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.

Thinning citrus

I always thought there were two good reasons for thinning out your crop of baby citrus fruits, but reading up on the topic I've discovered a third excellent reason to do it.

1. The first reason for removing some of the baby fruits from your tree is to increase the size and quality of each of the remaining fruit that forms on the tree. Knew that.

2. The second is that thinning fruit prevents the tree totally jettisoning all fruits during a heatwave. A few years ago I didn't know that, and I didn't thin the fruit much, and a heatwave struck early in the season, and then I discovered that in order to survive the tree will willingly abandon a whole season's crop of thirsty little baby fruits (especially if it has also been dry and the plant is thirsty, anyway). Young trees are more likely to do this than older, established trees, but it's always a bit of a risk when fruits are just forming.

3. Here's the thing I discovered only recently. Citrus trees can tend to have a pattern of bearing a huge, bumper crop one year, then virtually no crop at all the next year. If you thin out your crop each year, it will tend to keep on producing crops to a nice, steady beat, year after year. Cool discovery!

Anyway, that's what I've been doing lately, and I thought one or two photos might be helpful.

This is a baby Eureka lemon this morning, covered in the latest shower of rain. Originally part of a cluster of three, he's the only one left, and he has doubled in size in a week of rain.

And here's the two-year-old Eureka lemon tree itself. In its first year I removed every last fruit from the tree, so it could put all its energy into growing. Last year I let just a couple of fruit mature, and they were lovely, squeezed over oysters I think it was. This year I have removed four out of every five baby fruit, as my main priority is for the tree to keep growing, but that should still give me about 15-20 nice lemons a few months from now, if all goes well.

Over the other side of the pathway, this is my espaliered 'Tahiti' lime, which is now about eight or nine years old and, given the small space it is allowed to occupy, fully grown. It actually needs a trim back, especially the top bit, which is hard to reach now, but I'm leaving it alone while the baby fruits are forming and the rest of the plant is looking so green and well. I've never done an espalier before, but it has worked out fairly well. I blogged all about it last year, here, if you're interested in the idea. Anyway, these last few days I have been thinning back what was looking like a bumper crop of limes.

Typically, I start off with about four, five, six or seven baby lime fruits in a cluster. As every last branch and stem of the tree is covered with these crowds of lime-green babies, my aim is to leave just one fruit to develop in each spot, after thinning.

The easy way to remove the fruit is to pinch one in your fingertips and give it a gentle twist. They usually come away very easily when they're young, like this.

As mentioned earlier, with this cluster I've just left one, the largest and healthiest baby.

I find the best way to thin the fruits is to have a couple of goes at doing it. Yes, it is a bit boring and arm-achey too, so I do it bit by bit, not all in one go. Besides, I always seem to just miss heaps of clusters the first time round, so I come back a couple of days later do a bit more. The nice part about doing the job is the lovely fragrance of the leaves, by the way. So it's not all bad and boring.

This approach works just fine if you have only one or two trees, as I do. I'm not sure what they do in orchards! Maybe they hand out fruit-thinning duties as punishment to bad orchardists – maybe they don't bother at all?

While at best it's fragrant drudgery, it is worthwhile doing, and here in Sydney it's the perfect time of year to do it.

Squeezing a lime

Garden science has overtaken me somewhat. These days growers are producing an astonishing array of dwarf fruit trees which are around half the height of the regular trees, yet they produce full-sized fruit. Long before I had ever heard of dwarf fruit trees, about seven years ago, I decided to squeeze a Tahiti lime tree into my little backyard the old-fashioned way – by turning it into an espalier.

I could have succumbed to the nervous virgin's lament of "I've never done this kind of thing before" and chickened out, but instead I just plunged in like a enthusiastic foolish boy, telling myself that it's the long list of things that you regret not doing that will bug you more in your old age than the long list of things that you regret doing. Espaliers, ho!

Before I grind you through cyberspace with all the nitty gritty detail of espaliers on a limited budget, this photo is the 'happily ever after' shot of a contented espaliered lime tree producing yet another season's crop of margarita juice and guacamole cream. (The stripey leaf behind belongs to a 'Bengal Tiger' canna lily, by the way.)

Here's the result after seven years. If I never move from here it might also be my last espalier, but it has worked out fairly well and wasn't that difficult to do. The main thing is to take time picking the right plant in the first place. What I did was simply sort through all the 20-or-so Tahiti limes for sale at the local large garden centre until I found one with three evenly spaced 'pairs' of branches aligned opposite each other up the main trunk. (Yes, a few people gave me strange looks at the time, but don't even think of trying to explain what you're doing. It's not worth it!). Once I got the chosen one home, set up the espalier frame and planted the baby tree, I cut off all the branches that weren't part of my sets of pairs. All of a sudden it looked like a small but perfectly formed espalier, almost from day one. Well, all right, a small and rather puny espalier, if you must.


For the uprights I used two tall metal fence posts designed for swimming pool fences. After concreting the two posts into the soil (allow about one-third of their length below ground, and two-thirds above ground), getting them nicely vertical with a spirit level and letting the concrete dry for a day, I braced the uprights with a small primed and painted timber cross-beam at the top. The 'tie' pictured here holding the tree in place is adjustable and is quite loose. It needs to be checked every six months or so (say, in mid spring and late summer).

For the lower cross-supports I chose good old galvanised clothes line wire. It isn't ageing much, is mostly not visible and is way cheaper than the admittedly superior and more expensive alternative, stainless steel wire.

At the other end the wires are tensioned up with adjustable turnbuckles, but over these seven years they haven't slacked much at all and I can't remember the last time I tightened them. The hardwood brace at the top is essential, by the way. If you don't have it, the tensioning of the lower wire rungs will tend to bend the metal posts inwards.

Adjustable Velcro ties connect the growing branches to the wires. These are the seven-year-old originals which have been out in all weathers and yet still unzip and zip with a pleasing, efficient swish every time. A truly useful garden tie, these guys.

The only trimming needed is to remove growth that is going in the wrong direction (ie, outwards from the espalier, instead of along the espalier's 'lines'). This trimming keeps the profile of the plant fairly 'flat' and is only necessary about twice a year (spring and late summer). The tree itself is healthy and produces good crops, although in the first two years it dropped almost all its baby fruits when scorching hot spring days surprised us all, as they usually do. These days I have learned to thin the baby fruit by half as soon as they have formed, and I'm probably more diligent about watering the tree, too. However, I suspect the tree itself has just grown more roots and should really take most of the credit for its good performance!

In the end I'm happier with the espalier than I would have been with a dwarf tree mostly because of the satisfaction of trying something supposedly difficult, such as an espalier, and succeeding. But deep down I feel the real satisfaction is simply discovering that it's actually easier than it looks, and spreading the word! When I size up the ultimate size of a dwarf tree, I think my espalier is smaller and takes up less space, which is why I chose that method. Sure, it will need trimming for the rest of my days if it is to stay small, but right now that isn't an issue. And it produces more limes than we can squeeze, anyway!