Most of my flowers this week are plants which spread themselves around without too much help given a slightly welcoming environment. There are a lot of twisty extending stems, a few herbs which have run wild, and one or two which are weeds.
Author: Cath
I'm working on transforming around 3 acres of paddock into a garden. I'm only here a couple days a week so the result so far is more like patches of garden.
Our water is rainwater collected off the roof of the hut, the house, and greenhouse, and the power comes from solar panels.
We try to grow enough tomatoes for frozen and bottled purée to last through the year, and enough kumaras (sweet potatoes) and pumpkins. We can generally harvest fresh greens of some sort.
Artichokes
The artichokes are in full swing now, with enough buds for a good feed each week. We started out with Green Globe and Purple de Jesi seedlings. One of the flowers which was left for the bees turned into a flower full of seedlings – they all just germinated while still in the flower. We planted these and they must have been purple – there don’t seem to be any of the green ones at all anymore. I love to see the bees on the flowers we leave. Sometimes 6 or 7 bumblebees seem to spend the night on a flower – such an extravagant bed.
In a Vase on Monday, Scilla natalensis
Scilla natalensis or Merwilla plumbea is flowering in my garden for the second year, so I feel that I’ve managed to give it the right conditions despite our high winter rainfall and clay soil. The flowers are a delicate blue with a tiny bit of pale yellow, flowering a bit at a time to give an effect which reminds me a little of a shorter blue Foxtail Lily.
In a Vase on Monday – Ixias and Iris
It was a busy weekend moving plants to make space for a bigger water tank. So initially I collected flowers from plants which needed to be pruned before moving.
More is more – in a Vase on Monday
This week I started out with purple Columbine and Wallflowers. At the last minute I decided to add some orange to spark up the colour a little.
Iris Eye of the Tiger
I planted these Iris this year, made a label, and then forgot where I had planted them. I think I have found them now.
Tomato transplanting, it begins
I arrived last Friday at the end of the day and the Moonglow tomatoes clearly needed transplanting. Their roots were small but their tops were tangling together. There was an extra hour of daylight thanks to daylight saving so I got into it and transplanted about 50 seedlings into separate pots.
I start to feel like the magician’s apprentice at this time of year, no sooner have I transplanted one flat of seedlings the next one is needing attention, and as I finish the last flat the first lot of small pots need to go into bigger pots, and so on. It’s not going to stop until I get everything into the ground sometime in November.
In a Vase on Monday – More Spring Flowers
I made two vases this week, a tall angular one and a fluffy wide one.
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Everything good all together
C helped me collect flowers as we went for a walk yesterday evening, so we have ended up with a hotchpotch or ‘everything good all together’ as he called it. There is no theme or colour scheme, just everything that either of us thought was looking pretty at the time.
Big pile of compost and other good things
The sun was up at 6:21 this morning and it’s past the neighbour’s place on the next ridge, and is only a few weeks away from the big tree which represents due East to me. It’s a clear pink sunrise with only a few delicate clouds on the horizon, and I have all my favourite and rare things today:
Continue reading “Big pile of compost and other good things”
Absent Gardener 