tangelos struggling along

Once again this year my designer twig has put out lots of flowers and set lots of fruit but most of them have dropped.  This year a few of them became a bit warped before falling off.  No idea what that's about!

Last year's tangelos are still hanging in there but they've been struck for the first time by gall wasps.  You can just see the stems start to swell.  Just my luck, BOTH branches with fruit have galls now and I think it's forcing the fruit to ripen early, as you can see by the yellow flush.  I just hope they ripen fully unlike the first fruit that dropped whilst still bitter.

My mature lemon tree just gives and gives, but my little twig has been picky from the start.  Young citrus trees are notoriously fussy, and growing it in a pot doesn't help!

poor little tangelo

My multi-graft citrus had three little tangelo fruits, but they stopped growing.  One of the branches holding the fruit started to die back and the fruit started ripening.  The poor tree keeps getting die back followed by a fresh flush of growth and I still don't quite know what's causing it.  This is the branch the first fruit was hanging on before it fell.

And here's the sad little tangelo.  It's not even the size of a mandarin and still had a flush of green on it, but the elongated neck suggests it was a tangelo and not off the mandarin graft.

Didn't look much better inside and was bitter and inedible.  One of these days I'll have a proper edible fruit off of this tree.  There are still two other tangelos on it but I don't know if they're going to get any bigger, though hopefully more ripe.

Citrus trees really are picky things when they're young.  This one's still only three years old.  Maybe one day it wont' be this fussy... maybe one day I'll actually be able to enjoy the fruits of all this fussing!

winter surprises

Last year I decided to try over-wintering my little firecracker chili plant.  Supposedly as long as they don't freeze they'll go ragged over winter but have a head start for the next summer.  Mine did better than that, it never slowed down!  I had to give away the last of the summer's chilies.  This weekend I trimmed off the last stragglers, replaced some of the potting soil and gave it a good feed.  Whilst doing that I was quite surprised to find that it not only put out new flowers, it actually set fruit!  Here are the little baby chilies already starting to come in.  The foliage is a bit yellow because it needs a feed.

I'm also pleasantly surprised to see my little twig still holding onto its off-season fruit.  Both the mandarin and tangelo grafts should have already fully fruited a while ago, but these fruit set after the first main flush (which the twig wasn't able to hold onto).  I think they're tangelos since they've got just a bit of a neck on them, but I can't remember which graft is which.

My worry is that they're already turning yellow, so I'm not sure if they'll keep growing before they ripen up.

a hint of spring

I've been really unmotivated about the garden this winter.  It's the coldest, wettest winter I can remember since moving to Australia six years ago.  It's hard to be excited about gardening in that weather.  But today was a hint of spring to come - a perfectly sunny day with a high of 18.  How could I stay inside in that weather?

The bees were busy in my rosemary bush.

A few cyclamen plants that survived the deep shade under the fig tree are putting on a lovely show.

And the geum is already starting to put out its spring flush!  I thought it would wait a lot longer.  You can also just see the daffodils springing up behind it.

The hellebore are going crazy, look at this show!

Even Thatcher was enjoying the sunshine in front of a few spring stars.

The multigraft twig is putting out heaps of new shoots, both leaves and flowers.  That's reassuring since the last set of growth in the autumn dropped its leaves and died over winter, possibly because of the cold.  I just hope we don't get a bad cold snap that knocks out this growth too!

Which just reminds us that spring is still a month away. This week will be more sunny warmth but after that is a return to the cold.

june veggies

It's been a pretty quiet winter in the garden.  I haven't planted many veggies this year but I thought I'd show a few pictures of what is growing.  As with last year I'm growing one Tuscan kale plant.  It's taken a while to get going, but it's now just big enough to start picking leaves for minestrone.  For some reason the white butterflies have left it alone this year, even though they decimated the Chinese cabbage I had growing next to it.

I'm also growing two pots of Oregon spring snowpeas.  They're also just starting to set pods.  I think they really appreciate having the teepee trellis this year.  They're bush-type peas but they still need some support.

My parsley plant has gone absolutely nuts.  Parsley's funny like that, it creeps along slowly until one day you realise you've got a triffid in the yard and there's nothing you can do about it.

My chilies are also still pottering along.  They're still ripening up, although more slowly in the cold.  It's also starting to look a bit yellow, but I'm not sure if I should fertilise it in the winter.

Finally, my twig lost all of its first flush of fruit but it's still holding onto a later flush.  I don't know if they're mandarins or tangelos though.

Unfortunately the other graft is suffering a bit of die-back on some of the new growing tips.  First the young leaves went, now they're turning brown.  I hope it doesn't continue!

citrus' little helper

Recently the garden's been overrun by aphids, including on the new growth of my designer twig.  I found heaps of these little critters all over my tree and had a bit of a panic because I'd never seen them before.  They looked kind of like a ladybug only smaller and they had some strange white powder on them.

Thanks to my friends at OzGrow garden forum, I found out it's a yellow-shouldered ladybird, one of the many "good" ladybugs that chows down on aphids.  I've never seen so many ladybugs on one plant, and they sure did a good job - the aphids are gone!  Good thing I checked before I sprayed.

january edible updates

Here are some updates from around the garden in January.  We've had so much rain this year (hundreds of mms/around 8 inches in just the last few months), plus some very humid tropical weather, which has made the whole garden go absolutely bonkers.  Plants that were going slowly through the cool spring have really started to catch up. 

First, my tomatoes.  They haven't grown too much in the last week or two, but I was very right when I realised they were lacking in nitrogen.  You would think I'd figured this one out before, since the first year I grew tomatoes I did the same thing.  The other good news is the lower leaves are looking OK too, so either the disease has slowed down or it was all just low nitrogen!

Speaking of which, my firecracker chilies are now going spacko since I gave them a shot of nitrogen too.  I'd grown them in a pot that had snowpeas in it, which are meant to "fix" nitrogen into the soil. I've also learned that they end up spending that nitrogen on themselves; they only really put it back in the soil if you plow them in when they're still little plants.  So yeah, mental note for next year: make sure if I re-use potting mix I give them a bigger boost of fertilizer.  I'd put a sprinkle of organic fert pellets but obviously not enough.  In any case, my firecracker now even has one green chili ripening away, plus dozens of flowers.

The cherrytime capsicums are coming along brilliantly too.  Not red yet, but there are quite a few little caps on there.

My basil's doing really well this year too.  They seem to like this weather a lot more: mid-high 20s plus rain and humidity suits them better than past years' dry heat with the occasional 40+ day.  The weird thing is my Greek basil (on the left) is getting die-off on one side.  No idea why, otherwise it's very healthy.  Maybe there are grubs in the potting mix?

My twig is also coming along beautifully.  Both grafts have fruitlets on them, although one has more than the other.  If I get half a dozen fruit to ripeness this year I'll be a happy camper.  And look how green and lush those leaves are!

For a little while it was dropping its lower leaves, which didn't worry me too much.  But it's actually started putting out a lot of new growth from the middle.  That actually makes me happy as it was starting to get a bit leggy.  I'll have to make sure the two grafts have the same number of shoots but look at all that new growth!

The melons are also finally starting to go crazy, they absolutely adore this weather.  No fertilized melons I can see yet.  I should be out there with a paintbrush helping them pollinate, but I keep forgetting to do it in the morning.  And when I do remember, it's raining which makes it pretty impossible.  Also notice how big that colocasia has gotten there in the corner - it's huge!

All of this has resulted in some decent harvests - well, decent for my garden anyway!  The tomatoes are producing pretty well, especially the yellow currant.  This is what a typical harvest looks like for me these days - a few handfuls of herbs and some tomatoes.

Keep bringing on this weather!  I just need to keep on top of the weeds...

i finally decided

I finally decided what to plant in place of the old hebe.  It was quite the odyssey in the end - first digging out the stump, then digging up piles of rubble and a few large stones.  And today I had a disgusting shock.  There were autumn leaves in the hole and when I went to pull them out, thought I saw wet fur.  I tried to dig whatever it was out with a shovel, and what I believe was a dead rat split in half to reveal a bed of maggots.  EW EW EW EW EW EW.  So I dumped some dirt on it and dug some more to one side.  It's well below the ground now, I suppose that even decomposed rats are good for the soil.  EW.

OK now for a nicer image.  I decided to plant a kaffir lime in the spot.  It's a type of lime grown for its leaves and used in Thai dishes.  It makes wrinkled little fruits but they're not really used.  I do occasionally cook with kaffir lime leaves so it'll be useful to me, but because the fruits aren't important I'm not as worried about it being in a spot that's shaded all winter.

It's just a wee little seedling at the moment but it's still big enough for me to pick a few leaves as I need them.  I decided to be clever and put an agricultural pipe in the planting hole, so I can water it down to the roots when I need to.

The striking thing about kaffir limes, if you're not familiar with them, is that they have double-leaves.  Look closely and you can see they're in a sort of figure-8 shape.  Nifty, huh?  I'll have to plan for a few Thai dishes next week.

And whilst I was walking along the path I noticed that my transplanted camellias are starting to bloom.  They've taken their move well; they didn't drop their buds and the first one is now sweetly blooming.  I'll leave you with this lovely picture.

twiggy gets a move

I kept going back and forth about what to do with the designer twig.  I thought I'd move it to where I dug out the hebe stump, but I realised that in the winter it doesn't get any direct sun.  That's not a good thing for citrus, which ripens up their fruit in the winter!  So I finally decided it needed a bigger pot.  Which meant going for the full half wine barrel!

It takes a LOT of potting soil to fill one of these suckers.  I mixed some sand into the soil for the bottom third to make sure it didn't get boggy, then in it went.

It does look a lot happier in its new home.  It wasn't actually very root-bound in the old pot which means it will be years before it fills out this pot.  And the bloody thing is so heavy, it's not going anywhere.  In maybe 3 or 4 years I'll pull it out just to trim the roots and the leaves to keep it to a small size.

I can't wait until it gets its next flush of flowers, this is definitely the year for it to fruit!

big little twig

My designer twig continues to power on with another set of new growth coming in now.  It's come so far since it was delivered in December 2008!  But as you can see, it's starting to look a bit too large for its pot.  The problem is I don't have a lot of room for another big pot!  It's pretty much at the point where it would want a half-wine-barrel sized pot but I don't think one would even fit on the porch.

Luckily at about the same time I was looking to dig out an old stump.  Along the front path (at the end of the row of birches and plums) there used to be a big hebe bush.  We cut it down last year because it was growing out into the path.  And I finally got tired of looking at the stump and wasting the space.  So I started to dig around it and hacking through a mat of roots ... before I got this surprise!

Whoever planted the hebe didn't even bother to take it out of the pot.  Now you might do that for something like a fig tree if you wanted to keep the size under control.  But for something like a hebe I can't imagine it was anything but laziness.

Add to that the horrible quality of the soil.  Starting from the surface, there's a layer of organic matter from decomposed leaves, then a thick mat of roots (since the hebe roots had nowhere to go but up and out!).  Under that mat the soil was bone-dry (despite decent rains in the last month) and builder's-dust-dead.  There were chunks of brick, concrete, glass, rusted metal, bits of tile and the occasional nail.

The plastic pot was a blessing in disguise because once I cut the roots I was able to leverage the pot out of the ground.  Notice how the roots weren't able to grow out from the bottom, perhaps because the soil down that far was so rubbish.  You can just see how at the top of the photo the soil's fairly dark and "living" but at the bottom it's pale and dry.

In any case, I still think this is the best new home for my designer twig.  I've piled on rich black compost and some of the soil I bought a few weeks ago and dug it in.  In a week or two I'll put the twig in its new home and hope it thrives!

what a difference a week makes

I'm used to visiting my garden almost every day, so when I was gone for a week it felt like so many things had changed!  To start things off, my first Greigii tulip had blossomed - it's a species tulip which essentially means a while tulip.  The variety is called "Cape Cod."  It's so bright and cheerful against the ugly brick wall and grating.

My designer twig is also in full blossom.  Although I got an update email from the company I bought it from saying that the first fruits should be removed when they're still tiny so as not to weigh down the branches and to encourage the plant to grow.  So no mandarins or tangelos for me after all!  But I still enjoy the flowers.

And my indoor seedlings were definitely ready to be planted out.  Look at the size of that basil!

The chillie got its own pot (on the left) whereas the cinnamon and lettuce-leaf basils will share a pot.  Last year my two basils shared a pot and they did just fine.

On the other hand, my tomatoes last year struggled partly because their pots were too small.  So this year I decided to get them much bigger pots ... then decided heck, might as well get them one long huge pot.  Trust me, they will grow into it.  And I can't wait to decide what to plant in it over the winter!

I also planted the soybeans in the back bed.  I'm keeping an eye on the onions - they're starting for form bulbs!  But in the meantime I've started some Baby Blue pumpkins, Green Nutmeg rockmelon and Minnesota Midget rockmelon in punnets to go into the onion bed when they're finished.  I love spring!