Summer panoramas

Lots of Sydney gardeners will tell you that we don't really have four distinct seasons here. We kind of spend most of the year in a lovely, mild warm season, then it gets cold for half a dozen weeks in the middle of the year, and horribly hot and humid for another half-dozen weeks around this New Year time of year. 

In the same sense, we also don't really have one particular "peak" season, as cool climate gardeners tend to enjoy each spring. We enjoy several little peaks every year, and right now, in the middle of the horribly humid and hot time, when we're almost tropical in every way, well-watered Sydney gardens go berserk. Which is what our garden is doing now. 

So here's three "panorama" style wider-angled photos of midsummer madness in Sydney. Hopefully if you click on each photo, it will come up a lot lot bigger.  

Using my iPhone's nifty "Panorama" function, this photo starts on the left with the rather ghostly looking sight of Spanish moss covering the bare branches of our recently carked-it ex-grevillea. On the left is a patch of cucumbers, chillies and assorted flowers. Big frangipani rear left, and on the right is a lemon tree, succulent patch, basil, Thai chilli, lots of geraniums and assorted others.

Taken from the other end of the path, this is the succulent patch, and beyond that are basil, shallots, geraniums behind, and mint bushes behind the geraniums. 

The dominating, broad-leafed thing in the left foreground is the "Cute Cucumber" which has spread far and wide, and produces about four or five new cucumbers to harvest every day. The yellow flowers are hardy marigolds, the white and reds and New Guinea impatiens, and the blue is salvia. Herbs include chives, garlic chives, thyme and the lovely big lemon grass in the background.

And so there you have it. A well-watered Sydney garden loving the heat. 

One handy tip right now for Aussie gardeners is to keep on watering pots well, especially on days when "a few showers" are forecast. Usually the showers do manage water the soil a bit, so you might not have to use the hose, but these light showers hardly do anything for potted plants, which can dry out amazingly fast in the summer heat. So I water my pots every day, unless it is truly pouring rain.

Last day of summer? Not here it isn't!

February 28 is, for people who put their faith in calendars, the last day of summer here in Sydney. Tomorrow, March 1, is when autumn begins. Well, I don't subscribe to that faith at all.

I prefer the way that summers end at different times each year, the way the season flickers out like a candle with a few late, warm days popping up to surprise you. And then one day you feel that special chill that says "it's autumn now and winter's not far away" and you realise summer ended a while ago, on no particular day.

So, at this stage of the year our garden is of the opinion that summer has several weeks to go before the party's over. It's a time when herbs like to flower, crops turn to gluts and there's plenty of colour wherever you look. I always like the simple little herb flowers in particular.  

Wild rocket flowers at the tips of its thin, gangly stems.

Broccolini is meant to be harvested before it flowers, but this
one beat me to it. I only planted the seedlings three weeks ago!

Basil mint is a tussie mussie of tiny blooms.

Eggplants show off their potato family heritage in a pretty hue.

And they're cropping now in purpley-white abundance.

Every day I pick a handful of red Serrano chillies that I swear
were deep green only the day before.

As well as all the edibles producing their little spots of colour, many ornamentals are a pleasure to be around at the moment.

New Guinea impatiens, which we've mass-planted under the
grevillea in the hope they suppress weeds better than the thick
mulch has abysmally failed to do. So far so good ....

Frangipani

Grevillea 'Peaches & Cream'

Ivy geranium

More ivy geraniums!

Blue salvia

Humorous weather

Our resident rain god, Huey, has a great sense of humour. December 1, the first day of summer. Hee hee hee. Cold and rainy, the classic Aussie summer, eh Huey? Very funny.

Many houses in my area were built in the first two decades of the 20th century (ours was built in 1916). And they have tiled roofs over the living rooms and bedrooms, but out the back, where the laundry and kitchen are, the roof is galvanised iron. And in the early morning, as I wander out into the kitchen, all you need to do is listen, to know that it's raining. I love the sound of rain on a tin roof. Out in the garden, the water bowls are dancing with raindrops.

The water garden needed bailing out, lest the goldfish suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the rim. And the gardenias behind are quickly turning from crisp white perfection into slimy brown mush. Thank you Huey, very amusing weather.

Almost every plant in the garden loves Huey's humour at the moment. Perhaps the succulents and Mrs Lithops could do with some warm, dry sunshine, but this potted cumquat is lapping up the rain.

Flowering plants such as this NSW Christmas Bush glisten with droplets and sag slightly under the extra load.

The long-term weather forecaster people say that this is going to be a wet summer, and that's a welcome change, a good thing for our dry soils. Certainly Huey has had a good laugh at our expense this morning. The classic Aussie summer – it's off to a squelchy start!

Local warming

Gardeners know that one should never complain too earnestly about the weather, as there's bound to be someone worse off than you. And that lesson came home to me this week. A few days ago, we had a really hot day, 41°C, as pictured below. Appalling, inescapable, energy-sapping heat. And then this week, my friends in Adelaide and Melbourne experienced much worse than that. The temperature in Melbourne got up to 42 and 43 these last few days. But in Adelaide it has been even worse. Somehow, just barely, I can imagine Adelaide's recent daily max of 45°C, but what I cannot get my mind around is an overnight minimum of 34°C, which is what the unlucky folk of Adelaide had to endure last night. Sleepless in Adelaide. So, while I'm posting about the heat here in Sydney, I really do owe it to my southern friends to say that they truly are doing it tough this summer. May a cool southerly wind blow your way soon, friends.

Here's my little digital thermometer the other day. 41 outside, 30.6 inside. You can escape this heat inside, but walk outside a few feet and you hit a clammy, energy-sapping wall of heat that makes you want to retreat inside at once.

One of my main concerns on days like this is my birdbaths. The water heats up in the sun, and so I replace the water in the afternoons with fresh, cooler water.

Moments after the change of water, the bulbuls moved in. These chirpy fruit-eaters have red bums and red chests, and a pointy head crest, and they love cool water.

Good old house sparrows are disappearing from our suburbs, but every time I stock up the bird-feeder with seed they're my best customers. I just cannot discriminate against living creatures on the basis of their being native or indigenous, and so I'm just as happy to see non-native sparrows enjoying a feed as I am seeing bulbuls and willy wagtails playing in the water.

Out in the garden some plants are loving the heat, thriving as if they're back home in their tropical homeland. My potted curry tree just loves summer here in Sydney, producing berries and spicy-scented leaves galore.

Down in the cooler reaches of the garden, away from the harshest overhead sun, the variegated society garlic caught my camera's attention the other day. This South African doesn't mind the heat.

My crops of rocket come and go so fast they almost seem like green trams on a busy street, and I am merely their conductor. I harvest them young, and harvest them often, but even the summer heat gets to this tough, fast crop. However, they do keep on producing, as long as I keep them away from the midday sun. And if you want to read a great post about rocket (or arugula), check out Michelle's blog (From Seed to Table) here: http://fromseedtotable.blogspot.com/2009/01/arugula-my-new-favorite-variety-plus.html

Elsewhere in the heat I have broken a sworn "no more succulents" oath and brought home this person, unnamed of course with the useless label of "succulent". I suspect it's a Crassula of some sort, as I already have something vaguely like it that turned out to be a crassula, so that's my amateur suspicion at the moment.

Also enjoying the heat is my native Grevillea, which was near death one month ago and is now belting along, thanks to a spray or two of magic elixir.

While northern hemisphere gardeners seem to experience the peak of growth and productivity in their northern summer, here in gardens Down Under, summer is a quiet time. There's little new growth here now, as it's just too hot. You'd be mad to plant much now, as it would die in the heat in a couple of days. Spring is a time of outrageously good growth, so too is autumn, but in the middle of summer we don't do a lot of gardening and not much grows here. I just concentrate on keeping plants alive with tapwater and prayers for rain, while giving the birds a drink and an occasional feed, and staying away from the heat.

My backyard is a lovely place to enjoy a cool beer as the sun goes down and the sea breeze blows in, but as a gardener there's not a lot to do right now.