Festive snooze

Gosh, absolutely no postings so far in December ... I must be in holiday mode! If only, but things have been a bit quiet here in the garden. With all the rain storms there has been little need to water anything, and all the flowering beauties don't need any help from me. They know what to do.

And so in the middle of this festive season snooze all I really want to say is I hope everyone has a safe and delicious festive season. This garden blog will continue to update occasionally, whenever something worth talking about occurs, and so until then, here is the latest from Amateur Land.

Our baby frangipani 'Serendipity' is looking good all over. Lots of amazingly multi-coloured flowers and plenty of new healthy growth. I think it likes it here.

I always feel duty-bound to report my failures as well as the successes, and this pretty pink hydrangea might seem a big success when Pam pops some into a vase in the living room, but the sad fact is that I was hoping they'd be blue. Last season I tried to acidify the soil in an effort to encourage blueness. Nothing doing. So then this year I've bought a "blueing" fertiliser, followed the packet directions ... and this is the result so far. 

But let's finish my festive well-wishing on a positive note. The bonsai curry leaf trees are not only still alive, they are thriving. And some radical pruning a few months back (which for a week or two looked more like the kiss of death than the kiss of life) has promoted much bushier growth from both. So far so good, but with growing bonsais from seed, it's a years-long project and this is merely a good year.

So let's end 2018 on that note. If 2018 has been a good year for you, may 2019 be even better. 

And if 2018 wasn't up there as a great one — a bit like my hydrangeas — then I hope 2019 is blessed with some lush curry leaf growth, even if that means life might need a bit of pruning here and there before things improve.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and have a great 2019!

Oh what a lovely little holiday

Well, this has been a very quiet little gardening blog of late. Nothing since May 6, nothing at all in June, and here we are in July already. Pammy and I are now back from our little holiday up north and we have some photos to show you of the lovely day we spent with our friend Judi at the Mount Coot-tha Botanic Gardens in Brisbane. 

If you're a garden lover and find yourself in Brisbane for a few days, set aside at least half a day to take in this really fascinating subtropical garden. It's quite close to the city itself, lots of buses go there if you are relying on public transport, and of course it's free to visit.

This posting is mostly going to be photos and captions, and so I thought I'd start off with a "pretty" one of Aloes in bloom. There's a very substantial section devoted to cacti and succulents here, but as I know lots of readers aren't big fans of them, I will leave the spiky ones till last. 

One thing I wasn't expecting at Mount Coot-tha was superb bonsais, but they have a whole open-air "house" devoted to them, and they are stunning.

This one is a cluster of Port Jackson figs (Ficus rubiginosa). It's given me the idea to turn my curry tree bonsai (it's still alive!) into a little stand of trees, rather than just a single one.

And this shapely one is a black pine (Pinus thunbergii).

But my favourite was this gnarled ancient forest giant, a Swamp Cypress (Taxodium distichum). So much skill over so many years to create something like this.

Wandering around the gardens, one of the highlights was not just the look of the many stands of golden bamboo, but also their sound. There was a slight breeze that day, and as the bamboo stands waved slowly the hollow stems clunked together in a strangely musical song, a bit like 50-foot-high wind chimes.

This Queensland bottle tree (Brachychiton rupestris) is a baby, but already it's taking on that bulbous shape in its trunk. Seeing how these develop over the years is reason enough to bring me back for more visits in coming years.

This screw pine (Pandanus) will just keep on growing and developing its astonishing multiple lower trunks as well.

And now folks, we come to the spiky guys ...

This Euphorbia ingens stands several metres tall and dominated the succulent and cacti garden.

A large grey-leaved Agave americana rules its patch.

I think I have a small potted version of this outrageously painful Agave parrasana in my garden, and no matter how careful I am when I am working near it in the succulent patch, it usually manages to get me.

Last of the painful spikies for this posting is this forbidding sight, Euphorbia lactea 'Cristata'. Apparently hedges of spiky euphorbias are quite effective at keeping lions and leopards away from your house/hut/campsite in Africa, so they have their uses after all.

Rather than finishing off on a note filled with lions, leopards and screams of agony as you tumble into the euphorbia patch, this pond represents a much fairer picture of our lovely little holiday. Though you can barely see her, at the other side of the pond there sits a tiny little figure on a park bench, and that's Pammy all set up with her watercolour painting kit, doing some travel sketching with her friend Judi.

And across the other side of the lake was me, happy as a garden lover at a beautiful botanic garden, photographing some ducks' bums.

Now we're back home there's a bit of gardening catch-up to be done. Lots of little midwinter jobs, plus some babies I've been raising have finally grown up enough and are ready to be transplanted to their new home ...

Bonsai update — risky repotting

First the good news: all the baby curry leaf trees are growing from seed. In fact all the seeds, even the slow starters in the punnet, are coming up. The bad news is that I've decided to interfere.

This might look like the beginnings of a bonsai empire, but it is in fact an insurance policy. I've scoured the garden shed and have found two extra bonsai pots, and the plan is to grow three bonsai curry leaf trees and hope that one of them turns out OK. Talk about confidence!

Taking things cautiously, I popped down to our garden centre, bought some specialist bonsai potting mix and some nice little pebbles. The bonsai potting mix label says "with Zeolite", and I was as impressed as anyone who doesn't know what Zeolite is, but 15 minutes of Googling before posting this update, I'm now truly impressed. It's a wonderful natural mineral that absorbs stuff. Very handy in potting mixes. If you want to know more, google it, but be prepared for some sciencey stuff. 

In the foreground is the bonsai pot with the seed-raised baby in place. I'm not touching it! Behind is the punnet with all the seedlings coming up.

This is the risky option. Actually removing a growing baby plant and transplanting it. I might be doing it too early, but I am very conscious of winter approaching, and all my curry leaf trees hate winter, so I want to give the strongest of them a chance to grow a bit more in a bigger pot.

Here's the bigger pot, a bonsai pot with two nice holes.

Cover the holes with mesh, add bonsai potting mix...

Uh oh. This is not a great look. A very long single tap root, curling around at the bottom where it hit the base of the punnet. No side shoots on the roots. It's probably too young to pot up, but I've done it now. At least the punnet has a few more plants growing on. I will leave them all alone for quite a bit longer.

So here's Mr Long Tap Root in place. At least its root won't grow straight out the bottom. Hopefully I can nurse it along in there, too.

Finally some decorative pebbles. As the pot is off-white, I've used my "Tarago Pebbles" which are sandstone-coloured ...

... and the glaring white pebbles, which might be a mistake, have been spread into the other, smaller bonsai pot.

So that's the update. Over the next few weeks, while the weather remains still warm enough, I am fussing over these guys. They are put into the sunshine every morning, watered, then brought back to their own warm, covered shelters (plastic topped propagating boxes) at night. 

If they survive winter, I think we might have a bonsai project on our hands!

Bonsai update – we have lift-off

One of life's little mistakes that most of us make repeatedly is to assume stuff. Assume X will be OK. Assume Y will happen. Assume Z will get in touch about W ...

And in the case of my little bonsai curry tree project, I just assumed on Day One that the seeds would sprout easy-peasy. After all, they have a "weedy" reputation, so I assumed the least of my worries would be getting the seeds to sprout.

Now, as a bit of a sworn enemy of assuming stuff, I like to look things up, to do my research. And so the next morning after planting my curry tree seeds, I actually went onto Google and looked up "Curry tree seed". Panic!

Well, more accurately, "unjustified panic!". A few of my Google hits told me that sprouting curry tree seeds was "unreliable", "sporadic", "inconsistent" ... you get the picture. Iffy at best, and so what you see below is my calm reaction to panic. I planted eight more seeds in a plastic seedling punnet.

I needn't have bothered to panic. Most of them are coming up, but not all of them. To refresh memories, I first posted about my curry tree bonsai project on February 24, then I went into panic mode on February 25, and here we are three and a half weeks later, happy as can be with six baby curry trees poking their little green heads above the soil.

I am not sure why the seeds in the plastic punnet are doing better than the one in the bonsai pot itself. All are in the same sheltered spot in the garden and all are receiving identical amounts of rain, warmth and sunshine. So I am adopting a "survival of the fittest" policy for the contender. 

A month from now there should be one or two seedlings that are doing best ... and that does encourage me to think that maybe having two identical bonsai-from-seed projects might not be such a bad idea, either. I haven't really got a clue what I am doing, apart from very very basic knowledge, plus Googling, so two pots doubles my odds of success, sort of.

The seedling in the pot itself currently is the weakest of all the candidates, but it's early days yet. Leaving a seed to grow undisturbed in the pot in which I hope it will spend many happy years is an appealing notion, so I will take a kindly, tolerant view of the progress of this first seed planted and be very reluctant to decide that it has to go.

Gardening is a bit awful like that. You get to cull the weak, decide the fate of other plants. There's just a tinge of being a conscientious medieval monarch to it all, don't you think?

Small beginnings for a little bonsai

I'm not an especially spiritual person, but I do believe in the power of coincidences to affect your life. Here's a simple gardening example ... there I was watering the garden (and that means making sure to water the pots in particular) when I looked at my potted curry leaf tree and felt a sense of regret that I hadn't ever got around to growing it as a bonsai, which I had promised to do on this blog about a year ago. Within one year it had grown too big for bonsai ... another plan that didn't happen.

A few hours later I opened my email inbox and there was a very nice email from a reader, Rehana, asking whatever happened to my curry leaf tree bonsai project. It was meant to be. Another coincidence working its magic. And so here is Day One of the curry leaf tree bonsai project! Thank you Rehana not only for your enquiry but also your exquisite timing.

Doesn't look like much at the moment, but patience is required. I have decided to raise my bonsai tree from seed, and keep it bonsai-sized from a very early age. Under the potting mix are two ripe seeds, hopefully doing their thing.

The potted curry tree is full of ripening seeds now, and unfortunately for the environment, these seeds need very little encouragement to sprout. Birds eat the seeds, then crap them out over bushland several kilometres away, and we have an environmental weed problem that gets worse the closer you are to the curry leaf trees' preferred subtropical climate. In Australia, these trees are becoming a problem on the NSW North Coast and into coastal Queensland.

This is our too-big potted curry leaf tree. Healthy and happy, it's already too big for its pot but I don't want to encourage it by putting it into a bigger pot. What I plan to do is cut the tree back fairly hard in early spring. Curry trees don't like Sydney winters, but they love our spring and summer, so if I cut it back in early September it will put on a lot of new growth in the months after that.

I'd hate to give you the impression that I know what I'm doing here. I don't really. It's all likely to be a big, mistake-filled experiment that might work out well, or might not.

All I know is that curry leaf tree seeds sprout very reliably and easy, which is why they are regarded as a weed. This is our second tree. We had our first one for many years in a pot, and it just grew and grew, and when its berries dropped to the ground they sprouted without any help from me. I pulled most of them out of the ground and composted the seedlings, but I also gave away one or two potted-up babies and they are now in friends' gardens, looking great and doing well.

So for this bonsai I hope the seeds will sprout. I will pick the healthiest of the two seedlings, and regularly clip it back and keep it small. My "starter" bonsai pot is too small for the eventual bonsai, so I will look around for a nice "big" bonsai style pot in the meantime. The challenge will be to clip back the bonsai plant both top and bottom: leaves on top and roots down below. Now I've made a start, I will post the occasional update on how it's all going. Wish me luck!