the newspapers and their endless 'articles' on AFL players and their pneumatic wives for the compost.
Fill the trays with Seed Raising Mix and wet it down, drop the really teeny tiny seeds in (2 rows of 4 for this type of container) and sprinkle more dirt over the top to cover them. Use a spray mist to wet down.

Then cut the tops of the soft drink bottles, fix over the top and you have a mini seed nursery.




I've used an old CD container for the long seed tray. You can get good little setups from the garden shop for about $20 but I like to use what's around the house.

The name of the game is to keep the little fellas warm, so if you have somewhere inside like the laundry or a sunroom you can keep them in there until they sprout.

There is always so much to choose from and it can get overwhelming. It's a good idea to choose a colour theme. That way you can have all different sort of flowers, with a colour theme running through it to keep it all together.

Maybe all yellows and oranges for example. My fave combination for summer are blues and whites - pansies, petunias are easy peasy and give you months of showy brightness.

I usually have no yellow or orange at all and stick to white, pinks and purples, but I cannot resist Sweet William (sometimes called Hearts Ease). They have cheerful little purple and yellow faces bobbing around, and Cyclone has declared them his favourite...

They can take heaps of sun too. I've got Impatiens in as well. They like a bit more shade but I have a place under the plum tree I want to brighten up.

And just in case you are wondering I haven't done any more on the vegie patch. It keeps raining and I have other pressing matters at hand. Like what fabric I should use to recover my dining chairs. Stay tuned because I can't decide and need your help!

Cheers,

Vegie Patch

Here is the 4 foot celery. After the heat it was looking sad, but instead of pulling it all out I left it to go wild. It has gone to seed now - you can tell by the tops so it wouldn't taste any good no matter how giant it is.

I left everything where it was because I got busy with 8 million other things and if I pulled it all up the whole patch would become a giant cat litter tray.

Today I pulled it all up with the help of a spade mind you, it was thick as tree trucks at the base but still smelled lovely and fresh. I pulled out heaps of snails and threw them at the fence (sorry Buddhists) when Betty Boo wasn't looking. She rescued a little one from the spade, placed it on the timber edge, declared it her baby then promptly fell over and stepped on it. Oh she cried like her little heart would break, so I found another one for her and all was well.

I turned over the earth (oh the worms - woo hoo!) turned in some compost material, leaf matter and emptied the vaccuum cleaner bags over the lot and turned that in too. Vac bags should be emptied into the compost. It's messy but if you are crafty you cut the bottom off, empty then stick it back together with sticky tape or staples and you can save on the bags.

So this is how the patch look now. Pretty unsexy but I've laid the celery down over the top to keep the cats at bay.
It will break down nicely over the next few weeks whilst I plan everything out.

My whipper snipper is out of commission, so no comments on the edging please.
I made this out of timber from hard waste collections.

Attacking the 4 foot celery

Soooo, it's time to sort out the vegetable patch. We got some lovely retarded carrots, plenty of lettuce, celery and a few capsicums. The zucchinis went beserk too. The season was cut short by the scorching weather and most of the plants were burnt too badly to carry on.

I will be doing lettuce again this year - oh it's wonderful having the freshest salad possible. I get a few different varieties for colour and it will last forever as you just pick off the leaves as you need them. I had to pick them whole to avoid the heat, but they lasted for ages sitting in a bowl in the fridge with the roots in a little water.
Miss Paranoid makes her lettuce last forever by washing and spinning it completely dry and putting it in freezer bags in the fridge.

I'll also do tomatoes - as many different types as I can fit, more capsicums, chillis - not so many zucchinis. Hmmm, I'm yet to decide. If I do buy seedlings they will all be Heritage variety - pre WW2 so haven't been fiddled with or modified too much. Did you know the first modified tomato tasted like petrol! They spent so much time fiddling about making the toms more easily transportable that the flavour suffered immensely. You also cannot save the seed to plant again next year because fiddled with species are sterile, forcing us to return to buy again each year. Way to corner the market Monsanto, you greedy bastards. Control my access to food? I don't think so. I'll be ranting further about Monsanto and their dastardly ways.

Having a backyard garden not only contributes to the environment (no transportation across the country) but having your own produce is just fabulous, tastes amazing and a wonderful way to get fussy eaters to try new things. It's how I got Cyclone to try carrots!

Preparing for another fire season

It's time to get on the roof and clear the gutters, clean up all the leaf matter and remove all potential fuel.
Yes I live in the suburbs but this years horrific fires got close enough and affected enough people near and dear to me that I won't take a single chance.

This shot was taken on the high side of the road near my house during the long weeks of 40+ temperatures and ferocious winds. I don't think I'll get over it for a long while really. I had the creeps all week before Black Saturday. I remember the fires in 1983, there was ash falling in our backyard pool, 3 people died and many many friends were evacuated from their homes.
So it hit with force on February 7th, I was at home and the children were visiting their grandparents in an area totally obliterated by fire in the 1930's. Up on a mountain with only one twisty mountain road to escape.

It took the entire day - I thought it best to follow recommendations and stay off the road, so I stayed at home glued to the emergency radio broadcast, CFA website and television. I had enough by late afternoon and decided to go and get the children (grandparents were happy to stay at the time), when a new blaze started close to me. I couldn't believe I was in more danger in the suburbs than they were in the bush - well at that point at least.

What a long two weeks that was - but most of my friends in dangerous areas had good plans and left in time to be out of danger - which is NOT when you see smoke by the way. The plan this year is to pack up the important stuff, provide my place for a refuge to my friends on the mountain if need be - move further away to another friends place should it get hairy here.

So up onto the roof again for me, clear those gutters, rake those leaves and consolidate the plans. I'm at the foot of the mountains and it's a beautiful place to be - I'm not going overboard, suburban Canberra should be a reminder to those on the outskirts of the fire prone areas.

The Garden

I have a front yard which is enclosed with a dwarf Japanese Maple, a young Magnolia, various random bulbs poking out here and there, a half hedge running along half the fence and other bits and bobs I can't be bothered describing. In the corner is my falling down gazebo and it's all under a towering Oak that gives excellent shade and heat protection in the summer.

I haven't done much because we are in a drought (you wouldn't know it today though), and I wanted to see what could survive with little to no water. Most of it has though. During summer I do lug buckets of water from the bath and kitchen sink because its better that wasting the precious stuff down the drain.

The soil isn't bad, just rock hard in most areas. I have a compost box and plenty of leaf matter that I spread out for mulch. I'll be adding this to the vegie garden soon, so tune in for the full vegetable patch regeneration story - I do it for little or no $$$ at all, which is the way it should be.

Anyhoo, for a great drought tolerant, hardy and pretty bush - try Convovulus. This is mine here. It's the plant I couldn't remember in my other garden post. It's in full sun, I might throw a bucket of water over it on a summer morning but apart from that I do nothing and this is what it gives me in return.

There are bunches of french lavender in between, for the first few months the lavender outshone the Convovulus, but it's caught up and is taking over. Sometimes known as Bindweed, Australian Bindweed or Silverbush, you usually see it in lilac but also comes in pink. The foliage is silvery and pretty enough for you to excuse it when there are no flowers.

This can be propagated from cuttings too, so if you see your neighbour with some, ask nicely for a cutting and you can have some for your garden for nothing.

I think you can have a spectacular garden without needing to buy the plants yourself, a little exchange between friends and neighbours is all you need We should probably have a chat about propagation and seeds someday shouldn't we?