Sweet shade

Success has its rewards, but like most drugs it also has its undesirable side-effects. Here in sunny Garden Amateurland, our modest success in growing things in all our lovely Australian sunshine is, ironically enough, lots more shade, and less sunshine.

Avert your eyes from our captivating tresses of Spanish moss for a moment if you can, because in the background you can see our two major shade-makers. In the centre is a lemongrass patch that has grown that big in one season, and on the right is our beautiful frangipani tree, which once was a cutting but is now approaching youthful adulthood. The little patch of straw mulch in front of both was once our garden's sunniest spot, a thriving little vegie patch, but right now it barely gets an hour of direct sunshine each day. It's overshadowed by success and I'm not sure what to grow there.

What to do with the lemongrass is a simple matter of cutting it back a month or two from now, in what was once known as "midwinter". I suspect we won't get much of a winter this year, if our warmest-ever autumn is any guide. However, the lemongrass will benefit from a very savage cutback, but will be this size again, same time next year. It's one of my favourite plants in the garden. It's very pleasantly lemony-scented to be near while I'm weeding, and its many graceful arches look like a green fireworks explosion frozen in time.

As a result of all this shade, I have swapped around the roles of a few garden beds. This is eastern side of the garden, now our sunniest spot.

One little bed is now our salad patch. In the foreground, another row of radish seeds have just sprouted this morning (hello!), next to them some lettuce seedlings are doing their thing, and barely visible, slender baby shallots/scallions are making their usual hesitant start.

Next door to salad-land, in our other sunny spot, that's parsley in the foreground, grown from supermarket salad parsley 'micro-sprouts' (see this older post for more on that), and behind the parsley is Pammy's 2016 crop of Iceland poppies, something I grow for her every year.

As for what to grow in the shadier spots, several different herbs do remarkably well in less than full sunshine. Here's some chervil supermarket mico-sprouts planted just yesterday. Chervil is a herb more people should grow and use in both cooking and salads, and it has the bonus that it is not only good in semi-shade (or semi-sunshine if you like), it actually seems to prefer the gloom. Parsley also copes fairly well with semi-shade, and as I've also planted a whole punnet of coriander micro-sprouts from the supermarket into the semi-shaded spot overshadowed by the lemongrass, I'll soon find out how it goes there. 

As for what to do about our garden's major shade-maker, the frangipani tree, it's a conundrum. It's beautiful, and as you can see here it's not just beautiful on the outside, with its fragrant yellow-centred white blooms. Even on the "inside", the space under the frangipani is a deep-shade mini forest that has a touch of the fairytales about it. It does need to be trimmed a bit, but not too much.

In years gone by the deciduous frangipani would drop all its leaves in June and would only fire up again in greenery in late August. In our ever-warming climate I suspect it will be leafless for just a few weeks every year.

The frangipani is also spreading so wide it's actually growing over the path leading out to Pammy's art studio at the bottom of the garden, so a few branches will be removed in winter so she can get out there without being fragrantly whacked in the face next summer. 

We haven't really made up our mind what to do about the frangipani. In the long run it will grow bigger and it will change how our garden grows. My instinct is to go with the flow and not to be too much "in charge" of everything that happens here. I'm just the gardener. While the odd bit of wayward frangipani might be lopped off, I suspect gardening here over coming years will take its own sweet-scented course.

Woo hoo, rain coming, action stations!

We gardeners are right up there in the top echelon of people who get a real kick out of enjoying life's simple pleasures. This morning, I'm a kid again, excited by the forecast of showers maybe coming this afternoon, then a definite promise of rain tomorrow. Woo hoo, the first rain in ages! Lots of little jobs to do ...

But wait, there's more. My bag of potatoes is sprouting up a forest of little green men. It's about time, too. It's been three weeks since I bagged them up (you can read all about that little excercise here). 

Traaa daaa, Mr Potato Head makes his debut. I've planted
four seed potatoes in the bad and there are four sets of
buds coming up, so they're all performing nicely.

Now that the potato shoots are up, the other job to do is to
gently fold down the sides of the bag, so the little shoots can
get some more sunlight. They don't need any fertiliser. They
are surrounded by it all already, courtesy of the compost. 

With this rain coming, it's the perfect time to get the job of
feeding the citrus trees done. Our lemon tree is covered in
new shoots, flowers and flower buds, so it's busting for a
decent feed. The same applies to our lime tree and our potted
Thai (kaffir) lime. 

Here in Australia it's best to feed citrus twice
a year, at the end of summer (in late February)
and now, the end of winter or start of spring
(late August). So if you have citrus trees, do
it now. Here's my posting on how I do it from
last February, 'Flingin' in the rain'. Today
I am again using my old standby, Dynamic Lifter.

This is outrageous. I only planted this strawberry seedling
on Wednesday, and it's already flowering. So, as well as
making sure it is well mulched, I have sprinkled around some
Dynamic Lifter and watered it in (but not too much, the
coming deluge will water in all my fertiliser for me).

Another big job to squeeze in before the rains
come is to yank out all the weeds. I'm down to
my last two square metres of weeding to do, so
it won't take long to pull these invaders out.
While weeding is a dull task, I find that if I
do it in small sections over a week or two, covering
the weeded ground with mulch as soon as I
finish, it's not such an onerous task.

One little trick with pulling weeds is to learn
what "wanted" self-seeding plants look like as
babies. These are two self-seeded Love-in-a-Mist
plants coming up, and there's about a dozen
of them showing up now near the lime tree.
I love the ethereal beauty of Love-in-a-Mist
(Nigella) flowers, and I am hoping that they
will become a permanent part of our garden
without me ever having to plant them again.

Finally, I'm planting out some more of my
supermarket sprouts. This time I am giving some
parsley sprouts a go as a border around a bed. 

I'm not sure how the parsley sprouts will take, but if they work out OK then most of the "micro sprouts" (eg, coriander, chervil, radish, sorrel, parsley) sold in punnets at my local Woolies supermarket can be treated as cheap seedlings to grow in the garden. You can read all about the original experiment here. 

Parsley has always been a plant which is very fussy about being transplanted as seedlings. The old wisdom is that it's best to grow parsley from seed, so I won't be surprised if my parsley seedlings don't survive. But if they do survive, I guess that will be because I planted clumps of several baby seedlings together, and all I really need from each clump is for one seedling to survive and grow to maturity.

Time will tell, but the first stage of caring for my parsley seedlings is to water them well, and I believe that Huey the rain god has that job covered for the next seven days. Over to you Huey!

Successes and failures

This blog posting has taken a few weeks to happen, but at last I can report on a magnificent failure, plus two very satisfactory little successes.

Projectionist! The failure slide first, please...

A failure? Yep, nothing like what I was hoping for. This, folks is a pot of failed radishes, grown from a little punnet of "Micro Radish" sprouts which I spotted at my local giant market-dominating supermarket. The gardener in me said "go on, have a go at growing them into radishes". And when I also spotted some "Micro Chervil" sprouts and "Micro Coriander" sprouts, the grand experiment began...

Here's the punnet of micro radishes, cute and fresh little
zingers which are nice tossed into a garden salad.

Plucked from their punnet they sit in their own
little pot of growing medium, which is kind of
like compacted cotton wool, sort of.

And here's the failure in action: no little round
radishes at all. It's a nice pot of leafy greenery
with red stems, and the leaves taste peppery, like
mustard greens, so I can still use them in stir-fries,
but the experiment was to grow radishes, and
in that attempt I didn't do all that well.

However, I didn't collapse into a funk of despondence, because at the same time I was tasting bitter (or, more accurately, peppery) defeat with the radishes, I was also savouring some, well ... savoury success. The coriander and chervil experiments have turned out quite nicely.

At $1.49, my chervil sprouts are cheaper than nursery
seedlings. More usually they're $2.98 a pop, which is still OK.

The potted chervil is belting along, loving the deluge of rain
which has soaked all of Sydney to its sandstone bones.

Ditto, the coriander sprouts, they're doing well too.

The chervil sprouts look great in the punnet. You can see some
long, thin black chervil seeds still attached here and there.

The trick with planting them up is to divide the punnet into
clumps. Don't bother with trying to separate out individual
sprouts, that's too much like hard work, and it's also too
much handling of the tender sprouts. Instead, just break this
kind of clump into four or five mini clumps, and plant these.

Here's how that single clump looked after being divided up
and planted out. The next trick is simply to keep the sprouts
watered. Some Seasol or Eco-Seaweed once a week is also
a good idea, as these solutions encourage roots to grow.

It's the same story with the coriander. 

It's the same story with the coriander. Just
divide the punnet into several clumps, not
individual seedlings, then plant them out.
Water often, seaweed solution weekly.

Both the coriander and the chervil should last for months, if planted now. As I've said many times before in this blog, coriander loves winters in Sydney and lasts for months in the cooler weather. In summer it grows too fast and turns to whispy-leafed seedy stuff in a matter of weeks. So now is the best time to plant some coriander.

And chervil loves winters here, too. It's also one of the better herbs for growing in part shade or at least gardens that don't get a full day of sunshine (which is the case in many inner-city gardens).

At the prices the supermarket is asking for these mini sprouts, this way of growing them is easier than seed and cheaper than nursery-bought seedlings. Good luck!