Playing catch-up

Let's not beat about the bush. I've been neglecting the garden lately, by my standards. Mind you, I freely admit to being a bit of a gardening nutter, yet lately I've been anything but that, a disgrace to the nutter-hood. However, the prospect of an old gardening friend paying a visit next weekend has propelled me back into full-blown nutcase mode again. I just spent this whole weekend playing catch-up, and here's how things are going.

For starters, I would like to say a heart-felt 'thank you' to my old mate Huey, the weather god, for laying on one-and-a-half days of mild, sunny weather ideal for gardening, then completing the deal with not one but two good showers of rain on Sunday afternoon, to wet the newly-laid mulch and water in the fertiliser. Thank you Huey. But now, on with the show. The poppies needed no attention at all. Well done, chaps.

Oh goody, the hellebores have decided to bloom. They should be looking good in a week's time.

Purple alyssum needs no encouragement or attention, and the succulent patch, under the wise leadership of the Mayor of Succulent City, Mrs Lithops, is ready to receive visitors.

No doubt ready to perform splendidly over the coming months, the first of the calendulas is sending up flowers. As these have been grown from seed, I am claiming bonus points!

In the vegie patch all is coming along nicely. Here, the baby beetroots are throbbing with colour.

Nearby, the coriander patch is thriving, partly because I am constantly snipping off leaves with scissors to take inside for cooking. Each snipping seems to match the patch lusher within a week. Regular organic liquid feeds don't do any harm, either. Behind the coriander patch, that's a pelargonium which nominally belongs in a pot, but which escaped from that little prison long ago and is now master of its own domain and a terrible bully to all its neighbours. If it wasn't for my secateurs the whole garden would eventually be one big pelargonium patch!

I haven't harvested any of these leaves yet, but they're ready to be used now. This is a new addition to Amateur Land. It's called the celery leaf plant, and it's closely related to celery but doesn't form those robust, crunchy stalks. It's low and leafy. I use traditional celery all the time in cooking in the kitchen, and I often use the leaves of celery bunches. So when I saw the packet of 'celery leaf plant' seeds in an Asian supermarket in tropical Darwin earlier this year, I had to try them.

One of the unsung heroes of my garden is the rosemary bush. This healthy person was grown from cuttings and is about three years old. As for the cuttings, I did what an expert gardening friend, Cheryl, said to do, which was: "Just poke the cuttings straight into the soil - most of them will grow just like that." And so they did. And my how they've grown!

The rosemary is just starting to flower, and it smells absolutely wonderful when you get up close to it to take yet another stalk or two for the kitchen. It really is one of the most fragrant things in this garden.

Finally, Mrs Agave has delivered two gorgeous children, as she likes to do most years. Both mother and children are doing well.

While everything else is now in much better order, I am afraid that the real work done on this lovely weekend of sunshine and showers hasn't rated a mention yet, mostly due to the lack of suitably nice photos.

I just couldn't manage a lovely photo of weeding, yet three or four hours yesterday afternoon were spent pulling rotten little weeds out of the ground. And the photos I took of newly mulched beds look far too mulchy. You'll just have to take it from me that there is mulch almost everywhere now. Same goes for the trimmed hedges out the front. Ramrod straight now. And the fertilising, too. Did lots of that, but I don't think I could manage a nice photo of chicken poo (in fact I didn't even try). But the air is currently wonderfully fragrant with that classic farmyard aroma. So Pam and I are going to do what we always do when I fertilise everything - that's right, we're leaving home for a few hours and heading off to the movies!

Raindrops

Beggars definitely cannot be choosers, and as a gardener who only recently begged Huey for a bit more rain I can hardly complain that he/she has left the tap running. Our average rainfall for February is 117mm; it's Feb 8 and already we have had 141mm. Hardly a deluge, but it's plenty. This morning there was a gap in the rain and it all looked so pretty that I whipped out the camera and came back with some snaps a few minutes later, because it had started raining again.

The berries on my curry leaf tree are turning black, and I really should get out there and remove them all, as these trees are gaining a reputation as a weed. Birds eat the berries, fly a few kilometres and while in some native bushland, leave a berry behind as birds naturally do. But right now it's too wet to harvest berries, and besides, they look so pretty.

The native floating fern called nardoo, which is thriving in my potted water garden, holds onto raindrops in much the same way as nasturtiums do – as if each droplet is a little pearl.

My goldfish, John, Paul and George don't care much about the rain, but I do worry a bit when the water level in the pot gets right up to rim-level (they're frisky little fellers), and so I bail out a couple of inches of water each morning.

Most people understandably think of succulents as dry-climate, waterwise plants, but these are often at their prettiest when wet. This is Agave attenuata.

And I'm not exactly sure what this person is. I suspect it's a 'graptoveria' but it could be an echeveria, maybe a graptopetalum. Frankly, I don't really have a clue, but its light blue colouring looks lovely in the wet morning light.

The potted cumquat tree is covered in white, gently fragrant flowers and green baby fruits, not to mention glossy green leaves. And raindrops.

The soil's getting the good soaking it badly needs, I've enjoyed a weekend of rest because there's nothing to do out in the garden, and all the plants are loving the deep drink. If anyone up in heaven reads blogs, please remind Huey to turn off the tap over Sydney. We've had our fill, thanks, but surely there's somewhere else which is bone dry and needs a good drink right now.