Country revival

I might be a city boy born and raised, and a long-term denizen of the inner-city if the truth be told, but the occasional weekend of country-style fresh air, sunshine and wide open spaces is as important to my continued sanity as being with my darling girl, Pammy, almost all the time. 

Almost? Yep, left her behind in the Big Smoke (she was off to the Sydney Opera House for a big Sing-Sing anyway) and I headed down south, and up into the hills, to visit my old mate Fraser at his lovely property close to the charming, historic and steadily reviving town of Taralga, on NSW's Southern Tablelands, pop. 312.

If you're in Australia and you're talking authentic
country style you'll be needing everything pictured
here: a beautiful gum tree, corrugated steel, rust,
weathered timbers, a slight dip in a roofline if you
can manage that, and a covering of lush green grass.
No, wait, I made up that bit about lush green grass.
Sometimes things get a bit dusty here in Australia,
but it has been raining this summer in Taralga,
the dam's full, the grass is growing, and the sheep,
the cattle and the horses are all fat. A good year.

You simply cannot build a heritage-listed
clothesline like this. It takes years for it to
happen, for the timbers to go grey, the lines
to sag wonkily, and the posts to lean over a bit.

Somewhere on the front of the old stone house there's a sign
saying 'Rose Cottage' and they have some very old established
rose bushes and climbers to prove it.

Right now you could rename the joint 'Anemone
Madness' and no-one would disagree, but of
course that's not as nice as Rose Cottage, is it?

Fraser's neighbour, Ken, is living the retiree's dream. He has a
few acres to play with and has lots of fruit trees and a very well
tended vegie patch too (and some of the crops make their way
over the fence to Fraser, more on that in a moment). One thing
I liked about Ken's orchard was the simple way he built his
bird-exclusion nets. Taralga is home to zillions of rosellas and
magpies, plus all sorts of itinerant cockatoos, galahs and other
airborne eating machines, so if you want to keep your crops
of fruit intact, you'll need netting. Ken creates a simple frame
for the nets by bending two very long pieces of flexible black
plastic irrigation piping (poly pipes) over the top of the
tree in a big U shape. Only two pipes are needed to make
a frame, and the net goes over. Works a treat, too.

Now, sorry to all the vegoes out there for the bacon, but it is
locally cured stuff from the butcher at the nearby big town
of Crookwell, and it tasted just like bacon should: really bacony!
Fraser's a dab hand in the kitchen, so I just bludged all weekend
(and every country town has its resident bludger, of course)
and he cooked up dinner, breakfast and more dinner. His tomato
and cheese omelette was made from eggs supplied by Ken's
chooks (thank you ladies) and the flavour boost from Ken's
super-flavoursome home-grown tomatoes and some freshly
snipped chives. The toast on the side was from the local bakery.

I tried to earn my keep this weekend by helping out in the garden then drinking his beer later on, but the real hero of the weekend, apart from my great host himself, was Huey the weather God. Taralga can be chilly (stop laughing all you Taralga-ites). Oh, all right then, Taralga is often very cold indeed. If Huey had decided to send us cold southerly winds, a bit of rain and lots of cloud, the slow-combustion fire would have been raging all weekend. Instead, it was T-shirt weather all the way. Superb.

And so I'm back with my lovely girl Pammy now in our pretty little inner-city cubby house, which is the natural order of things. But after a weekend in the country I feel like I've blown a whole ceiling full of cobwebs out of my head. Taralga, you've done it again!

The Rudd garden

Not sure if you've noticed or not, but apparently there's been this thing called a Global Financial Crisis (GFC) happening lately. It's a bit like swine flu, but economic. With both epidemics, most countries have had their dose, or are still doing so. Some have had it worse than others, and each country is responding (and suffering) in its own way.

As for the GFC, our Australian Federal Government, led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, decided to stimulate the economy with a cash injection by giving every taxpayer a cheque for $900. The idea was for us to spend the money like good consumers should, and stimulate the retail economy in particular: ie, buy a plasma TV, get the kids new sneakers, mend the fence, etc. Well, I decided to spend a good slice of my little undeserved windfall on my mother-in-law, Val, who I've blogged about before, here. The garden at the back of her house is basically fine, but it needed a makeover. Pensioners aren't taxpayers and lots of them didn't get any cash. That offended my sense of fairness!

So, a few weeks ago I spent a day cutting back some of the overgrowth in the back garden, and then we paid a guy to haul it all away (and he also did a bit more cutting back and carting away). Today, I removed all the weeds from the pathway at the back, covered it with new woodchip mulch, planted two roses, lavender, roses and various herbs. Here's the 'rose garden' section at the end of the day.

The mulch on the paths is chipped hardwood that will last for ages. It will break down slowly, but the odd annual top-up should keep it in good nick.

It's midwinter here in Australia now, and so the garden centres are full of bare-rooted roses. These are two really lovely hybrid tea roses: 'Just Joey' an apricot coloured rose with a superb sweet scent, and 'Friesia', a pure yellow rose with an equally wonderful perfume. I have a standard 'Friesia' in my own garden and our hallway smells so nice when Pam cuts a few roses and pops them in a vase. Pam's mum Val is also a great one for filling vases with blooms from her garden and I'm sure she'll love both of these.

Val used to have a lavender bush, but it was a victim when the new green steel fence went in. So I bought her a French lavender plant. Unlike Italian and Spanish lavenders, which tend to flower mostly in spring, and English lavender, which simply dies in Sydney, French lavender flowers all-year-round in Sydney. It's a wonderful plant with one little problem: it's fairly short-lived in Sydney – only four or five years, on average, in my experience. They usually cark it during the worst of February's heat, rainfall and almost subtropical humidity.

I also bought Val a rosemary bush, as she's a keen cook and needed a new bush to replace an old, tired one which had succumbed to too much shade from the overgrown trees which we cut back a few weeks ago. Both the rosemary and the lavender are in pots, as the soil is pretty horrible clay here. Roses don't seem to mind clay, but lavender and rosemary don't thrive in heavy soils. They're better off in pots.

And so here's the colourful scene late afternoon (sorry about the shaky focus, but the light was low and the camera's shutter speed was down to super slow by the time I got around to happy snap time). I actually ran out of redgum mulch and had to dash off to the garden centre for more, and it was only when I emptied this stuff out of the bag that I realised what a truly lurid red colour it is. Val loved the colour (or at least was good enough to say so!), but it should lose its ultra-saturated colour over the next couple of months' worth of Aussie sunshine. No colour lasts in the Aussie sunshine, especially anything red.

Val's a very good cook and loves to use herbs in her soups, casseroles, salads and with her vegetables, too. Her herb pots needed some TLC, so from left to right: thyme, mint, curly parsley and chives went in, along with new potting mix and some fertiliser.

And finally, Pammy asked me to see how the japonica was going and take some snaps of it. These are also known as flowering quinces, and they flower here in winter. So far it has barely started flowering. For some reason this was the only cluster of blooms, but I thought I'd finish off with them simply because they're growing at Nanna's and they're lovely, just like Nanna!

A funny little postscript to this garden – it's famous! Well, if being mentioned in the newspapers means you're famous, then it's famous. Val was at a community event attended by various politicians, including the Federal local member (Julie Owen) and a senior Federal minister (Jenny Macklin). The pollies were asking the audience what they were doing with their $900 cash stimulus cheques and Val (never a shy one at community gatherings such as these, which she often attends and sometimes helps to organise) piped up with her story of her son-in-law spending some of his cheque on her garden makeover. Always the one with a good one-liner, Val added that it had been named "The Rudd Garden".

Well, the local media, presumably bored to tears by the not-very-exciting community meeting with the Federal pollies, decided that "The Rudd Garden" was the best story to come out of the event, and so it made into a couple of the local papers as the lead item in the report on the visit by the Federal Minister!

Idle idyll

Too much of a good thing right now. Wet days, plenty of them, above average February rainfall after a too-dry January. Fair enough. The only thing an idle gardener can do at the moment is wander around during a break in the rain and enjoy the scenery. Rain softens summer gardens here in Sydney – like a delicious sauce it adds complexity to the dish.

My healthy, happy, potted cumquat, all dolled up in pearls. Its summer flush of flowers has just given way to reveal a host of little fruits eagerly making their way in life.

Next door to my potted cumquat is my friend, Michelle's, potted cumquat, which I am baby-sitting for her while she and her husband, Evan, spend a year in the Outback discovering the other Australia. For some strange reason, Michelle's cumquat is about two to three weeks more advanced in flowering and fruiting than mine. Both plants are the same variety, in the same spot in the garden, next to each other, and they receive an identical regime of food, water and encouragement from me. Yet Michelle's plant finished flowering three weeks ago and is steaming ahead with fruit formation, while mine happily lags behind at all times. One of life's little mysteries, but the main thing is that both plants are doing well (and you'll get another batch of home-made cumquat marmalade later this year, Michelle!)

As well as babysitting Michelle's potted cumquat, I'm also looking after Evan's standard 'Friesia' rose. Ever since I gave it a light mulch of old cow manure, plus a treatment with a soil wetting agent, it has really started to power along beautifully, a much happier chap. Such a lovely scent to its yellow roses, many of which make their way indoors into Pam's little empire of vases, which are dotted like pretty little forts guarding bookcases and ledges here and there throughout the house.

Speaking of lovely scents, these scented-leaf pelargoniums (rear, left) smell heavenly on this moist morning. The other participants in this pleasingly green scene are a golden marjoram (front left), potted mint (front right) and Murraya (rear, right). The trunk in the centre belongs to an olive tree, by the way.

The berries on the potted curry leaf tree are changing colour from red to black at the moment. My wife Pam does botanical illustration in watercolours, and she has chosen the curry leaf tree as her subject for a course she's doing at the Sydney Botanic Gardens, doing studies of its flowers, berries and leaves. Can't wait to see the completed work, but I will have to wait, as she doesn't like to hurry these things. She takes her own time, and the results are always a thing of lasting beauty.

After a snooze through the dry heat of January, the new 'Eureka' lemon tree has perked up wonderfully in the February rain. And, as part of the annual routine with citrus here, I'll be feeding all of them this weekend. I feed the greedy in-ground plants twice a year, in late February and late August (the potted citrus are given lighter feeds every six weeks). Citrus love their pelletised chicken manure, which adds a certain farmyard aroma to Amateur Land for about 48 hours, but it keeps them very happy, even if Pam and the neighbours aren't always thrilled.

Everywhere on this idle morning the garden is gently sagging under its shiny coat of rain. Coleus Corner is much more maroon-hued than in any previous year, but that's OK with me. I think this colour scheme is probably at its best in the rain. The more varied and colourful versions of Coleus Corner of other years looked better in the sunshine, but on a rainy day I like this darker, moodier scheme best.

So, there's no weeding, no trimming, no jobs to do at all this idle weekday morning. Just a few minutes during a break in the rain in my soggy little idyll before getting down to work. The perfect start, really.

Babysitting

Purely by coincidence, I've suddenly become a babysitter for a few plants. In one case it's more of a 'nursing back to health' kind of plant babysitting job, but for the other two temporary residents it's simply a matter of looking after two perfectly healthy plants for a whole year, while friends are away on an interesting journey into the very hot, dry and dusty Australian outback.

Pictured above is the Thai lime leaf tree that's being nursed back to good health. I'm hoping the person for whom I'm nursing it also bounces back to good health at the same time. My sister-in-law is slugging it out with breast cancer. She's up to the twelfth round and she's still fighting hard, and her corner is crowded with supporters. Unfortunately her illness has meant that her potted garden hasn't been getting its usual good care lately, and recently she had to move house, and the little potted lime tree ended up in a cold, dark shady corner and promptly dropped all its leaves. It was reduced to bare sticks, so it's now getting some much-needed R&R in a sunny spot in my backyard. A drink of liquid Seasol (not a fertiliser, but a soil conditioner and root-growth promoter based on seaweed), some mulch and lots of sunshine seems to be working. Pictured above are some of the first babies, pictured shining in the early morning sun.

The leaves of this thorny little tree (also called the Makrut lime or Kaffir lime, but Citrus hystrix to the botanists) look like double leaves, joined at the waist. The fruits themselves are knobbly and not very juicy, but the grated zest has a dazzling tang, and the leaves are one of the essential ingredients of Thai cuisine. A Thai beef salad just doesn't taste authentic without super-finely shredded Thai lime leaves as part of the mix. Hopefully I'll soon be able to make a nice, spicy Thai beef salad for my sister-in-law, using leaves from her rejuvenated tree.

This may look like an ordinary rose bud, but it's actually an awesome responsibility in a pot. It's the middle of winter and roses should be snoozing now. But not this standard 'Friesia' yellow rose. It just keeps on sending up big, beautiful, fragrant yellow flowers. Admittedly, it has slowed down the flower production a bit lately, but only a bit. The leaves remain glossy and green and the plant is in fabulous good health. I've been babysitting this plant since early May, when my good friends Evan and Michelle headed out of Sydney, for a year of living in the baking hot centre of Australia, in the tiny but, for Australians, culturally important town of Birdsville, in far western Queensland.

The other plant I am babysitting belongs to Michelle. It's this cumquat, pictured here. You can read all about what Evan and Michelle are up to in Michelle's Birdsville blog, which is linked to at the bottom of this page. Michelle and Evan are also taking on the heroic task of trying to grow fresh vegies out there. It's sandy, dry and gets ludicrously hot in summer. So far so good in their vegie patch over the winter, though. Potted plants like roses and cumquats wouldn't stand a chance of surviving in Birdsville's heat, so they're staying here in Sydney with me. Michelle's cumquat is every bit as healthy as Evan's rose, so I have a simple task ahead, hopefully. I also have a potted cumquat tree, so whatever I do to my cumquat (food, water, spray, mulch), Michelle's cumquat gets it too. They don't need much care, fortunately. Water's the main thing, plus mulch. I use slow-release fertilisers for most of my potted plants, but maybe a bit of Dynamic Lifter (chicken manure) in spring for good measure. And the only spray is an organic oil called PestOil, which keeps the scales,leaf miners and aphids miserable, hopefully.

I had a cumquat harvest a week or two back, and had enough fruit to make four jars of marmalade. Hopefully the first of Michelle's two jars will arrive in good nick at Birdsville, courtesy of Australia Post and the cushioning comfort of bubble-wrap. This is my second year of marmalade making, and I think it's going to become an annual tradition. Those little potted trees certainly produce a good amount of fruit. It's a bit of a worry seeing how much sugar is needed to make the stuff, but I only have it on toast about once a week, so that's not too bad for moderation!

And so that's the babysitting report. Oddly enough, it's much more fun babysitting a sick plant and seeing it recover. The best you can do with an already-healthy plant is not stuff things up, and the plants Evan and Michelle handed over have certainly come from a good gardening home.