Looking good

While my enthusiasm for garden blogging might be on the wane, the opposite is true for gardening itself. I've never enjoyed it more. Perhaps the blogging has been getting in the way of my enjoyment of gardening? In recent years I suspect so, hence very little activity here on the Garden Amateur blog.

So here's a rare posting on how things are going here in spring. I may post  something during summer, but right now in spring there is almost too much to talk about.

The one thought that hit me the other day as I was admiring all the flowers and crops is how spring makes you feel like you're a better gardener than you probably really are. Everything grows so well, it all seems so easy. Plant something new and whoosh! It races away like happy children in the park.

Summer in Sydney, however, brings you back to earth with a thud. The humidity, the heat, the sheer difficulty of helping everything to merely survive is hardly a joyful pursuit — it's an important part of the gardening year of course — but gardening here in spring is a much more wonderful time to be out there among all the plants. 

Encouraging little garden sprites whisper in your ear "Hey, you can do this!" and "That worked well" as you tour the flower and vegie beds. It's good for your soul to be out there soaking up the success. 

So, here's my usual little 'photos with captions' essay on what's happening here now. It's very pretty, a lot of fun, and I sometimes wish spring would last forever. 

The amazing Geranium Rozanne is getting bigger and better all the time. It started flowering its head off in midwinter when we bought it and has never let up. It's now spreading about three feet wide and rising two feet tall and it's covered in the prettiest purple flowers.

This feels like cheating, but I love it. All you need to do is buy a La Sevillana rose in flower from your garden centre, bring it home, whack it in a bigger pot and let it flower on. This is one of "Pam's plants". She saw it at a friend's house, loved the clear red colour, issued orders on what we needed next and a week later it was brightening up our pergola area. It's so lightly scented that you barely notice it at first, but I have never seen anyone admire a rose without sticking their nose into the centre. However, Pam being an artist with an eye for colour, this is definitely the rose she wanted.

This is our society garlic, or Tulbaghia, in flower. Lots of variegated strappy leaves with these pink trumpet flower clusters on tall stems rising up. I admire its tenacity. All sorts of horrid weeds like to bully it but it never gives up and always shows up.

Our potted New South Wales Christmas Bush is getting better at timing its display of coloured bracts for the festive season

Boy, are we eating a lot of spinach and silver beet right now. Pam loves it Japanese style, chopped and steamed with a sesame dressing, and I love it Indian style, in dishes such as Palak Paneer and Chicken Palak. The golden rule with these prolific spring crops is that if you think you haven't planted enough, you've probably planted too much already.

Lettuce thrives in spring but soon gives up the will to live once summer comes around. Fortunately we're a little pair of salad munching bunnies, and Pammy also loves to make up egg and lettuce bread rolls for lunch.

I'm a sucker for multi-coloured bowls of salad greens, and so I find all seed packets of "mixed lettuce" to be irresistable. Here's another crop approaching harvest time.

My other must-have crop in our garden is shallots, or green onions, or scallions, or whatever you call them in your part of the world. I'm still perfecting my skills at sowing enough — and especially not too many — seeds to raise the next punnet of seedlings while the current crop matures, but this is much more satisfying than buying a punnet of far too many shallot seedlings at the garden centre and only planting half of them.

Who me? Impulse-buy a Grosse Lisse tomato plant at the local Woolies supermarket? Yes, of course. Total sucker for growing tomatoes, with a very ordinary success rate on the big tomatoes, and a perfectly acceptable success rate on the cherry tomato front. So of course I am attempting to keep a big climbing tomato happy in spring. Summer will be the seasoning of reckoning, but I am prepared to take on the challenge.

On the other hand, all the potted succulents are looking forward to summer's heat. Ever since I repotted them they are all loving the new potting mix. And though it's hard to see here, there's a very thick layer of pine bark mulch spread between the pots and all over the formerly weedy succulent patch, and for the meantime at least, the weeds are not enjoying life at all. They're probably biding their time, waiting for the mulch to break down, but right now the succulent patch is a peaceful village of potted contentment.

So there you have it loyal readers, all 10 of you. Pammy and I are both really enjoying this year's spring in our garden. 

Pam's art students love wandering around and finding something to draw or paint, and for me as a gardener that's plenty of job satisfaction right there.

Gladiator V Onion Weed

Pictured below is nothing less than a disgrace. A weedy disgrace, a total temporary victory by the evil onion weed.

And so last week I decided I had to do battle with this almost invincible foe, or die in the attempt. More to the point in my current state of health, I didn't so much fear death by onion weed than a relapse in my recovery from the broken foot/wrecked ankle. Neither happened, I'm still here. I won (kind of), and here's what happened in the Coliseum Match of Gladiator V Onion Weed.

Neglect onion weed for a few weeks so it gets a foothold in your garden, then wait for a thoroughly wet week or so of rain and suddenly you have this appalling problem to deal with.

And this is how it looked about three hours later. Every plant removed from the patch, plus half a wheelie bin full of onion weed. And as well as getting the big strappy leafed onion weeds with the bulbs on the bottom, of course there are approximately one million baby bulblets left behind, waiting for their chance to make my life a misery. I managed so sift out a few hundred thousand bulblets, but have no illusions about the task ahead. All the white dots you can see on the soil surface are the remnants of my decorative pebble mulch that has never managed to suppress a single weed in the last decade. Pretty, but useless ... 

Apart from leaving in place one large Crassula shrub and a pretty Kalanchoe 'Copper Spoons', I pulled every other succulent out of the ground. This trug full of haworthias isn't all of them by any stretch. These things multiply almost as well as onion weeds.

Little guys like these sempervivums somehow survived the smothering weeds, but from now on they are going to be growing in their own comfy pots.

Some of these Senecio 'Chalk Sticks' will be popped into pots, and a few put back in the ground. Lovely grey-blue colour.

I don't look like much of a Gladiator, but it was a torrid battle that lasted most of the day in the end. One of the things I like about digging soil is coming across all the worms and other little critters who call this soil home. I suspect they were all very upset by my presence. 

So the brilliant new plan is to grow many more succulents in pots, and only the very hardiest things (like those multiplying haworthias) in the ground. I've alway grown a small selection of cacti in pots, and the succulents make perfect company for them.

I used up every spare pot I could find in no time. The best ones for growing succulents are the "wide and shallow" ones. And I used up all my special Cacti & Succulent potting mix in no time, and most of these are now growing in good old ordinary potting mix, which will probably suit them just fine anyway (but it was all I had in the shed, so I couldn't be fussy).

As mentioned earlier, I have left the established 'Copper Spoons' shrub where it is, in the ground. Love the coppery colour of the new foliage. Every now and then a few leaves that fall off soon sprout into new plants on the ground, without any help from me.

Years ago when I first started this blog I made it a mission to find out the actual botanical names of my succulents, and it was no easy task. I tried hard but did get several wrong and was then corrected by succulent specialists who got in contact to set me straight. I am almost back where I started, though, as I now have half a dozen succulents, including this handsome one, whose name I don't know. I call him 'Pagoda guy'.

Since I renovated the succulent patch I've only been disappointed that there's still no sign of the first onion weed shoot popping up through the soil. I'm keeping a close watch and heaven help that first sprout! However, the real test will be whether I can keep up the vigilance if warm spring and summer weather gets wet. That's when the onion weed will really get cracking and try to take over again.

Potting up an art class

When a boiling hot day is forecast, do all your gardening as early as you can in the morning. Then, as a well-earned reward, enjoy a pot of tea. And so here I am, sipping tea and blogging late on a very warm Sydney Saturday morning in March.

It's been a fun morning too. I've been selecting and potting up a bunch of succulents from our succulent garden, in preparation for the watercolour workshop on cacti and succulents which Pam will be running on Wednesday, March 28. I'll add in details of the class at the end of this posting. If you're in Sydney and interested in joining Pam for a relaxed, enjoyable few hours of watercolour painting, get in contact with her. And beginners are welcome!

Here's the first tray all potted up ...

And here's the other one.

As you can see from the photos, there's an amazing variety of shapes, colours, leaf forms and plant forms. To cover the whole variety found within the amazing world of cacti and succulents, you'd need a thousand trays. So we just kept it down to a couple of dozen little pots, as a beginner's representative sample. Here's a few of them ...

As soon a people clap eyes on this Kalanchoe 'Copper Spoons' they want one. I've done some other postings on Copper Spoons before, such as here. They are very easy to propagate, and autumn is a nice time for them, as they are starting to colour up right now with that coppery glow.

I'm a sucker for variegated leaves (here and there, not everywhere!) and this little Crassula looks like the perfect subject for the soft tones of watercolours. 

We have far more succulents than cacti here, so recently I popped down to our garden centre to see if I could add a few cacti to the mix, and I fell in love with this cute little spiky person — I've named it 'Arizona' — and its spherical pal.

So here's the info you need if you want to book yourself into Pam's March workshop on cactus and succulents. As well as the monthly workshops, every Wednesday morning she also holds a casual drop-in art class at The Bakehouse Studio in Marrickville.

Also, at the same venue, The Bakehouse Studio, she and ceramicist Lisa Hoelzl host a regular Open Studio for painters, potters and ceramic artists every Friday. 

Pictured below is one of Pam's watercolours, of cacti growing against an old church in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

MARCH WATERCOLOUR WORKSHOP – ‘Cactus & Succulents’
THE BAKEHOUSE STUDIO 

54 Renwick Street, Marrickville NSW
Wednesday from 10am – 1pm, March 28

For more details, visit Pam's website at https://pamelahorsnell.org

Or, for info and updates,

Visit her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pamelahorsnellartist

And her Instagram feed at @pamelahorsnellartist

The trouble with pots

The trouble I have with pots is that I wax and wane in my use of them. My garden seems to go through cycles ranging from "sorry, we need minimal pots" to "more pots please" ... and right now, I'm swinging back to using more pots.

I have only made this situation worse because last weekend I tidied up my spare pots area, for the simple reason that this unsightly spot used to be hidden from view. Alas, recent garden renovations have removed the dense screen of ginger plants that concealed the pots, and so now my pots area is neatly sorted into sizes and types. 

That's where the troubled brewed up. For example, as I stacked the wide, shallow dish-shaped pots, I thought to myself that they really could contain all the mixed leafy salad greens that two little people could need. Removing the greens from the vegie beds into the pots would then provide more space for my preference — other vegies — or Pammy's preference — more flowers.

The trouble with that idea is that I bought that same wide, shallow pot several years ago precisely to grow more salad greens. I did it successfully for a few years, but it was a lot more work than simply plonking the salad green seedlings or seeds into a garden bed.

And that's the trouble with pots. They seem like a gardener's best friend, a real problem-solver ... but then a few months later you realise that they are more work. They need more watering, more feeding and every second year or so, complete repotting.

Has this deterred me from entering a new cycle of "more pots please"? No, afraid not. 

And no, it's not a tragic cycle. You see, I have more time on my hands now that I am winding down into a semi-retired pattern of work. Several years ago I was much busier, and staying on top of the workload of keeping potted plants happy was more of a chore.

Despite the fact that I seem to be a remarkably slow learner at times, as I am now entering a positive "you can do it" phase with pots, here are several perfectly good reasons to grow plants in pots.

Limit the size of spreading plants. In this case, it's a pot containing all the oregano we will ever need. In a garden bed, oregano can spread a metre or more if it's happy. Here in the pot it has to be content with 30cm. All I need to do is cut it back every three months. Another truly rotten spreader is mint, which you should never grow in the ground if you have limited space. 

Keep fruit trees down to a manageable size. Our potted Turkish Brown fig tree is content in its pot, and so is its close neighbour, a potted Thai lime tree. In the ground, both would grow much bigger, and our garden already has an olive, a Tahitian lime and a Eureka lemon in the ground, so there is no more room.

Put kitchen garden herbs within easy reach. You can almost smell this fragrant forest of young basil, and as well as using leaves for staples such as tomato sauces or pesto, just a few torn leaves tossed into a garden salad works wonders. Other nearby pots contain mint, tarragon, chives, thyme, rosemary and sage.

Grow specialised plants in potting mixes designed for them. Our garden has all sorts of interesting plants, such as this colourful succulent, Crassula 'Campfire', planted into pots containing potting mixes designed to suit them. As well as succulents, there are bromeliads, orchids and water-loving Louisiana iris. Each requires its own special mix, but if you give plants the exact conditions they love to grow in, they tend to be much happier and easier to look after.  

And so all I really have to offer with this posting is that pots are an essential part of any garden. Their downside is that they are more work, but their upside is that they can solve all sorts of problems, and even allow you to grow a much wider variety of plants than if you just tried to grow everything in the ground. And for a plant-lover like me, that final point seals the deal.

I'll be growing plants in pots for all my days here. It's just that every now and then I'll scale back on them for a while, then I'll bounce back a year or two later filled with fresh enthusiasm for them. 

This waxing and waning, of de-potting then re-potting, is just another of life's and gardening's steady little cycles.

A gong for the Gong

We finally did it. Visited the Wollongong Botanic Garden. I'm not proud to say that it has only taken us 20 years to get here, even though it's only a bit over an hour south of Sydney. Until recently, this wonderful garden was something we must have driven past a hundred times on the highway south, always saying to each other "we must visit that place one of these days".

It was worth the wait, too. Pammy and I visited Wollongong recently to attend an art show, and having stayed there one night we weren't in a hurry to get home. A nice long garden visit, followed by an easy drive home. The perfect Sunday for garden lovers. And Huey, the weather god, turned on the record warmest-ever midwinter July day for the Sydney/Gong region that Sunday, with the thermometer climbing over 26°C. Thank you Huey!

The first pleasant surprise was that the garden was much bigger than we imagined ...

... you'd need half a day just to do one complete lap.

I suspect Australia gets the better end of the bargain with our many "sister city" relationships with Japanese cities, and in the Gong's garden the Kawasaki bridge is a magical thing to behold, even if walking over it isn't such a sure-footed experience. 

It's not only everywhere you go in these gardens that Mount Keira looks down on you, it's pretty much the same feeling everywhere you go in the Gong. Mount Keira is watching ...


On with the show ...

Well, for starters, the orchids in the Sir Joseph Banks greenhouse thought it was nice here in Darwin (we didn't break the news to them that they were a long way from the tropics).

And though this young Queensland bottle tree (Brachychiton rupestris) was also a long way from home, it was showing all the signs of turning into a perfect specimen over the next hundred years or so.

However, on our midwinter visit, the undoubted stars of the show were the collected weirdos and misfits of ... you guessed it ... the succulent and cacti collection. They even have a sign there saying June and July are the best times to visit this section. Lucky us!

A bunch of aloes in bloom. Not exactly pretty but definitely striking.

This one is Aloe marlothii

Nearby a ponytail palm couldn't keep its heavy corsage upright

And spikies wouldn't be spikies without cute masses of little guys to frighten the nervous, such as these 'Tiger Tooth' Aloe juvenna ...

 ... or this incredible sea of tightly clustered Euphorbia pulvinata, the pin cushion euphorbia

Just as you think you've escaped spiky world, there's the other end of the Sir Joseph Banks greenhouse, the ultra-dry but very warm desert end, where the Mexican, Madagascan and other wonderfully weird spiky collection spends its days. (This is one of my special iPhone panoramas, so if you click on the photo, it should pop up nice and widescreen bigly.)

Meanwhile, under the dappled, restful shade of an ancient melaleuca (paperbark) tree, en plein air artist Pammy spent an enjoyably long time capturing the scene in succulent land.

This allowed me to go for a very long wander all around the gardens while Pammy used her paintbrush to mix work, pleasure and watercolours.

So, if you're like Pam and me and have passed by the turnoff to the gardens many times as you've whizzed by on the Princes Highway, these gardens are the perfect spot to plan a picnic lunch. Set aside a couple of hours for a really good look at the gardens, and I am sure you'll come away with many good memories and, hopefully, some nice photos too.

Renovations

Should they ever discover plant life on Mars I would not be a bit surprised if it turned out to be onion weed ... or oxalis. These two weeds are indestructible, and they have well and truly taken over our succulent patch in recent months. It was a disgrace: you could barely see the smaller succulent plants for the weeds, and so I've been waiting for the weather to cool down a bit so I could get stuck into the big job of yanking out all the weeds and renovating the whole patch back to "as-new" condition.

To kick things off, let's start with the finished, renovated succulent patch. Traa daa! 

This, dear readers, is how it now looks, six hours after starting on the project. It took a lot longer than I imagined it would.

The first step was to pull every small succulent out of the ground and toss them into a few trugs and trays. That's one thing I can say about succulents: these things grow and multiply incredibly easily. I was amazed how many there were.

The next step was the ugly bit, and it took a long time to do it: digging out onion weed and both type of oxalis (ie, the one with large leaves which grows from bulbs (Oxalis latifolia) and the "creeping" variety with small leaves that sends out runners in every direction (Oxalis corniculata).)

As I dug the soil I realised that there were probably more decorative "mulch" pebbles in the soil than on top of the soil as mulch, so I went into the kitchen, grabbed a large bamboo-handled wire scoop (bought from a Chinese food store) that we never use, and pressed it into service as a pebble sifter.

What a fantastic pebble sifter! It did a brilliant job, and along the way it also scooped up, oh ... about another thousand oxalis and onion weed bulbs.

Two giant trugs loaded up with sifted pebbles, and I was ready to plant the succulents back into the prepared bed. 

(By the way, pebble mulches are nice to look at and have one other benefit: they don't stay wet and so they are a good environment for growing succulents. As for slowing the growth of weeds? Utterly hopeless. In fact, the creeping type of oxalis loves spreading across pebble mulches, and onion weed powers through it. And over time, the pebbles slowly sink into the soil, so in general they aren't my favourite mulch at all.)

Replanting everything allowed me to re-arrange the plants, with the smallest ones right down the front, mediums in the middle and tall ones at the back. I know this sounds perfectly obvious, but when I originally planted the succulents I wasn't sure of their ultimate sizes, and a few have grown more than I expected.Pictured here are Gasteria (top left), sempervivums (left), faucaria centre right, echeveria (far right), Corpuscularia (top centre), and another type of echeveria (top right).

Some of those names above might be familiar to you, but if you haven't heard of corpuscularia, here it is. It's one of my favourites in the whole patch, and the renovation has allowed me to move it to a better spot.

The spiky guy in the centre is Haworthia attenuata. When I planted it back in 2012 the clump was almost this size. Now, four years later, I was able to divide the clump into two clumps this size. I honestly hadn't realised until I looked at an old photo how much this had grown.

As I mentioned earlier, I had dug out all the smaller succulents, but had left the larger, more established succulent shrubs in place. And they've also grown a fair bit since I first planted it all out in September 2012. Look at the photo below for the comparison.

While the weeds have multiplied, so have the succulents themselves. I am sure the weeds will be back in force in no time, but here's hoping the succulents will also keep on growing and take over the place. That's the plan ...