The changeover season

Every move you make here in Sydney at the moment, you sweat. It's sticky. On these uncomfortably humid, end-of-summer days, the weather forecasters endlessly repeat their "chance of a shower" chant each morning, and that means it's very warm and humid, mostly sunny all day, then in the late afternoon there's rain or, if we're lucky, a storm as well.

While it's not my favourite time I year (the humidity knocks me around more and more as I get older), I do enjoy this season because it's time for the changeover from the spring/summer crops, to the autumn/winter plantings in the vegie patch. Rip out the old crops, plant new ones. That's what I call fun.

So the garden looks like a mulch farm at the moment, with not much to show for all the effort, but I do like digging soil. That's one of the best bits about gardening. Digging over soil. I also enjoy adding a bit of dolomite lime to sweeten the soil's pH, then working in some cow manure and compost to give the worms and all the other soil-borne critters a treat. At the end of it all, smooth over and level the rich dark soil, stand back and admire your work... 

The digging takes some time, the planting seems to be over in minutes. I've been a bit lazy this time round. Instead of conscientiously raising everything from seed I went down to the garden centre and bought some punnets of seedlings. I've sown seeds, too, but only here and there. Here's how things are going, in the Changeover Season of autumn 2014.

Wild rocket in front, lettuce (raised from seed)
behind. The wild rocket is the serrated-leaf kind
seen most commonly in shops. It's a perennial
plant that should last some time here. It's a much
better bet as a garden plant than the ultra-fast
growing annual type of rocket. Mind you, baby
annual rocket (with the rounded leaves) is still
my favourite rocket to eat, but it's so much work
to sow, re-sow, re-sow, re-sow. Eventually I
tire of the effort, and give it a rest. At least
with this wild rocket you get an easier supply.

Here's the mulch farm. There are spinach seedlings in the
centre, spring onions as well, perpetual spinach on the left.
The perpetual spinach will crop well until spring and is one
of my favourite leafy greens. The English spinach is much
shorter-lived, but it is so nice in Japanese cuisine. The big
leafy greens on the left are more chicory plants, and they are
another excellent leafy green that we turn into Greek-style
horta, boiled greens dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.

There is such a thing as too many Thai limes. They're falling
off the tree now. It's a wonderful choice if you're wondering
which citrus to grow in a pot. It reaches a bit over 1m tall
and wide and seems quite hardy, too. Just brushing past the
leaves or the fruit is such a fragrant thing to do.

Huge, green and unproductive. I've tried watering in some
sulphate of potash to stimulate flower production on our
18-month-old passionfruit vine. No luck. Plan B is do nothing
at all. Pretend it's not there. It's a bit hard to do when it
is so huge, so it's now my 'elephant in the room' plant.  

At least the lemon tree is flowering its head
off. It smells lovely in the still morning air,
and hopefully the recent rains and the big
dose of chicken poo I gave it will restore it to
health and happiness.

Have you ever anxiously watched a plant, hoping
it would flower in time for the big Sunday lunch
that you've invited some friends to? Well, our
Tibouchina 'Jules' is letting us down. It has
18 hours left to burst into purple glory by midday
tomorrow. Otherwise it's just another green blob
in our very green blob of a garden. Healthy, yes.
In flower, not yet. 

As for the things I can't show you, I have sown more seeds of collard greens, as these big cabbage-family leafy greens were such a success over spring and early summer. They're meant to be even better in the cooler months, so here's hoping that's true. And I have also sown a few rows of seeds of the love-in-a-mist (Nigella) seeds I collected in midsummer, following the end of its spring flowering. 

The first of the collard green seeds are already up, after only five days in the soil. The Nigella seeds are on a more leisurely schedule. They'll appear in a couple of weeks, and the flowers won't do their thing for at least another six or seven months. I can wait. It's one of the very nice things about growing plants from seed. They offer the chance to share in a full life-cycle, especially if you harvest the seeds at the end of it all. I like that idea.

  

Nigella's secret admirer

I've been patiently waiting for months for this day to arrive, when our love-in-a-mist (Nigella) plants, sown from seed last autumn, finally burst into spring bloom. So, diligent little gardening blogger that I am, camera in hand, I trotted out this morning to take a few photos of these delicate pretties, only to find another admirer already in residence, sipping on some nigella nectar. 

This little person is definitely not a bee, nor is it a fruit fly or
a wasp, but I wasn't quite sure who he or she is.

Fortunately for me this garden visitor was not the flighty,
frantic kind of operator that your normal honeybee is. Instead,
it stayed in place, long enough for me to manage a few good
ID shots. Later, I Googled away and soon discovered its name
(I think...): it's a wasp-mimicking hoverfly, an insect that's found
in gardens Australia-wide. I only say "I think" because it could
also be a black-banded hoverfly. I'll leave the correct identification
up to the entomologists.

Almost lost in the hubbub of our pretty visitor, the love-in-a-mist
blooms are as lovely as ever, as this isn't the first time I've grown
or blogged about them. I sowed a packet of Yates Persian Jewels
mix, the only nigella seeds I could find, and a very parsimonious
packet of not-many seeds it was too, so to make sure of a
decent spring show I bought and sowed another packet soon after.

The Persian Jewels mix is meant to
include white, blue and pink but so far
there have been no pinks at all.

The plants themselves are unimpressive
but dainty, multi-branched with a flower
head at the end of each fine stem, on
plants about 50cm high. These colourful
flowering types aren't the variety of Nigella
used to supply the spice called Nigella. That
comes from a similar but different plant,
Nigella sativa, which has white flowers
and bigger pods later on, filled with the
small dark black seeds used in cooking.

As for our garden visitor, the wasp mimicking hoverfly (or
maybe it's the black banded hoverfly), this is a garden good-guy
who likes to feast on juicy aphids and scale insects. Even if
it didn't do anything especially useful, it'd still be welcome
here because, as always, I am merely sharing this garden
space with all creatures great and small, I don't own it. 

Patient progress

One of my favourite gardening blog titles is 'Patient Gardener', as that is what I would like to be: a patient gardener. Shame about that, can't have everything I guess. 

However, wandering around my garden this warm and sunny spring morning I felt such a sense of progress here, there and everywhere, despite much effort on my part. It was then I realised that I must have been experiencing an unfamiliar bout of patience. So that's what patience feels like... it's a sense of knowing calm, a preparedness to wait, without interfering.

Pleased with the spring progress all around me, I popped inside, grabbed my little pocket camera and found all these little patient virtues enjoying the spring sunshine every bit as much as I was.

Mr or Ms butterfly posed for many seconds atop a lettuce leaf
while I fumbled excitedly for the right camera settings. Ta.

I could have sworn I harvested a big bunch of
this perpetual spinach plant for our dinner last
Wednesday, but now it looks just as big as ever.

The brown liquid splodge on this collard green leaf is this
morning's organic liquid feed. I have a few collard greens
plants steadily growing from the seed sown in early September.
The seeds came with my order of my friend Awia Markey's
'Soulicious' eBook cookery book, so I might as well give it
another plug while I'm at it. Check it out here.

I had to get out the tall step-ladder to take this shot of the first
passionfruit flower bud finally making an appearance. The
vine itself is a huge, wall-covering thing, but it's all greenery
and no flowers or fruit. Hopefully, if I'm patient and leave it
alone, it will produce many flowers and many fruit and we can
all live happily, deliciously, ever after.

I'm not sure why my Thai makrut lime looked
so ordinary all through winter, as it wasn't a
cold winter at all – quite the opposite in fact.
Regular feeds and cutting off the ugly bits has
suddenly borne flowers and fruit this spring.

Baby Turkish Brown figs have appeared on schedule.  

So too the next crop of strawberries from the
self-sprouted patch which came up out of the
compost. Such a healthy plant, these, easily
the most vigorous strawbs I've ever seen here.

This year I'm limiting tomato production to just a couple of
pots of cherry tomatoes, raised from seed. After a slow start
they're now 50% bigger than they were last weekend, or so
it seems.

Another "sown-from-seed" planting done last autumn, this is
the first love-in-a-mist (Nigella) flower to come out. Many more
should follow next week, so I'll post something about them once
the full range of colours makes an appearance.

As usual, the so-called Christmas bush gets its timing
completely out of whack, colouring up in October. 

The deciduous frangipanis must have been
leafless for just five or six weeks this year,
their shortest 'winter' ever.

Finally, as I was up on top of the step ladder
taking that passionfruit flower bud shot,
I had a view of the garden I rarely get, and
so here's the progress on my new fence
screen of four Gardenia magnifica plants.
What's that smell? Of course it's Dynamic
Lifter, that heady chicken manure perfume
that you detect. Look closely and you can see
the odd yellow leaf, a gardenia trademark
that often happens in winter and spring.
Chicken manure is the cure. Works every time.

Mustn't grumble

Mustn't grumble. We were in drought not long ago, but it's the 5th of November and already we have exceeded our average monthly rainfall. Yesterday we got 52mm (two inches), two days earlier 33mm. That's 85mm, and the average is 83. And here's the forecast for the next seven days.

At least I won't have to water the garden. And I still can do some gardening. In fact it should be easy. The poppies and brodieas are finishing and so they're coming out, and in will go a potager mix of flowers and vegies, which I always think looks pretty.

Every time I go out to my rain gauge I think of Michael Palin and his Eric Olthwaite character in the Ripping Yarns series. Eric's main hobbies were precipitation and shovels, and he was so boring that his parents ran away from home. Unfortunately for Eric, he lived in a part of England with very steady rain. He should have moved to Sydney! (At least the Eric story did have some excitement. He did become a famous armed bank robber, even if that did happen by accident.) Where was I? Oh yes, rain. Two inches yesterday. I have a rain gauge, and I keep records. I do have shovels but I wouldn't describe them as a major interest, though.

The good news is that some residents of Amateur Land are loving the rain. I had to bail out the goldfish's water garden, as the water was lapping at the brim, and for frisky goldfish one excited leap could mean a sudden change of environment. I actually lost one goldfish that way earlier this year.

And to finish on a positive note, the love-in-a-mist is popping up all sorts of colours in the rainy weather, including this lone pink person.

So, there's absolutely no good reason to grumble, just because it's raining a lot. The deeply dry soil is getting the soaking it needs, the water table deep below Sydney is being topped up. The ground is so soft that old plants will be a snack to pull out of the ground, and anything newly planted will just cruise along with moist soil below and rising temperatures flowing overhead.

But I do like a good weather grumble, especially when Huey from above looks down and thinks "you ungrateful sod!"

Star quality

Oh, wow. I expected the Louisiana iris to be nice, but not quite this nice.

It feels a bit like a Royal visit (if I was a monarchist, that is, but I'm not). Movie star. Yes, definitely an A-list movie star. Here, in my backyard!

I know I've shown you photos of my sage plant only recently, but it keeps on getting prettier and more covered in flowers as each day passes. I've never seen it looking this good before, and this plant has been here for several years now.

What the hell, one more pic of it. And this is meant to be just the culinary herb, Salvia officinalis, the 'official' one used by apothecaries (and cooks). As a welcoming committee for our movie star from Louisiana, it couldn't look any better. Of course they're getting on famously, my official blue welcoming committee and the movie star.

Finally, some action with the Nigella, the love-in-a-mist. No 'love' (ie, the flowers) yet, but we're getting a nice green mist developing as each day passes. Can't wait, but I'll have to!

Making plans

The rain is doing its best imitation of Madam Lash at the moment, telling Sydney "take that, Sin City" with successive whippings of rain. And so poor innocent gardeners, who've done nothing to deserve this punishment (apart from praying for rain) are sitting with their wet, squishy noses pressed against the window pane, looking out at a super-soggy garden, doing the only thing they can do right now – dreaming up what to do next.

This is definitely one of those "click on the photo to make it readable" photos. This is how the garden looks today, after 78mm rain (three inches) yesterday, and 50mm (one inch) spread over the two days beforehand. That's enough, Madam Lash, I can't take any more! Anyway, what follows are my plans for autumn plantings – probably beginning in March at the earliest. Let's start with the foreground, left – "brodiaeas in here".

Until last Sunday night I'd never heard of brodiaeas, but now I own 50 of them. Aren't catalogues wonderful? After a recent posting here, blasting away at how much I dislike spring bulbs, I've gone ahead and ordered some spring bulbs. I just figured that I wanted to see something different next spring, and as soon as they finish flowering, I'm pulling them all up and, shock-horror, tossing them all away. Total cost is $12.50, roughly the price of an indifferent bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. But it wasn't me who picked the brodiaeas.

That was Pammy's job. Pammy is a wonderful shopper, and also a magician with restaurant menus, able to find something amazing on a menu which everyone else misses. I suspect this is because she reads menus from cover to cover, same too with catalogues. Anyway, I tossed her this catalogue with her brief to choose something interesting, and the next morning it was on the kitchen table, with helpful pink sticky note thingys indicating the brodiaeas. Blue flowers. I love blue flowers!

By the following Friday, the postman dropped off the package. Parcels in the mail, one of life's simple pleasures!

Little buttons they are. Currently they're staying in the crisper bin of my fridge until planting time, which won't be until April. I asked my resident horticultural expert, Geoffrey, for some tips, and as well as telling me to wait until Anzac Day (April 25) before planting he helpfully added that the growers incorrectly list brodiaeas as being from South Africa when in fact they actually come from Northern California. So thanks once again to Geoffrey for his growing tips and advice, which is invariably spot-on.

Once Pam had set me off with a blue theme, I wondered what else might I grow that's blue-flowered, down the other end of the garden. It has been about 15 years since I last grew the old-fashioned cottage plant, love-in-a-mist, so I ticked the box for one packet of love-in-a-mist seeds while browsing the online catalogue of another major seed supplier, Digger's. (This photo is pinched from Google Images, by the way).

In the spot where currently I have an Asian eggplant producing a crop, I've decided to grow a dwarf Tibouchina 'Groovy Baby' which is only 60cm tall and 80cm wide. I'll plant this dwarf shrub in April, once the eggplant has finished. This is more of a summer and autumn flowerer, so it'll keep my favourite blue-flowered thing going a couple of months after all the spring blues have gone up to heaven. If all goes well, this will become a permanent planting here, a summer patch of blue in a lovely, sunny spot.

Across the path from the love-in-a-mist, I'm going to grow another crop of broad beans, my favourite home-grown vegetable to eat. This is a photo of the previous crop, which was a tall-growing variety tied to a nice bamboo frame. This time round I've picked a dwarf plant which only grows 1m tall, but as I still have the bamboo poles in the shed, I'll make up some kind of support for the floppy old broad bean plants with them.

This is just the tiny photo pinched from the Diggers catalogue. It's what they solemnly promise their red spring onions will look like, and I liked that look so much I ticked the box for a packet of seeds of these, and they'll form a border around the broad beans.

Of course I am going to grow poppies again for Pammy, in the same spot where I grew them last year, and I hope they'll be every bit as lovely this time round, too.

I've run out of photos for the rest of my autumn planting plans. But on the left side, near the house, I am going to replace my rather dreary big potted bay tree with a far more exciting and interesting potted 'Black Genoa' fig. I'm really looking forward to having a fig in the garden again. When we moved here an old in-ground fig tree struggled along for the first 15 or so years, producing bumper crops every summer, then it just fell over in a storm one day, its branches full of rot. And so 'Son of Fig II – the Black Genoa' will be starring at this blog fairly soon.

And that lovely big grevillea on the left needs pruning soon. Big tip for anyone growing grevilleas: prune them often, do it twice a year, after each flush of flowers. Take off up to a third each time if you like, but that's not compulsory, although some kind of pruning is. Roses and grevilleas have a lot in common - pruning makes both of them flower much better. But grevilleas hardly need feeding. Just pruning.

On the right side of the pathway, I am going to grow a leafy patch of flavours, combining flat-leaf parsley, coriander (cilantro) and some celery leaf plants, which produce lots of celery-flavoured leaves for cooking. Celery is a notoriously tricky vegie to grow, but I do like the flavour of the leaves, etc in making all sorts of sauces, so I'll give the seeds of these leafy relatives of celery (which I bought recently in an Asian food store in Darwin) a try this autumn.

Finally, on the centre, right side of the pathway, yet another crop of mixed 'mesclun' salad greens, a crop which, along with herbs, is probably the most useful, practical crop I grow here.

One thing I can say in favour of extremely wet days is that they slow you down enough to help you do some planning. So Madam Lash's ministrations aren't all bad, but she can stop now.