Waiting for Good-o

 

It's hardly rational, but I always manage to have moments of silent panic each year when my Louisiana irises start to bloom. I blame the blue ones, because they show up early. Too early in fact. About two weeks before the white ones.

And I really love the white ones. So, every year, there's a two week period when I manage to convince myself that maybe I've done something wrong, and the white ones won't appear at all. Silly boy. 

Double delight this morning, two white Louisiana irises.

It was only few days ago that I wondered 'had I accidentally thrown out the white-flowered plants' rhizomes last year while repotting?' No, surely not. 

But I am keen enough that, every now and then, just for a few nano-seconds of self-doubt, I allow these thoughts a subversive whisper in my ear.

 

That's all history now. Last year I had to repot my Louisiana irises, as they had multiplied so much they had totally outgrown their pot. In fact, I had to set up a second, smaller water garden pot to cope with the overload. Even then I still had to toss out some excess rhizomes, simply because I had so many. These things are really vigorous growers, but I must admit it's a nice problem to have. 

Louisiana iris flowers telegraph the colours to come a few
days in advance.

It's hard to be there for the actual moment the flowers open,
but these guys are sooo close.

Then, next thing you know, they're open and if you could
talk to them they'd say they've been open for ages. Where were you?

Of course the thing that makes my white irises so special to
me is the green bits. A totally all-white iris with no green stripey bits would be a pale imitation of the real thing. 

There are tinges of green deep within each bloom, but it's the stripes that really get me. They look like they're hand-painted with a slender brush.

The whole glorious flower show will all be over two weeks from now. That'll be it for another year, but the wait for Good-o has been worth it yet again. 

However, when you factor in the two weeks of glorious blue irises prior to the white ones, it's a month-long, very delightful way to announce to everyone that spring is well and truly here. 

The blue and white Louisiana iris show

I guess it's fitting that we have both blue and white Louisiana iris growing here in Marrickville. Blue and white are the traditional colours of Greece, and as we have had the same wonderful Greek neighbours on both sides for almost three decades now, the least we could do is have a Greek-themed flower festival every October, (even if Louisiana iris are very unlikely to be found growing anywhere in Greece). On with the show ...

Not only are they in full bloom now, they're still popping out by the hour. At 7am I photographed this lovely white Louisiana iris with a gaggle of blues behind it. The other white bloom was still a furled bud at that hour.

By 9am, the furled person had gone "boing" (I think that's the technical term ...) and suddenly we had the full blue and white show. 

I truly do love my blue iris, but these white ones I love maybe just a little bit more. It's the fine green stripes on each of the petals that I can't take my eyes off. So many, so perfectly fine and such a mellow green.

One of the great features of these water-loving irises is that you can tell what's coming up next just by looking at the furled flower buds. This is the white one, photographed yesterday.

And a blue one. These buds keep on appearing, as the lifespan of each Louisiana iris flower is just a day or two. As each big bloom (10-12cm across) fades, another bud lower down on the stem readies itself for its brief 48 hours of glory. The whole show lasts less that a fortnight, but it's a seasonal highlight that is well worth the wait.

This year the neighbouring pot of New South Wales Christmas Bush is having its best-ever flowering season, and so the combination of one enormous blue showboat against a backdrop of hundreds of dainty dancers is well worth pausing to enjoy.

For overseas readers unfamiliar with the New South Wales Christmas Bush, this is a flowering plant with lots of relatively insignificant flowers at this time of year. Later on, closer to Christmas, the real show begins. This close up provides a preview of what lies in store. The outer bracts around the flowers turn all sorts of shades of reddy-pink, pinky-red — Pam says "think coral, and it's more red than pink" — there's quite a few variations. Right now it's a pleasantly white-flowered bush, but in a few weeks it will be something entirely different. 

In the meantime, it's the Louisiana irises' turn to be the star. The large pot pictured here is about 50cm across and high and it's full of water. Inside that pot, sitting on some bricks, is a wide shallow bowl about 40cm across and only 20cm deep, and it is full of the Louisiana iris rhizomes. The roots are inundated with water all year round, they love slow-release fertiliser, they breed like rabbits and provided they get the conditions they like they are very low maintenance.

I started off with just one plant about 10 years ago, and my how they have multiplied! The white flowers are the gift of two dear friends, John and Liz (I swapped some of my blue ones for one of John and Liz's whites).

If you want to find out any more about setting up your own pots, I've done Louisiana iris postings every October for the last 10 years, so do a search and you'll find plenty of growing tips.

Changing of the guard

Well, me and my big mouth ... there I was blogging recently, saying our lovely little goldfish, Paul, was coming up to his sixth birthday. I'm very sorry to tell you that Paul didn't make it that far. He passed away soon after that, and since then we've been galvanised into giving our water garden a makeover, and bringing a new family of goldfish into our garden. (We've buried Paul in the garden, with a little metal plant marker with his name on it serving as his gravestone. RIP Paul.)

We've expanded our water garden so it comprises two large ceramic pots filled with potted Louisiana iris, and each pot requires some resident goldfish to munch on the mosquito larvae that will inevitably be laid there. So, it's two goldfish per pot ...

Here they are, still in the bags I brought them home in from the aquarium shop. In the bag on the right are Tony and Carmela, and in the bag on the left, AJ and Meadow. Late night TV crime show fans might recognise the names, but if not, doesn't matter. It'll be hard to tell them apart, but Tony is the one with the black markings. The others are innocent.

If you're thinking of goldfish for outdoor ponds, the cheap and
common "Comets" are said to be one of the best choices. At
Marrickville Aquarium these four cost $14. They're tough,
they eat mozzie larvae, they can cope with murky-ish water,
and they aren't rowdy.

Paul came to us from the Marrickville Aquarium shop too,
so maybe Meadow and AJ are his distant cousins?

The basics of adding goldfish to an outdoor pond are straightforward.

1. I filled both pots up with water on Wednesday this week, and so the water itself has had a few days of sunshine (and a bit of rain) to evaporate off chemical residues of chlorine and other stuff that is added to a city's drinking water. Apparently adding little goldfish straight into tapwater will kill some of them. So, "age" your water for a day or two.
2. Leave your new goldfish in their bag of water, and sit it in the pond for at least half an hour, or more, so the temperature of their water slowly becomes the same as the temperature of the pond's water. Then gently release them into the water. That's it.

Here's both ponds with their bags of goldfish. Tony and Carmela
are in the bigger (and new) pot on the left, and Ajay and Meadow
are in the original, smaller pot on the right. 

Here's a slightly fuzzy shot of Tony and Carmela moments after
they were released from the bag. They stayed down the bottom
of the pond for a few minutes, and now they are swimming
around, exploring their strange new world.

Last but not least, I've installed an ACME cat frustrator for
our local fish-obsessed pussy cat, the eternally unsuccessful
Wile. E. Coyote, who hunts by night and never catches a thing.

Just as in my previous posting, where I talked about the second generation of curry leaf trees starting its career here, now I'm introducing the second generation of our mozzie munching goldfish. The times they are a' changing...

I hope they enjoy it here, and I certainly hope that they are here for at least six more years, hopefully. Come to think of it, I guess I could say the same for me!

Louisiana's razza-matazz

Watching the build-up is half the fun of owning gorgeous flowering plants. Once you learn how they grow and flower from previous years' experience, you recognise all the tell-tale signs that "they're doing it again" for several weeks before the big colourful show finally gets started.

For me, that's almost as much fun as enjoying the flowers in bloom ... but not quite. And on this mild and sunny early October morning our Louisiana iris 'Gulf Shores' is putting on its wonderful annual show, and as the plants have multiplied, there's even more to enjoy this year.

Each big bloom is fairly short-lived but is then replaced in
quick succession by flowers lower down on each flowering stem. 

Here's what I mean. You can see the unopened
flower buds patiently waiting their turn, while
the show-off higher up on the stem gets all
the morning glory.

Here's where the plants grow, in two water
pots. I'll get back to these a few photos further
down in this posting.

The foliage itself is strappy and lush. The flower
stems start erupting from the leaves about
a month before flowering.

The flower buds themselves are well worth
admiring. The fine sheath around each tightly
wound cluster of petals looks like plastic wrap.

Like many blooms, after all the weeks of the
slow build-up, flowering itself is sudden.
Yesterday there was just one bloom open, and
this morning there are nine. The whole show
doesn't last that long, just a few weeks at
best, but the Louisiana iris show is now, for
me, several weeks of fun watching the
build up, followed by a couple of weeks of
delight when the razza-matazz happens. 

Now, back to those water garden pots, for those who are interested in such things ... 

How's this for a dodgy, improvised solution? The Louisiana iris plants in the original blue ceramic pot were just growing like crazy by the end of last summer, spilling over the sides of the pot, sending out roots looking for new soil to colonise. So I took all the plants out, divided them up and replanted them into two large, wide, shallow bowls. These plants need to sit in a permanent pool of water that's just lapping under the sides of the bowls. To get the water height right around the pots, I sit the pots on house bricks.

Just think of "river's edge" or "banks of the bayou" with water lapping around the roots but not submerging the foliage, and you'll get the idea. Purely as a stop-gap arrangement, just for a week or so until I could find another suitable glazed bowl, I pressed into service one of my plastic gardener's trugs (for Aussie readers, they're less than 10 bucks each at Bunnings). Well, eight months later I still haven't found a suitable ceramic bowl, and the trug is still holding water and doing fine. Being plastic, it won't last forever, so I will get my act together one of these days. 

As for potting up the plants, I treat them like other water plants, making up a mix of 50:50 garden soil and cow manure, and planting them into that. Ideally for acid-loving Louisiana iris, use acid garden soil (pH less than 6.5), and the cow manure is also considered an "acid" fertiliser.

I then cover the soil with small pebbles (to keep the soil surface stable), and scatter slow-release fertiliser pellets on top. "With all that cow manure as well, isn't that too much fertiliser?" you might ask. A Louisiana iris specialist nursery owner once told me that "Louisiana iris are the teenage boys of the plant world," saying it's very hard to over-feed them. And she has been proved right so far. These plants love life, love food and seem quite happy here.

And finally, last but not least ... you might notice there's wire mesh draped over the sides of the blue ceramic pot. This is purely there to make life even more difficult for the cat I have named Wile E. Coyote.

Our goldfish, Paul, who has lived outdoors in the blue ceramic pot, turns six years old next month, and so he's an experienced campaigner, especially good at staying away from Wile E. Coyote, who, true to his 'Road Runner' cartoon namesake, never, ever gives up. 

We find Wile E. out there near Paul's fishpond on many mornings. Pammy has even spotted Wile E. perched up in the nearby grevillea, sitting on a branch looking down into the pond, contemplating the seafood meal he never manages to enjoy. Pammy says "he looks like a leopard sitting on that branch." Alas, the closest he comes to that dream of catching his prey is his nightly bowl of canned Whiskas. Bad luck, Wile E!

Purple waves

Memories are unreliable things at times. Here I was about to write a blog about "earlybirds" because I was convinced my Louisiana iris were coming up a bit earlier than usual, when it occurred to me to actually go and check blog postings from previous years. And guess what? Yep, this is the latest they have ever appeared. The earliest was Sept 21 last year, another year it was Sept 28, another year Oct 6. And here we are, October 10, and they've just opened up.

Don't let the experts tell you that you have to visit a water
gardens specialist to buy nice Louisiana iris. I saw this one,
called 'Gulf Shores' at Bunnings (Australia's biggest hardware
warehouse chain) several years ago, when I wasn't looking
for Louisiana iris. Anyway, it came home with me, and it has
flowered in spring every year. And it has multiplied.

The flowers appear pretty quickly, too. The stems
shoot up in no time, the flower buds expand and
colour up for a day or so, and then before you
know it - traaaa daaaaa! They're open.

If anything, this photo doesn't do the colour any justice. In
reality it's a whole lot more purple than this. Stunning.

Now, there's one possible reason for the slightly later flowering this year. As I mentioned earlier, the plants have multiplied and were starting to crowd out our potted water garden, where Paul, our goldfish, has been living happily for the past five years. And so, in the middle of winter I decided to lift, divide and replant (only some of) the iris plants in Paul's domain. What to do with the others? Well, as a purely temporary fix just for that weekend, I potted up the remainder in a wide, shallow terracotta bowl, filled it with the recommended 50/50 mix of garden soil and cow poo, topped that with a goodly layer of gravel, then sat the pot on bricks in a plastic purple garden trug. Good old trugs!

And now, that temporary, one-week-only,
arrangement is still in place. How often does
that happen! Anyway, it works.

This helicopter shot shows the other essential:
keeping the water topped up so it is about halfway
up the side of the terracotta bowl. In the wild,
Louisiana iris live on the edges of swamps, lakes,
creeks and rivers, with their feet constantly in
water and their heads up in the sunshine.

On the right is Paul's ceramic bowl, and on the left
his purple plastic neighbour. So we no longer have
a water garden, we have an aquatic complex.

I guess I should find a better pot than the purple plastic trug. The plastic will slowly go brittle in the sunshine, with a sudden and very soggy dam-bursting finale (probably when we have guests around for an alfresco lunch, if the general theory of the timing of domestic disasters holds true). But for the meantime (and I mean meantime!) it stays.

Water babies

Wednesday morning they looked like they would flower sometime next week, and they were in full bloom two days later, on Friday morning. My Louisiana iris are water babies in a hurry this year, bursting into bloom both fast and early. Last year they came out a week later than this (Sept 28), and in 2010 it was two weeks later, on October 6. And yes, I have blogged about both flowerings (here for 2010) and (here for 2012). We were in the USA for the 2011 flowering and, very sadly, missed it. However, those earlier postings have probably said everything I have to say about our gorgeous blue Louisiana iris, so this time round I'll let 10 photos taken this morning tell the full story of how lovely these flowering pond plants are. Glad they're part of my garden, and happy here. They need next to no care, by the way.

Floating an idea

I had one of those Homer Simpson "D'oh" moments recently, when I saw a plant in another garden growing as it should grow, unlike my version of the same plant. It was in a pond that I saw some Nardoo (Marsilea drummondii), our native floating fern, doing what it should do. Float. On the water. It's a simple game. Float on water = floating fern. Trouble was, my floating fern didn't float. It kind of hovered over the water. D'oh!

Problem solved, here is my nardoo, floating on the goldfish pond like it should.

And here is nardoo doing it all wrong a month or so ago. The problem was simple. I had not put the pot deep enough underwater. That's all. The pot was sitting on a brick, with the top of the pot about 2-3 inches below water level. Wrong! I took out the brick, sank the pot to the bottom, so it was 6 or more inches below the water level, cut off all the foliage, and started again.

While it was a bit of an anxious wait to see whether my drastic action worked, it took only four weeks for the first new leaves to float into position, just like they should have all along. But now all is well with the world, the fish seem to like their new floaty cover, and I've learned something.

And so the moral of the story is to be a gardening stickybeak – you might just learn something useful. Now, I'm sure many blog-readers from around the world won't be familiar with the word 'stickybeak' but it's a fine old Australian term that's fairly close to the English 'Nosy Parker'.

In its worst sense a stickybeak is someone who pries into others' lives, but in the grand sense of the word it just describes what we all can't resist doing: having a look at something, whether or not it's often over a fence, through a fence, or from a vantage point.

Stickybeak often = get a life.

Stickybeak occasionally = national pastime.

And that's what I was doing, walking around the local area stickybeaking at others' front gardens, and in one I saw the nardoo floating serenely, just as it should. That ended my stroll in fact. Headed for home, 'fixed' the nardoo problem then and there. Good, productive, stickybeaking stroll, that one.

A touch of jade

After yet another lovely Sunday lunch spent enjoying yum cha at our favourite Chinese restaurant in the city, Pammy and I went shopping in Chinatown. We came across a little shop, a traditional old-style one, and I bought two cups of polished jade chips, for $8. 'Cups' is what they called them in the shops, but their cups were just a bit bigger than a sewing thimble. It was only a little bit of jade, but it was enough to use as a mulch for the potted Louisiana iris in our water garden.

I've always liked pebble mulches in pots. I use pebbles quite a bit with my potted succulents, and the colour of the jade just goes so well here with both the foliage, the pot itself and the watery world nearby. At $4 a 'cup' it's an expensive mulch, so I won't go crazy and use it everywhere. But it has added a touch of class to proceedings, hasn't it?

Potted water gardens, an update

Late last year I somehow managed to talk myself into starting up a little potted water garden, and the good news is that it's all progressing pretty well, but I've learned a few lessons along the way, of course, as all newbies do. And that's what this little blog posting is all about.

The peaceful scene this morning. Of the four original goldfish – John, Paul, George and Ringo – three have survived (Ringo, alas, didn't survive a scorching 40°C day fairly early on in the piece). The plants have grown like crazy, and I have learned that potted water gardens are a lot of work. I don't mind the work at all, but that's the main lesson learned. To keep the water clean, you have to both top it up and replace it very regularly.

At first I thought the Louisiana iris wouldn't make it, as the leaves flopped over and showed some signs of yellowing, but to my surprise the main stem has popped up a sturdy, dark green new bunch of erect leaves, and for good measure a second healthy stem has emerged. So I presume it suffered a bit of transplant shock when I repotted it, but now likes the manure-rich soil in which it's growing.

The other planting, a native floating fern called nardoo, is thriving to the point that I have to cut it back weekly to stop it taking over the whole pond. I love this delicate looking monster. This one plant in a six-inch pot could easily cover a water surface three or four times as big as my puny pond.

If you look closely at this shot you can see the underwater roots of the nardoo looking to spread out and take over the world. The goldfish also love the nardoo, as it gives them a great hiding spot to dart to the moment they sense any movement above the water.

The main issue with the pond is maintaining water quality, and as I don't have a pump with a filter (no space to fit one in) I have adopted a simple program of replacing about one-third of all the water roughly every 10 days.

To do this, I first fill a bucket with tap water and sit that out in the sun all day, to 'burn off' any chlorine present in the water (goldfish are said to be susceptible to chlorine, say all the experts). Then in the late afternoon or early evening, I let the water in the bucket cool fully, and use it to replace the pond water. I use a small 500ml plastic measuring jug to remove the water bit by bit, and once the water level is down by about a third, I wipe any green slime off the side of the iris's pot, as well as the pond pot itself. Then I replace the water using the bucket water. This has all become an easy routine, but it is essential maintenance.

During the hot weather of summer, however, the pond's water level sinks an inch or so each day, and so I just top that up with ordinary tap water without worrying about burning off the chlorine in the sun, etc. Adding one litre of tapwater at a time doesn't seem to bother the goldfish at all.

When I was in the supermarket buying the small plastic measuring jug that I use to gently add or remove water from the pond, I also picked up a cheap tea strainer, and this has proved a useful little 'scoop' to clean any bits of flotsam and jetsam from the water.

The reason for all this fiddly maintenance is sunshine. To stay healthy, goldfish need about half of the water surface to be bathed in sunshine, and the other half covered in something cool, protective and green (like the nardoo). When the sunshine hits the water, algae forms. If the whole of the water surface was covered in plant life, there'd be little or no algae, as algae needs sunshine to grow. But as I wanted goldfish (to eat any mosquito larvae) I had to accept algae as part of the deal.

Another serious promoter of algae is me. Well, to be more specific, the problem is me overfeeding the fish. These 'Comet' goldfish are really cute when you sprinkle the goldfish food over the water, going into a very greedy and entertaining feeding frenzy. And so early on I overfed them. Cheap thrills. Then I discovered the 'food block'. This is the white thing you can see in the pond. It's shaped like a seashell, and it's like a slow-release goldfish food. It's a much better way to feed them (great if you go away on holidays of course), and it also contains a few slow-release elements which help to clear up the water quality. Since I've started to use the food block, the water quality has improved and it doesn't need quite as much maintenance as early on.

And finally, the pond has given Pammy a whole new class of ornamental creatures to shop for. This is her latest purchase from our Darwin holiday, a cute little turtle that sits at the base of our pond.

And so the main thing I have learned is that if you take on a potted water garden you've taken on a fair bit of extra work – they're not low-maintenance by any means. I'm loving the whole experience so I'd encourage anyone interested to give it a go. I'm thinking of swapping over to a much bigger pot at some stage in the future, just to give the nardoo a more natural looking wide, shallowish pond of water to float on, but that's about the only change I have in mind at this stage. I guess when I get around to doing that, another update might be in order.