It's citrus feeding time, folks!

Don't you just love it when a plan works? I do. Last week, looking at the weather forecast, I spotted the magic word "rain" predicted for Tuesday August 24. And Huey the Rain God didn't let us down. The rain started late yesterday and it's still raining. 

A creature of gardening habits, I knew that the weeks spanning the end of August and the beginning of September are the ideal time to fertilise my citrus trees, so it was always at the top of my "to-do" list. All I needed was to wait for a good day of rain to come along, because that way the rain will water in the many handfuls of fertiliser I scattered around my Eureka lemon, Tahitian lime and Thai Makrut lime trees.

While I was at it and had plenty of fertiliser to spare, I scattered it around all manner of other plants that could do with a boost in spring, but the main game was feeding citrus. If you have a lemon, lime or other citrus tree in your garden, try to get out there over the next few days (showers are forecast through to the weekend) and your citrus trees will reward you with bumper crops.

I love a shiny footpath and water dripping off foliage. It means I have a day off from watering the garden, and I can watch the rain do the last stage of fertilising for me.

Both the lemon tree (pictured) and the lime are covered in flower buds right now, so a big feed is all they need to turn flowers into fruit.

The Eureka lemon is the ideal variety for Sydney gardens. In cooler climates the Lisbon variety is preferred, while the Meyer lemon is great in pots in all climates.

As is the Tahitian lime the ideal one for Sydney.

And this wrinkled weirdo is the Thai Makrut lime (also called the Kaffir lime), whose culinary value lies in the grated rind of the fruit (it produces hardly any juice), and the wonderfully aromatic foliage, which I toss into all sorts of South-East Asian curries and stir fries. The Thai lime is a great choice for pots, too, because it's naturally quite small.

This is my preferred citrus food not only because it's organic-based and the smelly aromas don't last long. It just happened to be what I had in the shed. 

Right now it's hard for locked-down gardeners everywhere to visit one of those big Hardware superbarns such as Bunnings. I actually bought my Dynamic Lifter a while back at my local Woolworths Supermarket, so try there if you don't have any in your garden shed at the moment.

There's also a small but well run local garden centre which I support by paying a bit more for the mulch, fertiliser, plants and seeds they stock, and it's still open. So maybe there's a small garden centre near you that is still open, or at least open for a click-and-collect shopping expedition?

In these difficult times, it doesn't really matter what you feed you citrus trees with. Almost any fertiliser I can think of is better than no fertiliser at all. If it says something about "fruit and flowers" then this is the good stuff, but even if the fertiliser just says "general purpose" you are in the citrus-feeding business.

Try to read the instructions on the pack before you get started. If you do your fertilising now, while the ground is wet and more showers are forecast, all you need to do is wait for a break in the rain, get out there like a mad person, laugh at the sky if the neighbours are watching, and scatter the fertiliser around the base of the tree. 

Don't direct the fertiliser at the tree trunk itself — there's no roots there. Instead, spread it out under the whole canopy of the tree, and especially around the ground directly below the outer edge of the canopy (that's called the 'dripline', because that's where most of the rainwater drips onto the ground).

The dripline area is where a healthy tree has oodles of roots. Direct your fertiliser there and let Huey the Rain God do the rest.

And after you've done the job and the poor locked-down neighbours with nothing to do are still watching, permit yourself to send one last chuckle skywards. All your gardening mates will know exactly how you feel.

Thai lime time

Just in time for a summer of Thai-style salads, our Thai limes are ripening so nicely on their little potted tree that I want to pause for a moment and admire them. As is the case whenever I post a frangipani photo, with these Thai limes I'm sad that I can't include a 'scratch-and-sniff' widget on my blog so you can experience the amazing fragrance they possess. There's nothing else like them.

Sadly, they have a face only their mother could love, all
wrinkled and disfigured like they're a green gargoyle.

And cut one open and the disappointment continues: lacking
in juice, filled with tiny seeds, it's not a lime for squeezing.

One saving grace is that they're still cute when they're babies.

And here's the Thai lime compared with its silky smooth, juicy
cousin from Tahiti. I think every cook's backyard ought to have
both limes growing (well, if your climate is right for them, that is),
as I couldn't do without either ingredient in my kitchen.

With the Thai lime (also called a makrut lime or a kaffir lime)
it's the grated green skin which adds so much flavour to salad
dressings, stir-fries, soups and other dishes. Its fragrance is so
amazingly spicy and tropical as you grate it finely.

These are the quirky 'double' leaves of the Thai lime, with a
waist in the middle. Naturally enough their flavour and fragrance
is similar (but not identical) to the grated rind. Depending on
the recipe, you can slice these leaves into fine shreds, or go
one step further and chop the find shreds into very fine bits.

For the record, the Thai lime is Citrus hystrix. It's a small-growing tree that usually doesn't grow much bigger than 1 to 1.5 metres high. Being a small plant, it's one of the best citrus to grow in pots, but its branches are a bit thorny, so you need to be careful where you place the pot so it doesn't hurt any little people playing near it or anyone else just walking past it.

It's a typical citrus in that it loves sunshine plus regular watering and feeding. Here in my Sydney garden it seems a bit less fussy to grow than my Tahiti lime and my Eureka lemon, both of which are regularly targeted by sap-sucking bronze orange and spined citrus bugs, plus aphids. The Thai lime isn't such a crock in those ways, but the citrus leaf miner which causes unsightly, squiggly markings in the leaves, does get stuck into it. I use an organic horticultural oil spray (sold here as either Eco-Oil) to prevent the leaf miner attacks, but you need to reapply it regularly to win that little battle.

FInally, a little recipe for a Thai salad dressing, featuring both my limes. It's very simple:
1 tablespoon Tahiti lime juice
1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon grated rind of Thai lime
1 pinch sugar

Combine in jar, shake. Pour just before serving. The water 'softens' the bite of the lime juice and fish sauce and the sugar is important for balance. You can of course add chopped chilli to taste, and include chopped Thai lime leaves in the salad greens component of your salad.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

With Christmas almost here our Australian-style festive fun this year is going to include prawns, oysters and other seafood, plus salads on the side and lots of fruit to finish. However you choose to enjoy the season, both Pam and I hope our small band of blog readers enjoy a merry, safe and happy Christmas, and a prosperous New Year. 

Pam and I are looking forward to keep everything rolling smoothly along into 2014, after a 2013 which has been very eventful – including my beloved 'Burke's Backyard' magazine closing down after 14 great years, and Pam doing more (successful) art exhibitions than ever before. It's been a tumultuous and busy year for us but the good news is that it has all turned out OK by year's end. We're looking forward to 2014 being a better year, and that's what I wish for all of you, too.

Spring started weeks ago!

One of the fortunate things about my new life as an erratically employed freelancer is that I get more time off to do gardening, whether I want the time off or not! The pay is lousy but the lifestyle is terrific. As a result, my garden looks rather tidy at the moment. As the heading for this post says, spring started weeks ago, so this posting is nothing more than a wander around my happy and unusually tidy spring garden. 

For me, this light, fresh green is the true colour
of spring. In this case it's the top leaves of my
potted Turkish Brown fig.

Flowers do announce the new season nicely, and our potted native
orchids are producing sprays of these tiny, fragrant little blooms.

Small but perfectly formed orchids less than an inch across
from side to side, the other nice thing about them, speaking
as a gardener, is that they are very easy to grow.

Our two lavender bushes have been blooming
their heads off for a month, the bees love them
and they aren't looking like slowing down any
time soon. I've added its fellow Mediterranean
classic, the rosemary, to keep them company.

Wet weather can truncate the show of the superb
scadoxus, but with hardly a drop for the last few
weeks they're putting on their best show ever.

Our self-sown strawberry patch (which came
up out of some compost spread in this spot) is
still rudely healthy. Its spot is a bit too shady
in winter so it's content to snooze then, but now
the amount of sunshine it's getting is growing
daily it is flowering (with liquid feeds from me
to help the cause) and the first fruits are forming.

The end of winter is one of the two times of the
year when my in-ground citrus are fed, and a
week ago our garden was resplendent with the
heady aroma of chicken poo. Now the Eureka
lemon is flowering its head off quite fragrantly. 

Our potted Thai lime is clapping on a lot of
deep maroon new growth, but as it's in a pot I
feed it lightly once a month, unlike the other
citrus trees growing here.

I sometimes channel a bit of Basil Fawlty when
I am yet again caring for my potted mint, as
what mint needs "is a damned good thrashing".
What I mean by that is mint needs constant
taming and cutting back, sometimes all the way
down to pot-rim level. I did that for the
umpteenth time about three weeks ago, and
since then with regular watering and liquid
feeds, it has bounced back nicely yet again.
It's a high-maintenance herb, mint, but it
does look and smell lovely in these peak times.

I'm not going to say too much about the passionfruit vine
trained on my neighbour's garage wall, other than to report
that it's ludicrously lush and green, and has no flowers and
is doing sod-all in the way of producing fruit yet.

The small gaggle of garlic plants raised from
sprouted supermarket cloves is growing on well.

I told you the garden looks neat and well mulched at the moment.
I pulled out the winter crop, dug it all over as usual, then planted
seedlings of lettuce, basil and chillies, along with pretty little French
 marigolds for some colour. The round bare patch on the right
rear is where I am raising Collard greens direct-sown from seeds.
The Collard greens came with the Soulicious eBook cookbook 
Pam and I bought from our friend Awia Markey.

New plants have been added recently, too.
This row of four Gardenia magnifica should
grow to about 2m tall and cover up that
white Colorbond fence. I am hoping for dense
glossy green growth, white fragrant flowers
in summer and no problems, please!

And finally, if it all grows too big and everything
gets out of hand – start again! That's what we
are doing with a potted bay tree. Our last one
was here for ages but grew too big, then became
pot-bound then got sick and ugly. All my fault.
So here is "Son of Bay", my attempt to make
amends for all my bay-tree growing mistakes
perpetrated over the last 20 years. Whether I find
redemption or not remains to be seen, but I do
like adding just a touch of epic theme to
gardening here. It puts things in perspective.

A little deficiency of mine

One of my favourite blog titles (and blogs), is 'Patient Gardener', the ongoing story of how Helen is going in her garden in Malvern Wells, in England. I've been tempted occasionally, and not very seriously, to rebadge my blog 'The Impatient Gardener' because I am afraid that is what I am. Here's a small example of the impatient gardener at work, courtesy of a small citrus problem I discovered recently.

All is well in this close up of my 'Eureka' lemon tree.
Flowers galore, bees buzzing and, if we had a 'scratch
and sniff' blog tool you'd be expecting sweet lemon
blossoms, only to run screaming in the other direction
as the chicken poo smells waft out from your screen. 

Ditto the 'Tahiti' lime tree: healthy new
leaves, chicken poo smells, too many
flowers and happiness all-round.

Even the hospital patient potted Thai
lime tree has staged a recovery, new
leaves galore thanks to the change
of pot and potting mix, plus lots of TLC.

The Thai lime is also covered in teeny
little flower buds, the signs of many
uniquely ugly fruit to come. Ugly?

Yep, ugly. I love just being around this Thai lime tree,
as every molecule of it is fragrant. The leaves are a
joy to harvest and chop, and these wrinkled, not-very-juicy
little fruits are equally well-scented. It's the rind which
is the harvest here, Thai zing personified.

OK, if everything is so hunky dory in the citrus department, where's the impatient gardener tale? See below... 

While photographing my somewhat healthy and happy
Eureka lemon tree I noticed that quite a few of the baby
leaves looked like this, very pale green with darker
green veins. Sure signs of some sort of deficiency, but
which one? (And how dare it be deficient in anything with
all the chicken poo, compost and mulch I've been
giving it... wretched ungrateful prima donna plant!)

So, get out my copy of Judy McMaugh's great book,
'What Garden Pest or Disease is That?' and in no
time it seems that we're talking iron deficiency, folks.

Iron deficiency is more common in alkaline soils,

and the basic treatment for iron deficiency is a dose

of chelated iron. And so Mr Impatient mixed up a 

batch (one teaspoon to a 9-litre watering can),

applied it to the root zone around the lemon tree,

watered it in well. Take that, iron deficiency!

Then, only afterwards, it occurred to me that maybe I should check with an expert that what I did actually was the right thing. So I did, and it turns out that yes, that does look like a case of iron deficiency, but not super-serious. It's in its early stages and probably will right itself. Just keep on watering well and let the chicken poo break down and slowly work its magic. Should come right, I was told.

Oh oh... well at least I followed the packet directions for the iron chelates and didn't overdo it, but – and it's a big but – if I was a truly patient gardener I would have noticed the problem, checked with the experts first, waited a while and probably it would all have come good all by itself.

Patience is not merely a virtue, it also has its virtues. It's a shame that I seem to regularly remind myself of that just after I've been impatient yet again.

Tangy flowers

Here in Sydney spring begins in late winter, if you know what I mean. Now that it's September the season is well and truly underway, and the generous feeding that I gave my citrus trees in August is bearing both flowers and the beginnings of another crop of fruit.

This little guy and his pals were everywhere this morning. I wonder if lime pollen has a citrus tang? Probably.

Standing back for a moment, here's the espaliered Tahitian lime tree which I have managed to keep alive for several years now. When I say 'espaliered' I mean that the branches are trained to grow sideways on some wires strung between two posts. I did a posting back in 2008 on how I set up the espalier, and if you're interested you can read it here.

Every year I feed my two in-ground citrus trees generously at the end of winter (August) and towards the end of summer (February). With the assistance of some steady watering, both citrus trees respond with delight, flowering their heads off and sending out new growth. I mostly use the well-known Australian product, pelletised chicken poo sold here as the beautifully named product, Dynamic Lifter. As it pongs to high heaven I am sure my neighbours probably don't love Dynamic Lifter as much as I do!

Lime flowers are white, and they mostly appear in clusters like this.

A bit of a rarity, here's a single lime flower with the beginnings of a fruit already there.

A much more common sight is a cluster of flowers and baby fruits, clinging to their mother branch.

On the other side of the garden path, it's the same story with my 'Eureka' lemon, except that the flowers are pinky coloured.

The lemon is also sending new growth in all directions.

If I was hanging around in Sydney all I'd need to do for the next couple of months is make sure of a steady water supply, either courtesy of Huey's heavenly garden shower service, or my trusty garden hose.

Fortunately my next door neighbour Katarina loves watering gardens and every time we come back from any holiday I could swear our garden always looks better thanks to Katarina's skills. And so, when Pammy and I get back from our travels in America I am sure the lime and lemon trees will be lush with green foliage and their branches drooping gently under the weight of growing crops, all thanks to Katarina's neighbourly skills.

Different strokes

They're doing it again. Lots of plants are flowering. Well, it is spring and so that's to be expected, but every year they manage to do it slightly differently, and so I thought I'd just point my camera at a couple of them, to show the many lovely and different ways you can go about being a flower.

For starters you could just try being enormous. That usually works a treat.

And when you do clusters of enormous blooms in long, arching sprays, you'll probably get a standing ovation. It's no wonder orchids are so popular, and here in Sydney's warm but not quite subtropical climate, cymbidium orchids are as tough as old boots, even if they do look as pretty as a party frock.

Another great option for flowers is to smell delicious and then bear delicious fruits later on. This is my Eureka lemon, doing it again and again.

Another option is to flower in symphony with your cousins, and so the fragrant, delicious Tahitian lime is also flowering at the same time as its lemony cousin.

If you're a succulent, a good option is to be a bit quirky and strange, such as these Gasteria flowers, whose stalks rise 30-60cm above the plant and catch the morning sun. I am sure I have seen some cooling summer ice-creams in that red, cream and green colour scheme?

Finally, you could be cute and fascinating even before you flower. I just love the nodding heads of Iceland poppies, which look to me like so many people in a meeting. I am sure that their little meeting passed a resolution to do the right thing and flower sometime tomorrow afternoon. These wonderful plants have been flowering since mid July and they might even set a new Amateur Land record by flowering until the end of October.

Sydney is an evergreen land, a lucky place to be a gardener where there is something happening every moment of the year. But we do still have our colourful burst of growth and flower colour each spring. I'm patiently waiting for three different blue-flowered beauties to do their thing next month, in October, but in the meantime the current carnival of colour provides more than enough entertainment.

The three-year itch

You've all heard of the seven-year itch? Somehow Pammy and I have racked up 20 years of happy marriage with my rapidly receding hairline as the only visible sign of irreversible damage, but as for my relationship with my potted citrus tree, we've got a bad case of the three-year itch. Not happy, it's not, and it reckons it's all my fault. Everything had been going swimmingly between us, until about four weeks ago. And then the symptoms began. Falling leaves. Curled-up leaves. Falling fruit. No smiles, no warm greetings in the morning. There was trouble between us.

Here's the miserable grouch yesterday morning. I had tried lightly feeding it, as well as watering it in my usual way, until water flowed freely out the drain holes at the bottom. And that only seemed to make things worse. I inspected Grouchy for pests and found nothing.

The change from happy to sad was rather sudden, too. Look at those inwardly curled leaves, and their sullen, droopy demeanour. I suspected the problem had to be out of sight, in the potting mix. My prime suspect was the dreaded curl grub, which I have blogged about before, here. So, instead of just watering and hoping things might come good, I decided that the only solution for our relationship was a visit to the therapist. Step one, remove plant from the pot.

The big surprise was... no curl grubs, but the problem was embarrassingly obvious, too, and it was all my fault. The potting mix was bone dry and ants were busy turning the plant's root-ball into a bustling, ant-filled metropolis. No wonder Grouchy wasn't happy! Would you like ants in your pants all day long?

Here's the plant and its root ball. The plant was a tight mass of roots competing for the inadequate water available. I couldn't believe this was the problem. I'm very conscientious about watering all my potted plants, and feeding them too. And this is when it dawned on me that the poor plant had simply outgrown its pot, and needed more room in which to grow. So, the solution was obvious. Buy a bigger pot, and repot it, Jamie. However, a bit of rehab prior to repotting was in order.

Step one, re-wet the root ball. This looks like a radical thing to do, but it's essential. I put the plant into a plastic trug and filled the trug slowly with water. It kept on bubbling away for a few minutes as water soaked back into the parched soil. I left it there to soak for five minutes.

EDIT: I've since learned that soaking it for one whole hour is a much better idea, and soaking it in a solution of water and wetting agent mixed according to packet directions also improves your chances of successfully re-wetting the ultra-dry potting mix.

How do you like my sophisticated anti-lean technology? The plant kept on flopping over in the loose fit of the trug, so I kept it upright with my nifty baked clay stabiliser units.

Step three, buy a new pot. Now, this isn't quite what I had in mind, but in a quick expedition-cum-mercy-dash, this was the best I could find. It's terracotta, 10cm wider at the top and 10cm taller than the existing pot, plenty of room to grow into, and very importantly, it's straight-sided, so repotting will be easy enough in a few years' time.

If you think soaking the whole root ball in water is radical treatment, you'll hate this next step. I used a little sharp knife to cut a few vertical slits in the root ball, to encourage new roots to grow out into the new potting mix. Then I just potted it up, as per normal.

As this terracotta pot has just one, very large, drain hole, I placed a square of mesh in the bottom to prevent potting mix flushing out too easily during watering.

Here it is in situ. The next step is to place the existing root ball into the pot, measure how many inches it sits down from the top of the rim (in this case it was about five inches) then place a bit less than that amount of new, fresh potting mix in the bottom (in this case about four inches of potting mix). That worked nicely, then I filled in the sides around the root ball with new potting mix, making sure that there were no air pockets left over.

A light watering-in usually exposes any air pockets in the new potting mix, and so I then top up those spots with more mix. The important thing is to not cover the top of the existing root ball with new potting mix at all. There is a system of fine feeder roots very close to the soil surface, and covering these over with new potting mix would be harmful to the plant's health. Two more things remain to be done, though.

One is to use a seaweed extract product to encourage the roots to grow. I used Seasol. One 9-litre can of this mixed in water now, and probably another one next weekend, too, and another one a month later should get things growing well again.

Finally, some slow-release fertiliser, to trickle down some goodies every time I water the pot over the next few months. This one is formulated for citrus, and it's a good way to provide the steady stream of food these greedy plants need.

Hopefully, this repotting will do the trick and save the relationship. But it did get me to thinking about not only the three-year itch with pots, but also where I went wrong, as it really was all my fault, and the citrus tree had every right to be grouchy.

As for the three-year itch, for fussy citrus, about three years is as long as they'll be happy in a pot before some kind of trouble sets in. Yes, I do have some other potted plants which are still healthy and happy and haven't been repotted in many years. One good example is my cast iron plant, the aspidistra on my front porch, which has been in the same pot for at least nine years and is still doing fine. But it's a low-performance tough guy foliage plant. However, high performance fruiting plants like citrus need everything to be hunky dory pretty much all the time. When it strikes they get the three-year itch big time, baby!

I've probably made things worse by spoiling my potted citrus with the best of everything: food, water, and sunshine. This good care has seen it grow rapidly, and as a result it has outgrown its pot rapidly. I realise that in two to three years from now, this same citrus plant will need repotting again, when it gets that three-year itch once more.

I got myself into this high-maintenance trap of a relationship and so I can't complain (well, not much). Now I know the ground rules, I'll be on the lookout for more trouble in about, say, three years from now.