Greetings from Locked Down Sydney!

 

It's been a long time (April 21) since I posted anything here in my gardening blog, which is semi-retired, just like me.

But as I finished this morning's final phase of the "weed then mulch" marathon, it occurred to me that it might help pass the time, maybe also provide some inspiration for gardeners who are cooped up at home due to covid lockdown restrictions, if I posted something here.

So what I plan to do every few days is to post something from my garden that I hope might of be interest, and maybe even motivate you to get out in the sunshine, which is good for both your mental and physical health (if you wear a hat!).

For starters, I'm starting off with a pair of panoramas of my freshly weeded and mulched garden, as it always looks very nice after new mulch has been spread around. 

Mid August and both the frangipanis are asleep, so it looks a bit bare. In the foreground the bonsai curry leaf tree has enjoyed the winter, and in the right foreground the strawberry patch is flowering and looking promising. That's Pam's nasturtium patch middle-left, and middle right is the hardest working part of the garden, the pots of rosemary and thyme.

On the right ride of the garden is another of Pam's nasturtium patches, while behind them the Geranium 'Big Red' patch continues on its merry spreading way. The only care it needs is cutting back. Right foreground, the remains of our two very productive broccoli plants. The stumpy/stalky one on the right looks like that because this week we cut off all the leaves and cooked them up, Southern USA "collard greens" style — and they were delicious.

So that's your introductory guided tour. In coming days I have lots of spring flowers to show you, plus some garden jobs to do now, lots of problems in the succulent patch, South Africans at their glorious best, Pam's mum's garden refugees, crops on the go, garden critters, and I am sure several more things that I'll come across as spring warms up.

Hang in there locked-down gardeners! If you have a garden, even if it's just some pots on a balcony, they're the perfect project to take on now. Spring is well and truly in the air, the temperatures are rising so any effort you put into getting plants to grow will be rapidly — and beautifully — rewarded.

Lots of flowers? Must be spring!

"Hey, come and have a look at this," said Pammy, ever the eagle-eyed spotter of all things newsworthy in our garden. We had to get down on our hands and knees, and be up very close, but there it was — the complex, gorgeous mini bloom of our potted succulent. I think it's a graptoveria, but as a succulent amateur I am at all times willing to be corrected on these things. Doesn't matter really, it's the wonderful mini other-worldliness of tiny blooms that had us both captivated.

It's a bit orchidy, this succulent flower, with its red-wine flecks on pearlescent petals.


Even I could spot the next of our spring awakenings — a huge spray of not-quite-yet-open yellow dendrobium orchids.


This spring show has been a few years in the making, as this plant has never flowered before. Over the last few years I have tried my hardest to be nice to it, but without any success. It has always lived with all the other orchids, which manage to flower their heads off like clockwork. But the dendrobium? Nah, sorry. Once all the flowers open fully, I will no doubt do another posting.


This next pink one, a climbing pelargonium, is one of the success stories of my "recovery ward". I bought three plants, put them in a hanging basket in a sunny spot, where they then proceeded to do very little, then started to die off. While I can accept that the fault is all mine, what bugs me is that I didn't have a clue what I was doing wrong.

So I rescued the final, barely surviving plant, repotted it into a smaller, normal pot and it has been keeping my orchids company in a more sheltered spot for the last year or so. And now it's looking happy again. Should I attempt to move it back to the hanging basket? Well, that is why I bought it ... but I am beginning to see that as the "hanging basket of doom" and I can't quite work up the bravery to try it yet.




Next in the spring slideshow is good old, never-fail, grow-them-every-year poppies. Pam loves them. Pam cuts them for vases in our house. And this year we have yellow, white and orange poppies. Lovely.



It's nice to be appreciated. The deal is, if I am nice to my lemon tree and scatter lots of chicken poo under the tree and water it well, the lemon tree produces lots of flowers, and a few months later, lots of fruit. So far it's all going according to plan. 


Even though evergreen Sydney springs aren't quite as spectacular as they are in colder climates, they're still a delightful time to be a gardener. As well as the flowers I have posted here, yellow clivias and vivid orange scadoxus aren't far off blooming, and the native orchid flower buds are all jostling for a good spot ... but I'll call a temporary halt at this stage. Lots to look forward to!

Boing!

One of my favourite experiences in our garden is simply to step out into it every morning, to see what's happening. In Spring I'm guaranteed to find something new every day. Just like me, it's alive and breathing (but unlike me it's young and pretty and growing fast). Oh well, I'm happy to settle for "it's great to be alive".

And so here's a photo-driven little posting of just some of the lovely things I found in our garden this morning.

I think we're at "peak native orchid" today. The show has been brewing for a few weeks but this morning all of them are on song. 

Pammy wants me to send her this close-up of a tiny native orchid bloom, taken with the camera about an inch away from the small but perfectly formed bloom. I think she can sense a watercolour painting coming on ...

Speaking of small but perfectly formed blooms, the first of our purple mint bush blooms made an appearance this morning. As I have three bushes and each is covered in flower buds, these are the first wave of what promises to be a few thousand more. Can't wait ...

And to finish off our purple patch, our potted common sage, the kitchen garden herb, has started to do its thing.

Just a few feet from the sage, also growing in a pot, the Thai lime plant is making good use of all the spring fertiliser I fed it with a few weeks ago. The young "double" leaves are the freshest green, every nook and cranny is filled with bum-like blooms and all is good in the fragrant, spicy Thai flavouring department.

A much quieter chap, the Turkish Brown fig looks such a treat as the morning sun shines through its new green leaves every morning. After its winter repotting, I am hoping for good things this summer. No pressure, though ...

Our Westringia 'Elizabeth Bough', covered in light pink blooms, cuddles up close with the astonishingly capable geranium 'Big Red', which flowers pretty much all year round.

And last of all, in a deep, dark corner of the garden when the sun doesn't get much of a look in, the yellow clivias have decided the time is right. I love how they know this stuff.

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.

Yes, spring definitely has sprung

Wow, Huey's laying on a pearler of a first week of spring. Sunshine plus warmth in the 20s every day, and for the next few days it seems. Love your work this week at least, Huey! While all the garden renovations chugg along nicely, the established plants in other parts of the garden where mattocks aren't being swung have all jumped out and, if they could speak, would be cheering loudly. The whole show here is starring, of course, the dazzling scadoxus family, but they're not the only spring bloomers around here.

The Scadoxus are at their peak right now, after taking
more than a week to fully open.

This year there are four of them, last year three.
They're at their best in the late afternoon, when the
low sun catches the tops of the flower tips.

Talk about photogenic! These scadoxus
are superb in the early morning light,
gleaming like neon adverts while all
the greens around are slowly waking up.
In the afternoons they catch fire. They're
the first thing you see when looking out
from the house, and you'd think I'd be over
the sense of 'wow' after a week of this,
but no, every 'first glimpse' gets me.

The largest of them seems to be making babies while
still blooming. Ever the optimist, I am hoping this is
a good thing, the beginning of a scadoxus empire,
achieved without much help from me, I might add.

If there is such a thing as a ridiculous amount of
flowers on the one plant, then my lime tree has a
ridiculous number of flowers on every twig, branch,
stem: you name it, it doesn't just have a flower on it,
there's a cluster jostling for a bit of bee action.

The hum of bees is the soundtrack to being out here
right now, and it looks like these baby lime-ettes
indicate that a bee has paid a welcome visit here.

When limes flower profusely, lemons flower too, but
not quite in such abundance, and in a different colour
scheme, too. Both have a lovely fragrance to be near.

Reliable as ever, the pinky-white cymbidium orchids
make their September appearance with aplomb.

And the most popular flower with visiting native birds
is working its way up to an October peak, but it is
already filled with blooms. This is Grevillea 'Peaches
and Cream' a modern hybrid that, like the Robyn
Gordon and Ned Kelly grevilleas to which it is
related, blooms most of the year anyway. The native
birds actually squabble over visiting rights, sometimes
quite noisily, but they all get a good feed every day.

As the garden is being renovated now it isn't quite as filled with flowers as it usually is at this time of year, but the old regulars are still a delightful bunch to have around. This really is the nicest start to spring that we've had for several years – may it continue this way for as long as possible, I say.