First Day of Winter

"Come outside," the love of my life beckoned to me, "and bring your camera, too." I was thinking a rare winged visitor had flown in perhaps from the tropical north and I was needed to record the historic ornithological event. Alas, no. Pam was just excited because her second nasturtium plant is producing yellow flowers. "Do a blog on it," she helpfully suggested.

"But I just blogged about your nasturtiums a few weeks ago, darling. They're nice but they're not that fantastic." Admittedly, this yellow one is really nice (much nicer than the orange one) but I let that observation glide by.

"I know what I'll do," I helpfully ventured, "as it's the first day of winter, and a warm and pleasant one too, I'll do something on that topic and include your nasturtium again." Deal done, here we go.

Traaa daaa, Pam's yellow nasturtium, in flower today, June 1, the start of winter here.

Now here's something a bit more newsworthy, winter-wise. My frangipani doesn't seem to know it's winter yet. You would have thunk it would be dropping leaves all over the place, as the May which just finished made it into the papers as the coldest May since Elvis died (or was it Buddy Holly?) Anyway, it was some long-distant milestone of time like that.

Not merely content to hang onto its foliage, the frangipani is still sending up flower buds. Perhaps this happened overnight? The minimum of 17°C last night was almost the warmest June minimum for Sydney since Elvis/Buddy Holly days, too, and so maybe the frangipani thinks there's still time to party?

Now here's something that is no surprise at all for the first day of winter, as this is the time of year when my potted cumquat should be covered in fruits rapidly turning a beautiful shade of orangey-yellow, which it is doing beautifully this year (due in large part to some great advice and help from our gardening writer, Elizabeth Swane).

My little pot of dill seems to be enjoying the cooler autumn-winter weather, so from now on I'll confine my dill-growing escapades to this time of year.

The plectranthus 'Mona Lavender' which I planted a few months ago hasn't stopped flowering since then. No doubt the soft accordion serenades of my gnome, Flaco, each evening, have made the plectranthus feel like part of the family from day one.

And finally, just for my Pammy, another nasturtium shot because I know she loves them.

On with winter, so far, so warm!

Goldilocks rain

It began as all good Goldilocks rain should. Early in the morning, before sun-up. We could hear it on the roof. Then it had its moments, falling ubundantly for a little while, without causing any problems. And then the sun came out. Goldilocks rain – not too little, not too much, just right, with sunshine soon after.

To qualify as a Goldilocks-pleaser, there'd have to be sunshine lighting droplets on pretty plants like this floating native water fern, nardoo.

And for another thing it would be heavy enough to thoroughly wash all the foliage, too. I'm sure that nature isn't meant to have jets, cars and diesel trucks throwing soot into the air, so all the gunk and grime of the city needs to be washed away for plants to be happy and breathe freely. At least that's what I think.

These poppies have just been fed, and so truly A-Grade Golidlocks rain falls the day after you have fertilised some plants, and they just start to grow like crazy when that happens.

Of course a bit of rain does knock over some floppy-leafed people for a short while, but it doesn't bash them up. This little moisture-loving lettuce leaf is probably giggling with pleasure about the rain this morning.

Out at the rain gauge the reading was excellent, a classic Goldy number. 8mm. That's one-third of an inch or about 30pts on the other scale. Definitely enough rain to soak into the soil, but not enough rain to wash seeds away or hurt any delicate petals.

We can't get the rain we want when we want it (ie, 10mm every Tuesday and Thursday nights, between 3am and 5am), as that would make things far too easy. But there's no reason why we can't get the occasional dose of pure Goldilocks rain in between the drizzle, the downpours and the droughts.

This morning, I loved your work, Huey!

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.

Citrus feeding time again, folks

Here's a reminder for all the Aussie gardeners with citrus plants of any sort, especially those growing in the ground: it's feeding time again, folks. These greedy plants need feeding at the end of February each year, then again at the end of August. You don't have to slavishly follow that timetable, but late winter and late summer are the ideal feeding times, and a good feed every six months is what they need. So here's what I did about an hour ago.

First, I watered the ground under the whole canopy of each tree (pictured here is my Eureka lemon tree, laden with developing fruit – yippee!). The reason for the 'water first' rule is to make sure the plants slake their thirst just on pure water, and not on fertiliser-laden water, which isn't such a good thing for them.

Second, spread the plant food all around the area under the tree's canopy, and especially around the outer edge of the tree's 'dripline' (just imagine the rough circle on the ground where water rolls off the foliage on the tree's perimeter, that's the dripline). Here, I'm using Dynamic Lifter, which is pelletised chicken poo. Being organic, it stinks to high heaven for a day (and Pam says "That's it, I'm going shopping in town for the day".) The packet says to apply three scoops-full per square metre of area. So my lemon tree got six scoops, scattered evenly, as did my lime tree. There are stacks of different citrus foods around, but I like the organic chicken poo, and I am sure the worms in the soil like it too. Pam's not so keen on it, but as she likes shopping she has discovered that citrus feeding day has its attractions.

Third and final step is to water in well afterwards, to get some plant food down into the soil, and to help all the rest of the pellets to start breaking down. That's it.

There are only three citrus trees in my small backyard. The other one planted in the ground is my espaliered 'Tahiti' lime, which is covered in limes ready to use now. This regular feeding keeps the leaves green and glossy and seems to fortify the tree so it looks after itself quite well. It still gets attacked by small numbers of pests, but largely it's pretty trouble-free, and I'm sure that's because it's well fed.

My other citrus tree is a potted cumquat. These need a different feeding regime altogether. I feed this one lightly every month in spring and summer. Today, I watered it first, then slipped one scoop of Dynamic Lifter pellets under the straw, then watered it again. Other times, when I'm feeling lazy, I give it a liquid feed. And in the cooler months I drop back to feeds every six weeks.

The cumquat is cropping better and better as it grows (it's about three years old now), and this crop should ripen in midwinter. Next spring I plan to transfer it to a slightly larger pot, and to replace the potting mix at the same time.

Listen to a gardening talkback radio show and about a third of the callers are having problems with their citrus trees. It's true that citrus can get all sorts of pests, diseases and nutrient deficiencies, mystery ailments and crop failures. But I'm slowly discovering that if you feed and water them very regularly, grow them in well-drained soil in a sunny spot, and they're much easier to live with than you might imagine.

A change of diet

We're having a mini version of a white Christmas here in Sydney at the moment – our potted citrus tree is flowering like it has never flowered before. It looks great and smells sweet, but it's especially pleasing because it shows that the change in the plant's diet which I started mid-way through the year seems to be paying off.

Last weekend and the tree was much more thickly covered in blooms compared with previous years. Sure, it's getting older and that may have something to do with it, but I have changed its feeding so it gets light feeds once a month in the warm growing season, and once every six weeks during the cooler months. That's a lot more often than in previous years, when I fed it about once every three months at best.

I made this change on the suggestion of a workmate, Geoffrey, an expert gardener whose suggestions are always well worth following. He says that every time we water a potted plant we wash some nutrients out of the soil, and so the best idea is to regularly replenish potted soils with nutrients (do it lightly, not too much). I could just use a slow-release fertiliser for this job, but I prefer to feed all of my citrus trees with organic chicken manure. And so I now give the plant just a handful of chicken manure pellets once a month, followed immediately by a good watering. The other main thing with the potted citrus is to put the pot up on pot feet, so the water drains away. And that means no saucers!

I am convinced this change of feeding regime has worked. Like all citrus, the cumquat blooms are sweetly scented, but they are short-lived. They're in a hurry to become fruit, and that suits me fine.

This morning, many of the flowers have dropped their petals already and left behind the tiny makings of a fruit that will now take months to grow and ripen.

This of course is a photo of last year's crop, which was pretty good. Cumquats are a bitter citrus that are most often turned into jams, marmalade or pickled in an alcohol such as brandy and sugar as a dessert condiment. To tell the truth, I grow this tree as much as an ornamental plant as a useful crop – but I do like cumquat marmalade! The fruit are marvellously decorative on the tree and last there for many weeks. In fact last year I kept on delaying the harvest just because the potted tree, with its attractive, glossy green leaves, looked so pretty covered in orange fruits.

Finally, another use for potted citrus trees – festive cheer! Pam put out our Santa gnome, Ravi, to guard the potted cumquat then decorated the tree with tinsel. We had a bunch of old friends around for a Christmas barbecue get-together last night, and the tinselly cumquat really helped to set the scene.

Fruitful harvests

The only reason I harvested my gorgeous little cumquats so late in the season this year is that I loved the look of them on the tree so much I couldn't bear to remove them. They're just so decorative. But a few have been dropping off of their own free will lately, and Pam almost took a tumble on a squishy one this morning, so that was it. Cumquat harvest day had arrived, for safety reasons!

Nice looking things, cumquats. They're a type of citrus, either Fortunella margarita 'Nagami' (which is what I have) or Fortunella margarita 'Marumi'. They're quite small, a bit over an inch long on average.

The fruit is very, very tart to eat straight, but the skin is extremely thin and the flavour is great – but it's only enjoyable once you've added heaps of sugar via turning it into marmalade or another sweetened recipe, such as the one I plan to do today – marinating them for three months in sugar and brandy. Brandied cumquats. I've heard all about them but have neither tried eating them nor making them. So, perfectly equipped for a beginner's course – ie, I know nothing at all – I dived in!

Here's my potted cumquat straight after the harvest – bare of fruit but not of leaf. These are generally regarded as one of the best citrus varieties for pots. This one is two years old, just starting its third year this spring. No troubles or problems at all, and it even produced a good crop, from which I made a few batches of marmalade, last year.

As for the brandied cumquats, here's the makings. I don't drink brandy at all, so I went out and bought a bottle of the French stuff. For the recipe I'm using, you need a bit less than one bottle of brandy, 500g caster sugar (the fine white sugar you use with all desserts) and 750g washed and dried cumquats.

You'll also need a 1-litre sealable jar, sterilised. I sterilised this brand new one by immersing it in simmering water for about 10 minutes.

Then I let the jar cool and dry for another 15 minutes.

While the jar cooled, I pricked each cumquat three or four times with a metal skewer. A tiresome job, this, which made my hands ache in the same way that writing very long essays by hand at high school used to make my hands ache so many years ago.

Now, at this point the lovely 'how-to' photography broke down somewhat, because the recipe I followed turned out to be naff (ish). The recipe said to add layers of cumquats to the jar, sprinkle with sugar, then repeat the layers of cumquats and sugar till you used them all up. And at the end add enough brandy to completely cover the cumquats (used a bit over half a bottle). Well, I tried that and you ended up with a dense, white layer of sugar occupying the bottom of the jar and a layer of brandy floating on top, with the cumquats caught in the middle. No amount of upending of the jar would persuade the brandy to mingle with the sugar, so everything came out of the jar into my biggest bowl. A large, clean, stainless steel spoon then made everything mingle, and it was all then piled back into the jar. This is the result, pictured above.

The rest of the recipe is this. Store the jar in a dry, dark place. Tumble-turn the jar once a day for a week, to help dissolve the sugar. Then turn the jar over once a week. Keep doing this for three months, by which time the cumquats should be ready to eat.

You can eat the cumquats as a dessert, or as part of a dessert (eg, brandied cumquats on the side served with a yummy cake, such as a chocolate cake). And of course you can also drink the brandy. As I've never tried brandied cumquats this is a whole new world for me, but I'm willing to give it a try. Only time will tell, but I like that sometimes with food – waiting patiently.

Purple patch

We're having a purple patch of lovely weather here in Sydney right now, a wonderful line-up of sunny, fine days. Last week we fell just short of the record for our warmest July day on record – that's a bit over 25°C (77°F) – but these last few days have all hovered around 19 or 20. With the sun on your back it's almost perfect gardening weather, so instead of dutifully heading inside to slave over a work-from-home computer keyboard, I decided to potter about and tend to a few plants while I also took a few snaps of how things are going here in Amateur Land.

I usually stand just outside the back door to take my snaps of the whole garden, but with the morning sun low in the sky making that shot impossible, I ventured all nine metres to way up the other end of Amateur Land to look back to the house, for a change. Lots happening, as usual. Here's a few close ups of what's going on.

While there aren't a lot of flowers in bloom now in the garden, the rosemary has just started producing its pretty mauve flowers. This is such a nice plant just to be near, thanks to those fragrant green leaves.

The poppy patch carries on prettily, but it has such a casual approach to the business of blooming. Though there might be 20 plants in the little patch, each sending up half a dozen droopy-headed stems at a go, you never really see much more than 10-20 blooms fully open at any one time in the little patch. That's plenty to pick in the morning to fill a vase (as Pammy does regularly) but you never get the razzamatazz of the whole patch in bloom all at once. That never happens. Instead, the patch just pops out its pretty blooms a few at a time, never trying to seem all that showy, but it does it so well for several months each year (from early June to early October).

The shallots in the foreground have been like this for weeks, and that's the wonderful thing about them. You can leave them there and just pick one or two when you need them, and leave the rest behind for another day. They do get a bit stronger in flavour as they age, but they're fine in cooking. Behind the shallots is a pot of rocket, and behind that a mixed planting of a couple plants each of Chinese cabbage, mini cauliflower and lettuce. On the left the tatty sage bush is due for its midwinter pruning. I'll cut off about half the growth and it'll bounce back nicely in spring with a new flush of aromatic, soft grey leaves.

I do like the look of this pot of colourful ornamental kale, but I can't take any credit for growing it. It was left behind by the TV crew who filmed here last Wednesday (see my previous blog entry for the details on that). It's pictured here next to some more baby cauliflower plants, and it always amazes me how incredibly diverse the Brassica group of vegies is. Essentially they're all the same plant, Brassica oleracea, but the huge number of different forms the same plant takes – all sorts of cabbages, ornamental kale, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts – it's just amazing.

Hooray, the eschallots are up! Last year I tried growing these onion-family members in a tub of potting mix and it was a miserable failure. This year I whacked them into the cold arms of wintry Mother Earth and in just four weeks all eight bulbs have sent up optimistic little green shoots.

Nearby, the garlic patch marches on. The central row (sown in May) is currently doing the best, but the other rows (one sown in April, the other in June) are still performing respectably, if not quite as well. I'm feeding them monthly with lines of chicken manure sprinkled between the rows.

At last the dwarf peas are getting a bit more sunshine and have started to gain in height and produce some flowers, but as for ambitions of any bumper crops, to quote a great Australian philosopher, Darryl Kerrigan "tell him he's dreaming".

Final stop on the sunny winter morning ramble is the cumquat tree, laden with fruit. This was actually the reason for the TV crew's visit, to do a segment on potted cumquats. These tart little citrus make wonderful marmalade, and that's what I'll be doing with them very soon.

I'd better get back to work. It was just too nice a morning to leave the garden straight away on such a perfect winter's day!