Renovations

Should they ever discover plant life on Mars I would not be a bit surprised if it turned out to be onion weed ... or oxalis. These two weeds are indestructible, and they have well and truly taken over our succulent patch in recent months. It was a disgrace: you could barely see the smaller succulent plants for the weeds, and so I've been waiting for the weather to cool down a bit so I could get stuck into the big job of yanking out all the weeds and renovating the whole patch back to "as-new" condition.

To kick things off, let's start with the finished, renovated succulent patch. Traa daa! 

This, dear readers, is how it now looks, six hours after starting on the project. It took a lot longer than I imagined it would.

The first step was to pull every small succulent out of the ground and toss them into a few trugs and trays. That's one thing I can say about succulents: these things grow and multiply incredibly easily. I was amazed how many there were.

The next step was the ugly bit, and it took a long time to do it: digging out onion weed and both type of oxalis (ie, the one with large leaves which grows from bulbs (Oxalis latifolia) and the "creeping" variety with small leaves that sends out runners in every direction (Oxalis corniculata).)

As I dug the soil I realised that there were probably more decorative "mulch" pebbles in the soil than on top of the soil as mulch, so I went into the kitchen, grabbed a large bamboo-handled wire scoop (bought from a Chinese food store) that we never use, and pressed it into service as a pebble sifter.

What a fantastic pebble sifter! It did a brilliant job, and along the way it also scooped up, oh ... about another thousand oxalis and onion weed bulbs.

Two giant trugs loaded up with sifted pebbles, and I was ready to plant the succulents back into the prepared bed. 

(By the way, pebble mulches are nice to look at and have one other benefit: they don't stay wet and so they are a good environment for growing succulents. As for slowing the growth of weeds? Utterly hopeless. In fact, the creeping type of oxalis loves spreading across pebble mulches, and onion weed powers through it. And over time, the pebbles slowly sink into the soil, so in general they aren't my favourite mulch at all.)

Replanting everything allowed me to re-arrange the plants, with the smallest ones right down the front, mediums in the middle and tall ones at the back. I know this sounds perfectly obvious, but when I originally planted the succulents I wasn't sure of their ultimate sizes, and a few have grown more than I expected.Pictured here are Gasteria (top left), sempervivums (left), faucaria centre right, echeveria (far right), Corpuscularia (top centre), and another type of echeveria (top right).

Some of those names above might be familiar to you, but if you haven't heard of corpuscularia, here it is. It's one of my favourites in the whole patch, and the renovation has allowed me to move it to a better spot.

The spiky guy in the centre is Haworthia attenuata. When I planted it back in 2012 the clump was almost this size. Now, four years later, I was able to divide the clump into two clumps this size. I honestly hadn't realised until I looked at an old photo how much this had grown.

As I mentioned earlier, I had dug out all the smaller succulents, but had left the larger, more established succulent shrubs in place. And they've also grown a fair bit since I first planted it all out in September 2012. Look at the photo below for the comparison.

While the weeds have multiplied, so have the succulents themselves. I am sure the weeds will be back in force in no time, but here's hoping the succulents will also keep on growing and take over the place. That's the plan ...

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.

Succulent season

Though succulents are usually thought of as tough, water-hardy plants which are built to survive hot, dry summers, the other side of their nature is that they don't really like summer all that much. Like most garden plants (and people), they much prefer autumn and spring. Right now they're growing and flowering, and looking lovely.

Faucarias, with their python-like jaws of spiny teeth, look quite savage at other times of year, but now, in autumn, they're home to dainty, yellow daisies.

Sempervivums are simply growing well now. I repotted these last spring and am hoping that by next spring they'll have filled the bowl with maroon-tipped, pale green rosettes.

It's the same story with the graptoverias. Repotted last spring, growing well now, hopefully looking a grey-blue picture of abundance by next spring.

Sometimes, when I look at my haworthia, I think of these as being like some kind of crowded futuristic city designed by Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. They're showing more complex colours now and are growing so fast they'll start climbing up and over each other. I'd like to see that!

Gasteria bicolor has never looked particularly bicoloured to me, at least until this year. Hopefully this is how it's meant to look. It's producing babies now, so I presume all is well, but as my knowledge of succulents is pretty limited, I often look at some of them and wonder 'is that normal, are you OK?'.

And so low are my expectations for this lithops, the living stone plant, that all I want for it is survival. When I repotted it into its nice little blue pot, I discovered that it was planted straight into gravel. OK. And then after a very wet month one of the two original lithops people shrivelled and died (that's when my low expectations really kicked in). Since then, this rather cute little survivor-person hasn't grown, hasn't died, hasn't done anything, and I'm delighted!

Several other succulents in my little potted conclave known as Succulent City are sending up flower spikes now, and there's never a dull flower in Succulent City. While these plants do store water to survive summer, the fact is they just go into survival mode over the hot months, then shout 'hooray' when autumn comes and then go into growing and flowering and baby-making mode during the cooler, wetter months. Around here, autumn is the real succulent season.