The early morning gardener

Of course it is impolite to eavesdrop on others' conversations, and I'm far too well brought up in the old-fashioned way to do it intentionally, but boy do I love a good accidental eavesdrop when you have no option but to listen to two people talking, close-by. 

In situations such as when you are seated behind people chatting loudly on the bus, or when the people at the table next to you in the cafe are doing the same, you do run the risk of being bored to tears by their inane chatter if they're talking about last night's reality TV show eliminations, but every now and then you strike a little bit of overheard "gold". 

Now, it wasn't anything gossipy or earth-shattering that I listened to, but it was funny to hear two people discussing "routines" as if they were discussing a terrible disease. In fact the whole conversation was hilariously devoted to these two people trying to outdo each other in how committed they were to having no routines whatsoever ... apart from their regular get-togethers at the cafe, of course.

In my advanced years I have come to a somewhat different conclusion about routines. At their worst, yes, strict routines can be debilitating in the same manner as a terrible disease, but at their best enjoyable routines can be as pleasurable as a nice cup of tea when you're thirsty.

And so, after no less than four paragraphs by way of introduction, I am very happy to tell you that I love my little early morning gardening routines. They're nothing special, it's mostly just watering the garden, actually, but there's an enormous amount of "noticing things" that goes on in its own infinite variety that makes this routine so special. On with the slide show of the pleasures of early morning gardening, plus a few things I noticed this morning.

So many plants and fruits look nicer with water droplets on them, and our little crop of baby figs shows that off very nicely.  


  

As far as mint is concerned, there's no such thing as too much water, but this healthy crop is mostly a case of job satisfaction for the savage pruning it performed on its straggly former self about a month ago. To stay looking lush and healthy, mint needs to be cut back down to pot-rim level several times a year.

One of my favourite vegies, this is "perpetual spinach". Yesterday morning I knew I was going to need some baby spinach leaves for a salad, so I picked the leaves early in the day, while they were still full of moisture. If I picked the leaves in the hot afternoon, the leaves would have far less moisture. Unlike ordinary spinach, this variety lasts much longer in the ground. It's "cut-and-come-again" spinach, and the only mistake you can make with it is to not harvest it often. Fortunately we use spinach a lot in cooking and in salads. These bigger leaves will be very nice as a cooked accompaniment to some salmon on the weekend. 

All this photo is about is that it's nice to check on the progress of new plants early in the morning and see that they're happy. These are New Guinea impatiens.

The gentle morning glow shows some plants in their "best light". A classic example is our potted NSW Christmas Bush, whose delicate "flower" colour is at its loveliest in the softer morning light. In the harsh light of the afternoon, it's a far less appealing, drowned out by the glare.

Impatiently waiting for the first fragrant frangipani of the season is one of my current pleasures of the morning. I love how frangipanis send up flower stalks and fresh new leaves in November. There's something "alien" about them.

Serves me right! I'm always telling people here at this blog that coriander doesn't like the heat, and will go from leafy to seedy in no time, once the weather warms up. And so what did I do? I planted some coriander sprouts in September, then watched all my predictions come true after a bout of very warm October weather. Even though I've lost my leafy herb, I have now settled on harvesting all the seed in a few weeks' time and drying it, saving it to sow over autumn and winter next year.

The early morning is a great time for crime-fighting too. Here's a bronze orange bug mugging an innocent baby lemon. Not any more it isn't.

Finally, the early morning is also the time when I get most of my bigger gardening jobs done. Yesterday I trimmed a hedge before the heat grew too oppressive. Tomorrow I am pulling down all six hanging baskets and renovating them in the morning. Weeds have colonised a few baskets where geraniums are meant to be the only occupants, and so after renovations are complete I am hoping for a much better flower show from them.


And so, if you have somehow managed to make it all the way to the bottom of this blog posting, take it from me that I love some of life's routines, especially my morning expeditions out into the garden. It's practical, in that I can get some little jobs done while the temperatures are still cool. I do wilt in the heat, I'm afraid, and so my mornings are when I get most of my gardening jobs done these days. 

It's a happy routine I am willing to advocate — if your mornings aren't taken up with getting the kids off to school, or yourself off to work. However if you are in a position to be in the garden for at least half an hour most mornings, give it a try, even if it means getting up out of bed half an hour earlier than usual.

Splashing out on herbs

It's amazing what a difference a pot can make to a plant's personality. In the case of my traditional 'Mediterranean' herbs such as rosemary, thyme, oregano and bay leaf, they have turned out to be very different plants to care for, compared to how they grow in ordinary garden soil. Yes, of course they need more maintenance in a pot, but I am surprised how thirsty they are. They all love a drink (well, at least in springtime they do).

Let's put this discovery another way. Since I have started watering these potted herbs a lot more often than I ever did in previous years, they are much happier. And yes, I am slow on the uptake sometimes. (Just ask Pam!) 

Much happier now that it is being watered
every morning, the rosemary is lush, deep
green and very fragrant to be around.

As I water the rosemary now, I can smell its 
sharp scent wafting around in the air.

Same goes for my potted bay tree. More water
this season has produced more growth, and
much nicer looking foliage. 

The thyme is flowering its head off at the moment. It needs the
most clipping to stay bushy, plus, you guessed it, water.

I've already done a blog posting recently on this potted oregano
patch, but it needs lots of watering as well.

Though hardly classic Mediterranean herbs,
the two pots of mint (common mint in the
foreground and basil mint behind) lap up the
water like a pair of thirsty hounds. 

When I grew rosemary, oregano and thyme in the ground I never watered them. Sydney's relatively abundant rainfall took care of all their needs for many years. And so I always thought of them as almost drought-proof and definitely not thirsty. I knew that transferring them to a pot would mean I'd have to water them more often, but I have, until now, underestimated how much water they need.

And so, Aussie gardeners, if your potted Mediterranean herbs aren't looking too terrific this spring, think about giving them more water more often. It might be what they desperately need. 

I'm not sure what they want once summer comes around, but my new hunch is that it will be more water than I gave them last summer...

Winter's pleasant depths

Do you find that on today's internet you often read stuff that's of interest, but only a few days later you can't remember exactly where you read it? It's a case of "that was a thousand clicks ago, how can I remember that?".

Well, I'm pleading a case of thousand-click memory loss, but I was reading some Australian gardening content last week – not a well-informed blogger, it was some fool doing it for money – who was banging on about the grey, gloomy depths of winter, as if they were living in Europe or North America. I wandered outside into my admittedly chilly-ish garden and all I could see in the depths of winter here was lush greenery and a beautiful array of colours.

And so for this little posting I would like to celebrate the depths of winter here in Sydney, Australia. When the cold winds blow from the south you certainly need jumpers and jackets, and slow-cooked casseroles still taste fab once the sun has gone down, but out in the garden there's plenty of colour to enjoy.

Squadrons of bees are feasting on the lavender, their little black
legs glowing golden with collected pollen.

The bromeliads enjoyed the World Cup action in Rio, and wish
they were back home in South America, but Sydney is OK.

Even the bromeliads waiting their turn to
flower can at least wear nice variegated fashions.

My 'hedge' of chervil is at its peak. The flopped
over bits in the foreground are merely drunk on
the drink of fresh water I gave them a few
moments before I started snapping pix. They'll
sober up soon enough.

Kalanchoe 'Copper Spoons' is loving the cooler weather.
I'm trying to strike lots of babies of this lovely thing. No luck
yet, but it is a slow process, I believe.

And the Crassula 'Campfire' is well and truly ablaze.

The new mint growing in the 'spot from hell'
under the adjacent grevillea is loving its first
few months here, but it needs lots of water to
keep this backlit beauty happy.

A Christmas gift poinsettia pot which Pammy
is taking a special interest in is doing what it
does naturally in the cooler months: blush red.

And finally, this single tibouchina bloom doesn't
know it's winter. It's meant to flower in autumn,
so either it's early or it's late, but it's on its own, the 
only flower on the bush at the moment.

And so that's the depths of winter here right now. Yes, growth is slow, but everything is still steadily growing, and for some plants it's their most beautiful time of year.

Spicing up the herb garden

I've been waiting for a chance to do an update on my herb garden, as it has changed a lot in the last year. The big change is that almost everything is growing in pots now, instead of in the ground. Now is the perfect time for the update for two very good reasons. The first is that it's spring, so everything is growing well and looks nice for photos. 

The second reason is that a new book on herbs and spices, by Don Burke, is going on sale next week, and as I worked behind the scenes helping Don to put the book together, I want to tell you all about it. Pictured below is the book cover, but I'll tell you all about it at the end of this blog post. Before my not-very-amateur burst of rampant commercialism, it's onto my potted herb garden show-and tell.

French tarragon is happy as larry in its new, wider pot,
replanted there during midwinter when it was just a bunch
of snoozing bare roots and runners. It has such a nice
mildly aniseedy flavour that is heaven with chicken, or eggs.

Oregano, grown from seed just on a whim, looking lovely
right now. It was looking straggly about six weeks ago, so
I cut it back all over and now it's at its finest. That's the big
secret with herbs in general, but potted herbs in particular:
cut them back often, a light cut once a month works wonders.

Chives in front, lemon thyme left and sage in flower, right.
The sage is from my original in-the-ground mother plant. I dug
up a section with a rootball and potted that up. It took a while to
bounce back, but it's happy now in its terracotta pot.

Another 'sprog of mum' plant, my common thyme is a roots-
and-all chunk of the former large mother plant, replanted and
doing well in a wide, shallow pot. This is one plant that I
cut back very regularly, to keep it low, dense and bushy.

The rosemary is a cutting grown from the monster size parent,
and I am cruelly trimming it to encourage dense, low growth,
as it can grow to silly sizes if you let it go unchecked. Rosemary
has such a strong flavour you never need much in any dish.

Moist mint is happy mint. I have two pots here, one with common
mint, the other with spearmint, and both need major cutbacks
about three or four times a year. I cut the whole plants down
to pot-rim level, back to just stumps, then give it a good feed.
I love the look of the two pots when they're in their pomp.

I still have a few herbs in the ground, including this chervil,
which I didn't plant here. It turns out that chervil is so happy
here it's behaving like a weed and self-seeding all over the
place. It has a lovely, light aniseedy flavour.

Also in the ground and "on the way out" is this patch of
coriander, which is starting to go to seed as the weather
warms up. The patch has been here for a few months now,
as coriander loves our mild winters the best. That's the
time to grow it here in Sydney. If you grow it in summer,
you'll have to sow, grow and harvest three or four crops
each summer season, as it goes from leafy to seedy in
no time at all during steadily hot summer weather.

That's enough for my own personal update on the herb patch. It's time to show you Don's new book, priced at $29.95 in hardcover, which goes on sale on October 1. It's published by New Holland Publishers, is 304 pages long and has entries on virtually every useful herb and spice you can think of, plus lots that you might not have heard of. Here's the cover.

With only a few exceptions, each herb is covered in what's called a 'double-page-spread' of two open, facing pages. Pam did some of the illustrations used in the book, and my wide-ranging contribution to Don's text goes under the heading of "editorial consultant". Don loves to get down to the practical nitty-gritty of gardening, so he offers tips on how to grow each herb, best varieties, how to harvest and dry or prepare it, then how best to use it in the kitchen. He also quite frankly tells you whether it's worthwhile trying to grow each herb or spice in the garden (as some are hopelessly impractical to grow in backyards while others are dead-easy). 

And Don loves a good debunking of myths, too. This is a no-mumbo-jumbo book! Instead of mindlessly repeating all the ancient myths about herbs and spices being good for curing ague, plague or whatever, he's gone straight to modern scientific research to find out whether each herb really is beneficial or not. (The good news is that many are very useful.) However, this is also where Don's book is full of new, fresh info that might contradict some of the very unscientific mumbo-jumbo that has been long attributed to the healing powers of various herbs and spices. Some traditional 'medicinal' herbs are actually unsafe for human consumption, and several are simply useless. While researching this subject area I was struck by how many herb experts writing their books had unquestioningly just repeated the traditional folk myths about the medicinal benefits of herbs and spices. So I say good on you Don for turning to science for your evidence in this area. I learned a lot at this stage of the project.

And did I tell you it's full of delicious recipes and gorgeous colour photos? And if you like to brew interesting cups of tea we've got the tea brewing recipes for you too.

OK, so I am a bit biased, but it's a new kind of herb and spice book, a deliciously practical one. A few enjoyable months of my working life went into helping Don research and prepare the text for this book, and I am very pleased with how it has turned out. Go check it out if you can. 

I've noticed that while it doesn't 'officially' go on sale until October 1, it's already up and available for pre-order on websites such as Amazon, the ABC Shop site here in Australia, and numerous other book sellers' websites. Just search for 'Herbs & Spices' by Don Burke and you'll find it.

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.

Good cheer

Of all the silly things a usually sensible person could do, I updated our accounts on Saturday, and delving into inconvenient financial facts always has a slightly depressing effect, doesn't it? And so yesterday, Sunday, was a low point for me, a cheerless day in the garden where all I did was pull out weeds and cut back a rampant ground cover in the front garden that likes to accost pedestrians in the street.

Not the greatest weekend, but it did end well with the first good downpour of rain in ages, and then this morning, Monday, wandering out into the garden had an amazingly uplifting effect on me. Everywhere I looked I saw positive signs, pretty colours, sweet scents – it was full of good cheer. 

And so, dear readers, I present a simple posting designed partly to cheer myself up but also to celebrate the benefits of slowing down and taking stock not only of the pennies in the jar but also the beautiful, natural riches around you.

This is what started it all off this morning. While gathering yet
another colander full of cherry tomatoes, the air was wafting along
on sweet tropical frangipani scents. I stood up, looked at their
lovely simplicity, inhaled another breath and my mood changed.

 

For the record, this is my favourite typo, cheery tomatoes.

Just as I stepped away from cheery frangipani
land I smiled at a conversation I had with an
expert gardener about how impossible it is to
grow Acacia cognata in Sydney. 

The rain brings out the scents and the colours;
this pot of mint was spicy with its tangy scent.

The mint is in flower now, a happy plant in semi-shade provided
it's given outrageous amounts of water and fertiliser.

Next door to the mint, the French tarragon is a contented low
forest of foliage. Medium water, slow-release fertiliser is all
it needs, plus one hell of a cutback in early spring.

My first go at growing Florence fennel is doing
OK. I have a whole packet of seeds here, but
only planted a few in late spring, as I had
missed the boat for the earlier spring sowing
it prefers. This autumn, I'm sowing lots more.

The strawberries just keep on coming. We started
harvesting breakfast bowls full of these back in
early October and they aren't close to finishing
yet. And to think I didn't even plant anything
there! They came up out of the compost, just
like monsters come up out of black lagoons.

And while I'm counting my blessings and
spreading the good cheer, let me recommend
radishes to you. These are French Breakfast
long cylindrical radishes, and I sowed the
seeds for these on Thursday. I'll probably
be eating some of these by early February.
And I've learned to like their flavour, too.
Super-finely sliced, not too much either, added
to a green garden salad, they are pure zing.

The Thai makrut lime fruit is ready for grating
into dressings, salads and sauces, but the only
hard thing is removing them from the tree,
simply because they look so good there, all
knobbly, deep green and just a bit weird.

There's a party going on in the succulent patch.

The Tiger Grass which is meant to become a
tropical look screen to hide the boring metal
fence is finally growing fast, now that the
heat of summer is here. That's what it loves,
apparently, heat and water, just as if it was
growing in the jungles of Thailand. One of
these days a tiger will jump out of that foliage!

If you're still with me after this marathon 'cheer up' to myself, thanks. There really is nothing quite like a spin around the garden on a cool morning after overnight rain. Quite magical, its effect.