The kindness of good people

 

I wasn't planning on doing an update on how my broken bones are healing, but today started with a knock at the door and a very pleasant surprise that gave me an idea for this blog posting about kindness.

If you aren't one of my regular readers, you might
wonder what I mean by "broken bones". Here's 
the evidence, a broken heel encased in a very
colourful purple fibreglass cast. If I behave myself
the cast comes off on December 15, a bit over
two weeks away.

Now, onto this morning's pleasant surprise. Our neighbour, Jane, from two doors down the hill, came to the door with the loveliest bunch of hydrangeas cut from the bush which is "going mad" right now in Sydney's spring. She had heard about my broken hoof and just wanted to wish me well. 

This simple, kindly gesture has become one of the themes of these last six weeks. Neighbours all around us have offered to help out however they can, especially with car transport. Close friends have actually done the driving for us when needed, delicious treats from friends' creative kitchens have been delivered, and all sorts of people have been in touch just to ask how we're both going. 

The kindness started even at the moment back in mid-October when I initially hurt myself. Later on, once I emerged from the hospital's emergency ward wearing a brand new plaster cast on my leg and wobbling along on a shiny set of crutches, two young men wearing turbans on their head rushed over to help me make it to the taxi rank. (I think they were Sikhs, but they were definitely also good Samaritans). One fellow whipped out his mobile phone and summoned a cab on his app for me, and when the taxi arrived they flagged it down so I only had a few awkward steps to make before I slumped into the back of the cab. My thankyous and their best wishes were warmly exchanged ... and now six weeks later I am still so grateful for their simple acts of kindness to a total stranger.

Meanwhile, I have discovered a completely new side to my darling Pammy. After 30 years of marriage we've got our respective household job descriptions quite nicely sorted. For all that time I have been the one to do the gardening and any heavy lifting, and she has been the creative person who comes up with ideas, who spots pest control problems on plants and generally offers good advice on what we should do next. We garden as a team, but I'm the one who gets covered in dirt.

The breakthrough to this old regime came early ... and it happened in the kitchen. We're keen on recycling vegie scraps, and composting is my job! So when the little vegie scrap bin filled up, she asked "what do I do with this now?". With my broken foot it's a very long way down to the back of the property and the compost bin, and my first utterly sexist reaction was to suggest we forget about the scraps and composting until I healed up. "Nonsense, where is it, what do you do?"

Well, the truth be told, compost bins are almost rocket science, but not quite. You see, you have to remove the lid from the bin, tip in the contents of the scraps bin, and replace the lid. So it's incredibly complicated. And worst of all, down there near the shed, it's a bit yucky, and there might be spiders there, too. 

And so ever since becoming compost bin attendant, Pammy has been adding my "boy's job" skills to her repertoire, each time doing it with effortless aplomb.

She's been watering the garden on all the days when rain hasn't been forecast, pulling out weeds, picking up fallen fruit and trimming back over-growth. And the garden is looking quite nice, actually.

Then Pam very sensibly decided that we needed to get in a professional team of heavy duty gardeners for a few hours, and two strapping lads whipped out their chainsaws and powered hedge trimmers and in a cacophony of noise and activity all manner of overgrowth was cut back, carried to the truck and disappeared. That's how to manage an overgrown garden!

She has been magnificent over these last six weeks, especially when you consider that she's as busy as can be with her art teaching at the same time.

And so, to finish off this update on the fun and games at our place, here's a few photos, taken this morning, to share.

Our potted New South Wales Christmas Bush has never looked
so red nor lasted so long. It usually colours up in late October
and runs out of puff well before Christmas, but at least it will
provide good festive colour well into December this time.

I planted silver beet seeds just a few days before I broke my
foot, and so all this excellent progress is due to the watering
skills of my watercolour girl Pammy. 

And on the same day I planted the silverbeet seeds I also
planted a Jap pumpkin seedling, and it too is loving life.
Our original thought was to be bossy and cut it back if it
spread too far but right now we're thinking of it as a
"very big groundcover with edibles" and we like that idea. 

And so the news here from the land of the broken-footed gardener is that for the last six weeks I have been surrounded by the kindness of strangers, of friends, of neighbours and, most of all, my wonderful woman. I am truly a very lucky boy.

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!

The 10-Year Rewind – Part 10 – Watering the Garden

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 10 is this one — Watering the Garden — from January 2009, all about my adventures watering the "garden" I grew up in as a little boy.

As a minor family history project I've dug out all of my ancient black and white family photos, with the aim of scanning them, burning them to a disc and sending this off to the small band of family members here and there who might be interested. While doing this I came across a few snaps of the house where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and had a few thoughts about the garden there, and the contribution it made to my love of gardening now. It wasn't much of a contribution, mind you, as it wasn't much of a garden, but the seeds of my passion for plants and gardening were sown then.

Not entirely sure of the vintage of this one, but it looks like it might have been taken before my first-ever cricket match for the Lane Cove Under 12s, when I was about 10. They put the youngsters into the third under 12 team, named us the Lane Cove Colts, and it took the older lads about one minute to rename us the Lane Cove Clots. While cricket remains a great love of mine, I've chosen this photo because I'm standing in front of the hydrangea, about the only truly lovely plant in our very bare garden of mostly lawn and concrete footpaths. I loved watering the hydrangea and loved its big, generous blue flowers.

Classic Sydney suburbia of the early 1960s. We had a row of oleanders planted by the front fence. Dad's efforts at gardening amounted to grumpily agreeing to hack back the oleanders every year or so, immediately after the official notice from the local council arrived in the letterbox informing him that other residents had complained about how the oleanders had so overgrown the footpath that they found it difficult to get by. I also loved watering the oleanders and watching them grow so rapidly. I think Dad had a secret plan to kill the oleanders by over-pruning them, but that only seemed to make them grow and flower even more. I like to think that my watering helped them to bounce back each time.

Here's Dad and our family car, the Jaguar Mk V. All the kids from the opposing cricket teams thought we were posh and had a Rolls Royce. We could and occasionally did fit all 12 members of the Lane Cove Colts team into the Jag, too. But this photo is here not only because the hydrangea is in bloom in the far right corner, but also because the Jag is parked near the cricket pitch. I know, having a slightly downhill sloping cricket pitch isn't ideal, but it didn't prevent countless memorable Test Matches between my brother, who is four years older than me and always got to be the Australians, and me, who being the junior chap always ended up being England, the West Indies or Pakistan etc. Each time I ever amazed us both and came close to a win, he'd just start bowling faster. I didn't have that option, I was already bowling flat out.

And so with the reminiscences dusted off, the thing that I remember so clearly from these photos was my love of watering the garden. We didn't actually DO any gardening so to speak. The hydrangeas and oleanders had been planted before I arrived, or when I was so young that I can't remember them being planted. So all the gardening there was to do was simply keeping it all alive with water.

Apparently my love of watering the garden started at an early age, so my older sisters tell me. Even by the time I was four years old I was outside watering the garden. A leading socialite of the time (well, she was both head of the Mothers' Club at the local primary school and had a hyphenated surname) used to walk past our house each day. Apparently, one day while watering the garden I called out a cheery "hello lady" and she ignored me. So I hosed her.

Her shrieks alerted my mother and sister, so I hosed them, too. Apparently it got totally out of hand and as my sisters retreated into the house, I followed them in, hosing away. At that point someone got brave and disarmed me, and presumably I got into trouble (but I don't remember a skerrick of this episode and am prepared to deny it ever happened, except here on this blog, which is on the internet and you know what they say about the internet).

And so that bare old patch of ground with a lot of lawn and concrete and just some tough old shrubs laid the seeds of my love of gardening. I really only got into gardening in recent decades, when I started sub-editing a homemaker magazine. That led to me moving to this house, with its modest patch of ground, about 17 years ago.

But still, to this day, one of my favourite things is watering the garden. With our current drought-induced water restrictions I can only unfurl the hose on Wednesdays and Sundays now, but it's always great fun to do, a childish pleasure of which I am sure I will never grow tired. 

The hydrangea blues

I thought as much ... the "blue" hydrangeas I planted recently are just completely normal hydrangeas which turn pink in alkaline soils, or turn blue in acid soils. Mine are a lilac colour, which isn't what I want, and so here's the story of giving my lilac hydrangeas a case of the hydrangea blues. It isn't rocket science, but it is science.

See what I mean? Those large flower petals are the originals. They're not a deep enough colour to be truly purple, they're a bit further along the colour wheel towards the pink end of the spectrum. And so that means my soil pH in this spot is probably somewhere about 5.5 to 6. The next lot of baby buds coming through are looking a lot bluer, though.

Normally, my garden soil is more down the acid end of the spectrum, somewhere about pH 5, and that should produce nice blue hydrangeas. However, the soil in this part of the garden is about 50 per cent homemade compost, and I guess that's why its pH is a bit higher (my guess is something closer to pH 6). 

None of this is a problem, of course. In fact it's just another excuse for some good gardening fun. After much Googling and reading, I realised there are two ways you can go about turning your hydrangeas blue.

Option A is to change the soil pH itself on a semi-permanent basis, using either sulphur powder or liquid sulphur. (And it is also spelled "sulfur" on some product labels, which apparently is how the scientific community has agreed it should be spelled). This is slower acting than option B, but is a more long-lasting, possibly permanent, solution as it changes your soil's pH. It's often used by gardeners growing acid-loving plants such as azaleas, camellias and blueberries.

Option B is to apply a "hydrangea blueing" mixture (liquid or powder) which is made from aluminium sulphate. This is faster acting, but it needs to be reapplied every month or so to keep the hydrangeas nice and blue. I didn't like the sound of that, so I was "yeah, nah" to this method.

This is what our local Mitre 10 store had in stock, so I bought it and applied it to the soil around each plant, then watered it in. The pack comes with a spoon and a guide to how much to use. I've taken a cautious approach and applied half a dose to each plant, and I am sure it is already affecting the flower colour a bit. If it's not that effective, I'll add a bit more later on.

This is the alternative "Option B" product, the aluminium sulfate "blueing" mixture. I didn't buy this and don't intend to, but lots of people prefer a quick fix to a slow fix, and so if you want to turn your pink hydrangeas blue within a few weeks, get some aluminium sulfate.

Finally, in case you're wondering, you can't change the colour of white hydrangeas. In the same soil that's turning my blue hydrangeas into a lilac haze, Pammy's white hydrangeas are looking splendidly healthy, handsome and dazzlingly white.

Those white flowers on a backdrop of deep green leaves really do look nice. This plant is still, of course, a baby, but the plant label says once it is is mature it will be 1.2 metres (4 feet) tall and wide, which is something I am looking forward to enjoying for many years to come.

Old-fashioned hydrangeas

I'm a bit of a sucker for anything that's out of fashion. Whether it's collecting garden gnomes, listening to bands with accordion players, or cooking time-consuming recipes, I'm your boy. 

Out in the garden, I'm often growing something that's supposedly out of fashion, and happily so. In a few weeks from now my cottagey old Nigella 'Love in a Mist' blooms will be out again, and today I've planted hydrangeas, to replace our unruly thicket of ornamental ginger which I reported on in my previous posting.

I like blue hydrangeas, and Pammy asked for a white one, so I bought both. This is the label for the blue ones (I bought three small pots at Bunnings for $13.95 each). 

And this is the far more traditional label for the larger and more expensive ($25) white hydrangea that Pammy wanted, which I found at a local garden centre.

Prior to planting I used the good old "put and look" method of figuring out where to plant each of the new people. The three small blue ones will grow together against the fence (and hopefully block our view of it) while the larger white one's job, apart from looking pretty, is to grow to its full 120cm high and wide and block any views of my less than gorgeous compost tumbler bin and various spare pots. 

Fortunately the blue hydrangeas' labels provided very good information on the plant size and spacing, but I have planted mine a bit closer together than recommended, as I want a dense effect from the hydrangeas to cover up the fence entirely.

After planting them, then watering in with seaweed solution, I spread out a good layer of sugar cane mulch to reduce the rampant weeds and retain some semblance of soil moisture. Besides, I just love the way mulched gardens look.

Once you start renovating, there's a "knock-on" phenomenon that applies to renovations both inside the house and outside in the garden. Fix or change anything, and it immediately makes the bit next to it, or behind it, look bad or weird or at least in need of renovation. The "knock-on" effect is that you are then obliged to do something about the next-door section to your renovation. It's a slippery slope of endless renovations ...

Now, in the case of renovating the ginger patch and turning it into hydrangea land, my previously hidden, messy disgrace of a composting area/pot storage zone is now there for all to see. The shame!

And so yesterday morning I spent a few hours pulling out every pot and sorting them out into this much better, much tidier area. I'm so proud of it that here I am including it in my hydrangea blog posting! 

The trouble is, now I've renovated my ginger patch, and then renovated my pot storage area, it has made me rethink how I am using pots in the garden, and that's what I plan to do a posting on next. 

It never ends!

Rumble in the jungle

We're renovating again. This time it's the lush but messy jungle of gingers ... it has to go. Sorry.

The jungle looks pretty ordinary all through spring. The problem is, once the frangipani tree is bare, and after I cut down the nearby lush lemon grass foliage from its six-foot high peak to a mere six-inch stump, you can see too much of the jungle. For nine months of the year it's almost hidden from sight, but now you can see it too clearly. It is an eyesore of dead brown bits ... lots of dead brown foliage beneath the evergreen canopy. I try to cut it back, but it is a fight to make it look even respectable.

Here's the offending foliage from its best angle, where it almost looks nicely jungle-like under the shade of the frangipani.

And here it is while the lemon grass stalks are just little 'uns in late spring. However, for all of September, October and November, the ginger patch looks messy. It needs a lot of cutting back, and despite that effort it rarely looks very appealing.

My problem was simply that I knew it was going to be an appalling job. I didn't even stop to think about the spiders and other creepy crawly life that might not be very pleased by my intrusion. I just concentrated on how much sheer hard work was involved ... and as it turns out, I was right! 

I'm not young anymore, and it has taken me a few days to cut it all down and dig it all out. Once it's reduced to brown rubble, it doesn't look so big, but don't let that fool you.

The worst part, without doubt, was digging out the roots with a mattock. These formed a dense mat about 3 yards long and one yard wide, and at ground level there was barely any soil. 

And beneath one layer of roots I often found a second, deeper layer of roots. These gingers really know how to build an environmental civilisation.

I scoured my shed for every tool I could find to help reduce the patch to a pile. It was an international effort, with a Japanese trimmer, an Aussie mattock, Swiss secateurs, Korean digger and a Japanese cane cutter.

The electric hedge trimmers removed the top layer of foliage, but didn't have much impact on the canes. The mattock somehow got heavier and heavier each time I picked it up, but in the end, like the forwards in a rugby match, the mattock won the "player of the match" award. I could not have done it without this ancient tool.

This jaggedy-edged scythe is called a Niwashi Shark, and it was brilliant at cutting down the canes almost to ground level. It's a Japanese garden tool, but I bought mine from New Zealand, at http://www.niwashi.co.nz, several years ago, and it is a well-made tool that feels like it is going to last the next few decades that will probably see me out here on planet Earth.

A wonderful all-round digging too, my Ho-Mi was fabulous at tilling the soil and discovering extra layers of roots once the mattock had "cleared" a section. It too feels like it will last a lifetime, and I particularly like the way the blade of my old Ho-Mi looks like it was forged in the Middle Ages. I bought mine online from the Gundaroo Tiller, http://www.allsun.com.au/HoMi.html, at about the same time I bought my Niwashi tiller and my Niwashi Shark — I think about 10 years ago, and last time I checked online they still seem to be in business.

Finally, the good news. For my shady 3 metres of ground, I am planting some hydrangeas. Pammy asked for a white one, but I also like blue ones, so we're buying both. The spot where the hydrangreas will grow will be shady for most of the time, but exposed to the sunshine in late winter and early spring, so I hope it suits them.

I'm glad I've done all the heavy digging to get rid of the ginger patch now. Five years from now I don't think I'd be physically up to the task. It almost killed me this time round.

I kind of like the idea of returning to growing old-fashioned hydrangeas in my dotage. More my pace these days.

Watering the garden, way back when

As a minor family history project I've dug out all of my ancient black and white family photos, with the aim of scanning them, burning them to a disc and sending this off to the small band of family members here and there who might be interested. While doing this I came across a few snaps of the house where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and had a few thoughts about the garden there, and the contribution it made to my love of gardening now. It wasn't much of a contribution, mind you, as it wasn't much of a garden, but the seeds of my passion for plants and gardening were sown then.

Not entirely sure of the vintage of this one, but it looks like it might have been taken before my first-ever cricket match for the Lane Cove Under 12s, when I was about 10. They put the youngsters into the third under 12 team, named us the Lane Cove Colts, and it took the older lads about one minute to rename us the Lane Cove Clots. While cricket remains a great love of mine, I've chosen this photo because I'm standing in front of the hydrangea, about the only truly lovely plant in our very bare garden of mostly lawn and concrete footpaths. I loved watering the hydrangea and loved its big, generous blue flowers.

Classic Sydney suburbia of the early 1960s. We had a row of oleanders planted by the front fence. Dad's efforts at gardening amounted to grumpily agreeing to hack back the oleanders every year or so, immediately after the official notice from the local council arrived in the letterbox informing him that other residents had complained about how the oleanders had so overgrown the footpath that they found it difficult to get by. I also loved watering the oleanders and watching them grow so rapidly. I think Dad had a secret plan to kill the oleanders by over-pruning them, but that only seemed to make them grow and flower even more. I like to think that my watering helped them to bounce back each time.

Here's Dad and our family car, the Mark Five Jaguar. All the kids from the opposing cricket teams thought we were posh and had a Rolls Royce. We could and occasionally did fit all 12 members of the Lane Cove Colts team into the Jag, too. But this photo is here not only because the hydrangea is in bloom in the far right corner, but also because the Jag is parked near the cricket pitch. I know, having a slightly downhill sloping cricket pitch isn't ideal, but it didn't prevent countless memorable Test Matches between my brother, who is four years older than me and always got to be the Australians, and me, who being the junior chap always ended up being England, the West Indies or Pakistan etc. Each time I ever amazed us both and came close to a win, he'd just start bowling faster. I didn't have that option, I was already bowling flat out.

And so with the reminiscences dusted off, the thing that I remember so clearly from these photos was my love of watering the garden. We didn't actually DO any gardening so to speak. The hydrangeas and oleanders had been planted before I arrived, or when I was so young that I can't remember them being planted. So all the gardening there was to do was simply keeping it all alive with water.

Apparently my love of watering the garden started at an early age, so my older sisters tell me. Even by the time I was four years old I was outside watering the garden. A leading socialite of the time (well, she was both head of the Mothers' Club at the local primary school and had a hyphenated surname) used to walk past our house each day. Apparently, one day while watering the garden I called out a cheery "hello lady" and she ignored me. So I hosed her.

Her shrieks alerted my mother and sister, so I hosed them, too. Apparently it got totally out of hand and as my sisters retreated into the house, I followed them in, hosing away. At that point someone got brave and disarmed me, and presumably I got into trouble (but I don't remember a skerrick of this episode and am prepared to deny it ever happened, except here on this blog, which is on the internet and you know what they say about the internet).

And so that bare old patch of ground with a lot of lawn and concrete and just some tough old shrubs laid the seeds of my love of gardening. I really only got into gardening in recent decades, when I started sub-editing a homemaker magazine. That led to me moving to this house, with its modest patch of ground, about 17 years ago.

But still, to this day, one of my favourite things is watering the garden. With our current drought-induced water restrictions I can only unfurl the hose on Wednesdays and Sundays now, but it's always great fun to do, a childish pleasure of which I am sure I will never grow tired.