Backyard Makeover

Before:

After:

Raised sleeper wicking beds for annual vegies. More info re these later.

Potatoes in Tyres

I can't believe how popular the post I made, years ago, on growing potatoes in tyres is.

It is the single most popular page on this blog, and searches for this topic continue to be the reason most ppl end up at my blog. Amazing!

I haven't grown potatoes in tyres myself for quite a while now, but have some organic seed potatoes waiting to be put somewhere. The tyres I used previously are now holding up my worm farm.

Oh! But I've just remembered I do have two other tyres not currently doing anything at all. Well, I had put some green manure crop onto them but it's not too soon to change that!!

Coolo, think I just gave myself a project for the afternoon, particularly as I have a bale of straw sitting out there not doing anything and it *is* potato planting time!

I'm off to plant potatoes in tyres!

Ciao.

Lemon Cordial Taste Test

Just made a drink of the lemon cordial I made. It's not great and could do with more lemon-ness in the flavour, but it's not dreadful either.

Think I will try less stevia next time and see if the lemon-ness comes through more.

Have you made any cordials from home-grown produce?

Plants for Free!

Oh how I love Freecycle.

Several times at the plant nursery I have looked for watercress so I can grown my own to add to my daily lunch-time salad, but to no avail.

Lo and behold what do I see in my local Freecycle emails on the weekend - someone one suburb away has watercress that's bursting out of it's pot and she'd love to give some away, YIPEE!

A few emails later, a short 5 minute drive and I am the happy owner of some watercress plants.

There are regularly plants advertised in our Freecycle group and I've given some away as well as received the grass tree. Maybe there are free plants waiting on Freecycle for you too? (Freecycle is for more than just plants BTW!) Go to the website now and join the group nearest you (there are groups all over the world)

Thankyou Freecycle!!

I didn't even get my nails dirty with this plant as it is floating in my pond.

Gatherer

Collected Kangaroo Paw seeds from my garden this afternoon - both Anigozanthos Manglesii (red and green kangaroo paw) and Anigozanthos Veridis (a smaller all green kangaroo paw).

Both had flowered particularly well so I was really pleased to be able to gather some seed for future propagation and use in my used-to-be-front-lawn area.

I was very fortunate to adopt a xanthorrhoea (grass tree) for free (from freecycle.org) however I feel it was already too far gone when I adopted it. There has been no signs of new leaves at all and the leaves in the middle of the crown are dead (were like that when I adopted it). I will continue to pamper it with more water than any any other plant receives and 4 - 6 weekly doses of seaweed solution and see what happens.

Go get some dirt under ya' nails!

I Wish we Had Smello-Net!

I really do wish you could smell what I bought today, cos I have something yummy!

Brown Boronia is a West Australian native that is very, very fragrant. People walk around the city selling bunches of it when it's in flower and you can smell them from miles away. A beautiful sweet aroma. They cleverly had some right at the front door of the Better Pets and Gardens shop I went to today - to buy cat food.

The aroma is just magnificent and I could smell it as soon as I got out of the car. Their selling ploy worked very well on me - came out with two boronia plants as well as two tomatoes, a capsicum, a punnet of bok choi on top of the cat food!

Boronia is sold as an aromatic oil for burning in oil burners.

I've tried to grow one of these before but it carked it pretty quickly, hopefully I will have more success this time. Here are the two I bought today:


The one on the left is the standard Boronia Megastigma, the one on the right is called 'Heaven Scent' which is, the label informs me, and improved version of the first.

The second plant has more compact bushier growth as you can see in the pic. The flowers are smaller but seem almost as heavily scented as the standard plant.

The flowers are quite profuse and are dark brown/purple on the outside and either yellow or, in this case, lime green inside. Here's a close up of the flowers both inside and outside:


The plant is native to the south-west of my state so I think my previous problem has been heat and dryness. I have a spot in my current native garden that I think may be OK for this plant. So I'll put it in the ground in a few weeks and see what happens.

Vegie Pot Update
I took pity on the mostly-dead snow peas today and gave them a burial befitting a .. well, umm a dead vegie plant :) :


All of the lettuce I had originally planted were still there, so I just added a few more to fill in the complete circle around the inside of the pot. In the middle I planted a tomato.

I bought a single tomoto plant in a pot instead of a punnet of seedlings even though it's a more expensive option.

I dislike buying a punnet of them and either throwing half the plants in the bin or just being absolutely overwhelmed by fruit if I'm silly enough to plant them all. They also take up far too much room if I plant 8 tomato plants. (What family could ever need 8 tomato plants?? hmm maybe an Italian family). I haven't had much luck with transplanting out ones I grown from seed either, so I'm better off buying an individual plant.

Trendy Tomato
The tomato I bought today is calld 'Pink' (after the singer maybe???) and is supposed to be a heavy cropper, so I probably should feed it more than I usually do. I'm generally pretty slack with fertilising, preferring only to do it during soil preparation. I gave it some Thrive (TM and all that) liquid fertiliser when I planted it today. Might go mark it on the calendar so I remember to feed it again in a few weeks.

Anyway, here's how the pot looks now, hopefully I haven't planted the tomato too soon as it's not really spring yet. I am a bit concerned for the lettuce once the weather warms up, but hopefully they'll all be eaten before it gets too hot for them :


Yum- I see summer salads on the menu, and right outside the back door!

The other tomato (a 'trailing' one meant for hanging pots, but I don't have any hanging pots) is in a separate pot with the rest of the left over lettuce plants, and in yet another pot is the yellow capsicum/mild chilli that I bought.

All in all there was quite a bit of dirt under my nails today!

Next time I'll show you my worm farm. 'Til then happy gardening everyone!

Losing Limbs ...

No, not me silly - the tree!

Since I'm talking about trees (ie in the previous post) I thought I'd give you an update on one of the star attractions of my garden.

About 18 months ago I took a big deep breath and allowed a tree care person do a major prune on my beautiful Liquidambar.
I love my huge big tree. Yes it drops leaves by the ton each autumn/winter and they clog up the driveway and the drains. But I vac' it up and use it as mulch or put it in the composter so they're put to good use.

But my tree worried me. It is big, bigger than my house, which is a two storey house, so it is a pretty big tree. What if it were to fall on my house and break my house. That would not make me a happy chappy. In the pics of the tree bare (or naked, as I prefer to call it!) you can see where it had been pruned sometime in the past, well before I bought this house. So I knew it had been done before, but I didn't know how long prior - at least more than the 10 years I had been here.

So, when I had the funds ('cos I knew it wouldn't be cheap) I called the tree man in and let him loose on my baby. I was rather concerned that such a heavy pruning might damage the tree irretrievably. There was a small part of me that was worried the tree might die :(


I felt so guilty when I got home from work that day and saw my baby all stumpy and cut off :(, it looked pretty ugly, but I knew it had needed to be done. I think they call that tough love!

The next season the tree took much longer to come into leaf, but when it did the canopy was very thick and lush :)

This year the tree was glorious. It's not as high as it used to be, true, but it's still a very large beautiful tree.

The end result is a much happier tree and a happier me.

I don't have a current pic of the tree - I'll take one on the weekend.

If you have a large tree I strongly recommend you have a professional person prune it for you. Mine took a cherry picker, three men and most of a day. Yes, it was expensive but well worth it, I was not about to entertain the idea of me climbing up the tree with a chainsaw going!

Tomorrow's Friday YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

History Repeats ...

A few years ago I had two garden blogs; this one (which used to be called Noala's Garden Journal) and Dirt Under the Nails which was hosted on BlogCharm.

BlogCharm ceased operating in January 2007 and I though all my blog posts from there were gone forever. But I had forgotten about the Way Back Machine!! This is a site where websites are archived. I've known about it and used it in the past to retrieve long gone website information but had forgotten all about it until I read a post on Blog Explosion forums suggesting it as a way of retrieving posts from old Blog Charm sites.

Here's a link to the Way Back Machine - type in a website address and see what the site looked like 10 years ago! Internet Archive There are other archives there, not just websites.

I've found nearly all of the posts, and will be posting some of them here (hey, I'm into recycling - it's good for the planet you know!).

Recycling ...
The first post I'd like to recycle is appropriate to the season as my deciduous trees are currently naked. The tricky bit is going to be whether I can find the original photos used in the post as they didn't travel through time with the web site.

Deciduous Trees - Understory

{ 1:01 PM, 28 January 2006 } { Posted in Trees } { 0 comments } { Link }

Deciduous Trees in My Garden

I have two deciduous trees in my garden. I love them, really I do.

One is a 40 year old liquidamber:

The other is a pair of Chinese Tallow trees (least I think that's what they are!)

The Challenge

I like seeing them in full leaf, and watching the process of them becoming naked, and then the sight of their skeletons in winter:

However ...

It does create a problem as to what to plant beneath them; they drop an enormous amount of leaves which entirely engulf the plants beneath them:

So far I don't think I've made any stupendous blunders on this front, but it's something for you to think about when planting under a deciduous tree.

Planting Under a Deciduous Tree - Things to Consider

• How will the new plants cope with being covered by leaves?
• How easy will it be to rake up leaves (or collect them for composting)

And.. (when planting under *any* tree)

• How will the tree roots affect the plants?
• Will there be too many tree roots for me to be able to dig the ground and get the plants (and reticulation if you're doing that too) in! (I've suffered this one a few times!)
• Will the plants cope with the differing amounts of sunlight between winter and summer?

The Leaves

I compost as many of the leaves as I can. I pick them up with a mulching garden vac. The vac breaks them up into little bits so they break down quicker than if put into the compost tumbler whole. I can't use them all though, so some go through the vac and straight onto the garden.

Used in this second manner, they seem to work well as a mulch and do a great job of keeping the weeds down (usually it's about a year before new weeds and wandering grass become problemmatic again).

Quite a few end up in the bin 'cos I just can't use them all. I feel bad about wasting Mother Natures' gift.

So Tell Me...

Leave a comment and tell me:

What do you grow under your deciduous trees and what do you do about dropped leaves?

Happy Gardening!

Vegies in Small Spaces

Ever increasingly people have less room for gardens. With the explosion of the 'house behind' phenomenon across my city many people have only a small paved area for their outdoor table and chairs and that's the extent of their garden.

Inner city living has also become very popular with a large number of (mostly younger) people living in apartments in the CBD or very close to it. At best they get a balcony where they can have some plants.

Viva Le Pot!
No, no, not *that* kind of pot! You can still grow some vegies to munch on even with severely restricted space.

Whilst I have a large backyard I still grow things in pots - vegies included!

For the last few months I have been growing snow peas and lettuce in a large pot on my back patio:
It's looking rather sad at the moment as we had a storm a couple of weeks ago and the snow pea plants broke off in the wind. However up until that point it was going very well and still has peas and flowers that will turn into peas (if the plant stays alive long enough!):


None of these snow peas made it into the kitchen - this is the kind of thing I plant so I can go out in the garden, grab a handful of peas straight off the plant and straight into my mouth; talk about fresh food!

This is the reason why I chose to put these into a pot - so it was close to the back door of my house. When coming home from work, or going back inside after doing some work in the yard, I can just grab a few peas and enjoy their deliciously sweet crunchiness :).

To support the pea plants I simply put three tomato stakes (for international visitors these are 1 inch square hardwood stakes about 8 feet long) into the pot equal distance around the rim and tied them together with garden string. The string keeping the stakes together also act as somewhere for the plants tendrils to take hold and grab onto for extra support.

There were between 6 - 8 pea plants in this pot. Here's a pic from a different angle so you can see the supports:

Down amongst the bottom of the pea plants there are some lettuce. These are now not doing so well as the pea plants grew so well the lettuce were a bit starved of light. Here's one of them - yes it's a purple lettuce (apologies for the out of focus pic - still working on the close up feature of the camera):

So there you go, even if you only have room for one pot then you have room to grown some vegies. About 6 hours of sunlight per day, some water and, if you must, some fertiliser and you'll be munching your own fresh produce in no time :)

'Til next time, happy gardening everyone :)

Vegie Patch Update

Winter is a pretty boring time in the vegie patch as far as I'm concerned.

Despite this I do have a few things growing, most of which are experiments .. ie things I've never grown before.

My vegie patch is raised from ground level and made of old railway sleepers. Here's how it's looking at the moment - tomatoes in front, brussel sprouts at the back, potatoes to the left rear and then there are some items in tyres (yes I still have the tyres from the potatoes in tyres experiment!):



Below are the potatoes. They haven't been up for long but seem to be doing very well.



This is some of the leeks (amongst flat leaf parsley). I've never grown these before. They seem to be taking a long time to thicken up.


This curious creature is Kale, also something I've not previously grown. Its neighbours were munched very early on by pale greyish looking bugs. This one (in a separate tyre) didn't get munched. I just love how dark the leaves are.

And here we have the brussel sprouts, again something I've not grown before. These took simply ages to start growing the sprouts - which come from where the leaf stalks meet the main stalk.


Here's a closer shot of the sprouts - and the pale grey bugs that are now devouring them These seem to be the same bugs that ate most of the Kale when it was at the seedling stage. I'm guessing both plants are brassica family so no doubt are attractive to the same bugs.


I may pick one of the sprouts this weekend, mostly out of curiosity. They've taken so long to grow I'm sure they will be overly strong - but you never know!

I have also grown bok choi, lettuce and some of the sweetest snow peas over the last couple of months. The weather is too cold now for these. It's really too cold for the tomatoes - they have set fruit but there's not enough sunshine to ripen them.

So although winter is generally a fairly quiet time in my vegie patch I have tried a few things this year just to see how they go. If nothing else I can dig them in at the end and provide some good nutrients for the next crops!

Happy gardening everyone.

Lawn, or Lack Thereof

I live in a hot dry place. We've been getting less and less rainfall each year and our winters are getting warmer and drier. The amount of water in the dams doesn't go up much during winter.

As a result we've had garden watering restrictions for quite a few years now.

In summer we are only permitted to turn our sprinklers on two days of the week (allotted according to your house number). If you have a private bore (which I do) you are permitted one extra day.

This year we also have watering restrictions in winter! Watering via sprinklers is totally banned at present. The exception is that private bore owners are allowed to run their systems once per week - so as to ensure proper operating functions (they can seize up if not used for long periods of time).

This, together with my many battles with lawn - the bindii, the clover, the dead patches, the bits where the sprinklers don't reach anymore (because the water table hand pressure has dropped), , the mowing and fertilising, the fight to find the sprinklers when they've gone underground... I'd had enough of battling with the front lawn - it's not as if any of us go out there and use it.

So I now have NO front lawn. This is not such a radical departure from the norm; many people are getting rid of their lawns.

Most lawns are replaced by paving or concrete (sometimes cheekily painted green), one person on my way home has put down fake grass and it doesn't look too bad!

Me, I've currently replaced my lawn with mulch/bark chips. Most of it was the free mulch from the council. Here's how it looks at the moment:


It's pretty bland at the moment, however it does look better than dead lawn with the added bonus of no watering and no mowing. I poison off the few weeds that rear their heads from time to time.

My long term plan is to plant natives in there - but have no definite plans as yet (though I do like the idea of having a dry creek-bed effect)

Dirty Nails

It's Sunday night and I have dirt under my nails.

I guess it must have been a good weekend!

Only partially though as most of the dirt under my nails is from cleaning out leaves and gunk from my gutters rather than from digging in the dirt.

Some of the dirt is from planting though - some very late daffodils made it into a pot this afternoon.

Welcome back, me :)

Mothers' Garden Day

I have had a most wonderful mothers day with much of it having been spent in the garden - after the obligatory (and much enjoyed!) breakfast in bed and lay-in with the newspaper.

First I headed over to Bunnings who had mightily pissed me off yesterday resulting in me missing their free composting workshop. Seems I didn't miss much though as mum had attended at her local store and said it wasn't worth crying over. (It's been International Compost Awareness week this week in case you didn't know)

Anyway, back to today!

Sick Compost Fix-Up
At Bunnings I bought compost activator for my very sick looking compost - found out my balance is all wrong, needs to be 4:1 nitrogen (ie green stuff) to carbon (ie brown stuff). I'll try get to a fruit and vege shop this week and see if I can grab some thrown out lettuce and cabbage leaves from them this week to help with the ratio.

Apparently fresh lawn clippings are nitrogen, but dried out lawn clippings are carbon - and lawn clippings is mostly what goes into my bin. So I have to get better at putting them in when they are green and fresh rather than from my lawn-clipping pile where they're all dry and brown.

Together with the activator, more water, and some scraps from the vege shop I'm hoping my compost will look a whole lot better soon!


hmm started writing this yesterday and it's still sitting on my screen - I'll post it now and see if I have time to finish it later.

Ok, Finally Some Pics

Here are some pics of the creation of the shade sail.

Shade Sail:
In case you don't recall how it looked previously here are some before pics:

View from the kitchen window

View as you come down the driveway

First the poles went in then were left to set for at least a week. The footings are about 1m square.

Then the sail came!

And finally, with it set up for entertaining:

I love the twist in the sail, so much more aesthetic on the eye than just a plane flat rectangle.

As with most things, I was a bit anxious as to how it would look at the end, but I'm very pleased with it.

BBQ anyone?

Finally a New Post!

Sheeesh, I didn't realise I hadn't posted in here since March!

Later tonight I'll try upload some pics as there has been some activity over in the new entertaining area over the last couple of weeks.

Shade Structure
I have half a shade structure! Finally decided not to go with a Bali Hut as I thought it was too imposing, and 'hard' a structure, for the small area. So I've gone with shade sails. Many thanks are due to my mum for supplying the funds!!!

At this stage the posts have been installed. The actual sail should arrive in the next two weeks.

Tree Pruning
My beloved liquidamber has been pruned, rather severely. This was in preparation for the shade sail as well as being something I have considered having done for a while, but didn't have the funds to do.

They had to bring in a cherry picker to do the job; alas I wasn't here to see it and take pics.

Hope to post some pics later this evening!

Replenishing The Vege Patch

Now that the weather has cooled down I can get back out into the garden, and oh boy, does it ever need some attention - the vege patch particularly.

Today I ripped out the tomatoes, lettuce, celery and about three hours of weeds.

My bad - the weeds had flowered and I could see their seeds scattered all over the ground :( means there are going to be a lot more weeds coming back :( My own fault, I didn't keep them under control.

Tomorrow I will dig the area over and plant the pea seedlings and bean seeds I bought today.

I have good results from beans in the past, so I'm looking forward to them.

With the peas I generally find they get powdery mildew (or whatever the equivalent for peas is) pretty quickly, so I'll try get them to grow and fruit fast.

I just love picking fresh peas and beans and eating them fresh off the plants, can't wait!

Hiatus

Apologies for the hiatus. It's been hot and not weather to be even thinking about gardening.

I hope to start updating again in a few days time.

Plants Beginning with S

ladytreemaker 's Online Photo Album - Q, R & S

Tonight uploaded the few S plants that I have:

Strawberry patch (the slaters get most of them!)
Strelizia - also known as the Bird of Paradise (see below)
Sweet Pea - first time I've grown these was last year, beautiful colours.

Plants Beginning with Q, R & S

ladytreemaker 's Online Photo Album - Q, R, S

Tonight added the R plants:

Rocket (a herb)
Rose (Eiffel Tower, and a sun-burnt red one name unknown)
Rununcula

The rununcula pics are my favourite. This particular one is really dark burgundy, almost brownish. I love the architecture of the petals.



Do you like it?

Plants Beginning with P

ladytreemaker 's Online Photo Album - MNOP

Uploaded the P plants tonight:

Pansy
Petunia
Philodendron Monstera Deliciosa
Poppies

You'll need to click through to the next page to see them all (link is near the top right of the album page).

I really like a lot of these pics, but if I had to choose a favourite it would be this one: