Greetings from Locked Down Sydney!

 

It's been a long time (April 21) since I posted anything here in my gardening blog, which is semi-retired, just like me.

But as I finished this morning's final phase of the "weed then mulch" marathon, it occurred to me that it might help pass the time, maybe also provide some inspiration for gardeners who are cooped up at home due to covid lockdown restrictions, if I posted something here.

So what I plan to do every few days is to post something from my garden that I hope might of be interest, and maybe even motivate you to get out in the sunshine, which is good for both your mental and physical health (if you wear a hat!).

For starters, I'm starting off with a pair of panoramas of my freshly weeded and mulched garden, as it always looks very nice after new mulch has been spread around. 

Mid August and both the frangipanis are asleep, so it looks a bit bare. In the foreground the bonsai curry leaf tree has enjoyed the winter, and in the right foreground the strawberry patch is flowering and looking promising. That's Pam's nasturtium patch middle-left, and middle right is the hardest working part of the garden, the pots of rosemary and thyme.

On the right ride of the garden is another of Pam's nasturtium patches, while behind them the Geranium 'Big Red' patch continues on its merry spreading way. The only care it needs is cutting back. Right foreground, the remains of our two very productive broccoli plants. The stumpy/stalky one on the right looks like that because this week we cut off all the leaves and cooked them up, Southern USA "collard greens" style — and they were delicious.

So that's your introductory guided tour. In coming days I have lots of spring flowers to show you, plus some garden jobs to do now, lots of problems in the succulent patch, South Africans at their glorious best, Pam's mum's garden refugees, crops on the go, garden critters, and I am sure several more things that I'll come across as spring warms up.

Hang in there locked-down gardeners! If you have a garden, even if it's just some pots on a balcony, they're the perfect project to take on now. Spring is well and truly in the air, the temperatures are rising so any effort you put into getting plants to grow will be rapidly — and beautifully — rewarded.

Blink and you might miss it

As we travelled the last few miles at the end of our recent 3500km driving holiday in southern Australia, Pammy said "I wonder what has changed in the two weeks since we left?" She was referring to anything and everything in our local area. "Look, that shop has closed down" ... "and finally they've taken down all the ugly hoarding around that construction site — that new apartment building is almost finished."

No matter how little time you spend away from your home base, in a fortnight something always changes.

And that proved to be true for our little garden. During our two weeks away, one of our garden's best flower shows reached its peak and then quietly faded (just like they do in the forest). New things burst into full bloom, and seeds sprouted. And we weren't here to see any of it. We blinked and missed it all.

Still, it's an interesting thing to do ... leave your garden to its own devices for a while. And so here's what we missed out on over the last couple of weeks.

In the foreground, our usually fabulous scadoxus looked like the stragglers on the morning after a very memorable party. Frazzled, tousled and tired, but they did have fun for a while. In the background, the yellow clivias were in a similar tatty condition.

Poor yellow clivias, they'll be back same time next year, and hopefully there'll be more of them next time (and there'll be an old blogger there to photograph them in all their glory and lavish them with praise).

The one very good thing about the scadoxus section of the garden is that all the baby plants are thriving. In recent years I have been painstakingly raising them from collected seed, and this spring they are growing stronger than ever. There's more than a dozen newbies here and there. I'm just hoping these are not plants that need 10-15 years in the ground before they do their first flowering. I'm not sure if I'll live that long to see all my work come into glorious bloom!

In other pleasing baby news, all the flat-leaf parsley seed which I scattered in a few spots a few weeks before we left have sprouted up through the sugar cane mulch and seem to be powering along. This year all I did was open the seed packet and shake it here and there in the mulched vegie area, then say "you're on your own, kids; good luck". I think this has been my most successful seed-sowing method yet for parsley.

Upon our return we were greeted by some new blooms, including these little mint bush beauties ...

... and all our hanging baskets of pelargoniums perked up in the spring sunshine. 

But the flower show which impressed us the most was this (next) unexpected one ...

Our broccoli patch was in its full glory as adult plants, and the loud humming of the bees all around the broccoli's yellow blooms was a clear signal from the bees to me to "leave our broccoli flowers alone". 

They're perfectly correct, of course. While we grow broccoli with the mindset of "food/vegetable" and tend to look upon these flowers as a signal to replace the crop, the bees adore this plant's flowers, and so until all the flowers fade our broccoli plants are staying right where they are, as a bee temple.

So that's my little report on how our little garden looks after a few weeks of slight neglect (although our wonderful neighbours Nick and Katerina did their usual great job watering the garden for us).

Oh, so how was the holiday? Great! 

I'm still sorting through the thousand or so photos that we took along the way, and once that's done I'll show you some of the highlights, especially the lovely gardens we visited and the new people we met (hi Kerryn in Kyneton!). 

While I was harvesting the broccoli

Broccoli is one of those vegetables that I have to admit I cannot ever get all that excited about. I don't mind eating it; in fact we eat broccoli at least once every week, it's a routine part of our diet. As for growing it, it's similarly honest and reliable, not hard to grow, but while I was harvesting another head to take back to the kitchen, I finally found something to admire about broccoli: it's good value for money.

Now, this time I am only growing my own broccoli because I had bought a punnet of six seedlings for my mother-in-law Val's garden, but she had room only for three ... and so I had three left over. So "waste-not, want-not" came into operation and I planted the three remaining seedlings here in our garden a few months ago, and over the last week or two have begun harvesting some.

Exhibit A: a completely ordinary head of broccoli, not quite at full harvestable size, but no doubt ready to go by the next weekend.

Exhibit B: sprouting from the lower levels of an already-harvested broccoli plant, side shoots forming smaller broccoli heads. That's my excitement, folks. It ain't all over when you cut off the mega-head of broccoli at the top of the plant. Give your broccoli a week or two more, another liquid feed, and production resumes, albeit on a smaller scale. Still delicious.

The one thing about this variety of broccoli that I planted is that it was labelled "mini broccoli". Now that it's producing heads it looks like a completely normal broccoli plant to me, there's nothing mini about it. 

But that happened a few years ago when I planted supposed "mini" cauliflower, and it produced completely normal cauliflowers for me on gorgeous but large plants. So, provided you're not fooled by the misleading plant label, these minis are still a very good backyard vegie to grow, but they do need a fair bit of space. 

Broccoli loves sunshine, the cooler months, liquid feeds, and a soil rich in compost and organic manure. Just remember to leave the plants alone after the initial harvest, and it will give you more in due course.

If raindrops were diamonds ...

If raindrops were diamonds ... I'd be a millionaire. Well, until the sun gets higher in the sky, that is, and then my diamonds would disappear.

One of the most wonderful of gardening's simple pleasures is enjoying the sight of raindrops adding their rounded, watery bling to everything on a damp morning. And the foliage of broccoli and its brassica cousins brussels sprouts and cauliflowers is especially good at holding raindrops in suspended animation. Just sitting there like jewels.

I am sure our own homegrown broccoli is going to taste superb when we enjoy it later this week. It'll almost feel like a shame to cut it down in its prime, but it's not good for your wellbeing to get sentimental about vegetables. Just harvest, cook, eat and enjoy. Keep it simple.

And speaking of simple things, I just have to make one last visit to the jewellery store to admire the shiny object before it's gone.

How not to grow broccoli

How not to grow broccoli? It's dead easy if you pick the wrong weather. Here's how I did it. First, be lazy and buy a seedling, instead of seed. Then plant the seedling in autumn, right at the start of an unusually warm stretch of weather. Fertilise normally. Stand back! Here's what happens next...

Too late for harvest already. This broccoli head went from
normal 'broccoli' to flower head in a matter of days. We
blinked and missed our chance to harvest our crop.

"Don't touch the broccoli!" our resident artist (Pammy) warned
our resident gardener (me). Like someone glued to the TV
screen watching a soap opera, she wanted to see what happened
next. (Besides, might make a nice painting later on.)

Each little blob-ette in a head of broccoli is a flower trying
to have its moment in the sunshine. I have posted about this
issue before: vegie guilt. Knowing that when you harvest crops
you're cutting down a growing plant in the beauty of its
adolescence, denying it the chance to live out a full life as an adult,
flowering plant. It's a tragic, yet guiltily delicious, story that isn't
all that different from the fate of little lambs and piglets. 

A simple flower, yes, but complexity in flowers is sometimes
a bit overrated, especially when you have lots of simple blooms.

The final stage is the disappearance of the
tightly clumped flowerhead altogether, when
the broccoli briefly becomes a shrub with
a frazzled spray of white tassels. The bees love
the broccoli blooms; there's a humming
soundtrack to accompany the show. 

And so that's how not to do it. Grow broccoli, I mean. Don't do it like this, but should you accidentally do it like this, my advice is "don't panic". Leave it be and enjoy the show. It's actually the star of the garden right now, and who would have thunk that broccoli would ever be the star turn in a garden?