a new bed of herbs

After the flood, I made a big decision about the two garden beds that run along the front of the house.  I grew the geraniums in those beds from tiny seedlings and nursed them through rust, drought, and completely replacing the soil.  But a few factors all came together at once: the floods really bashed at the geraniums that struggle every year in the heat.  At the same time, when we cleared all the pots off the front porch to clean it, it was remarkable how much more space we had without the pots and pots of herbs. I'd also noticed how much happier my herbs in the ground are compared to my herbs in pots. 

It actually made me sad to do it, but I pulled them out.  In the bed that gets hot, hot sun in summer I planted thyme, more sage and chives.  You can barely see the little things, but they should absolutely love the heat and sun they'll get here.  The rosemary bush casts a bit of shade in the afternoon but the sage, at least, will soon grow just as tall.

The other bed gets afternoon shade so I decided I'd plant basil (Greek and sweet) and parsley here, and in the winter replace the basil with rocket or lettuce.  This choice was even harder because the geraniums on this side do a lot better, although they did struggle badly with rust.  So in the end one plant survived the cull!

This has meant that the porch only has one small row of pots on it now, leaving things much more spacious!

january flowers update

It's not just the veggies that have gone crazy, the flowers are also loving this weather.  My gaura's coming into bloom now and is looking great.  I'm a little irked though.  It's hard to tell in this photo but the one on the left is a bit more pink than the one on the right, even though the label was the same.

The geum is starting to repeat-bloom as well.  Such a dainty little flower!

The ageratum is still small but a few of them are starting to flower.  I can't wait to see these guys at full size.

The vitex is huge!  It was this big when I planted it last year:

Now it's this big and growing every day:

The hydrangeas are starting to fade to pink.  Since this photo, they've actually faded to a pretty ugly brown.  But there's another set of flower heads still coming in.

And the sunflowers are still going strong.  They're obviously two different types as the one on the left is still going and the flower head isn't near opening yet.  The geraniums are doing pretty well too considering.

december update

I've been a bit slack updating what's new in the garden recently.  First up, my little vitex shrub is steadily powering along.  It used to be this small!

Speaking of small, it has a little visitor.  I just love finding praying mantises in the garden!

Not so welcome a visitor was the locust I found in the lawn.  There's a really bad plague of them this year up north in country Victoria, with sporadic sightings throughout the city.  So far I've only seen the one, who tried to escape in the rosemary.

The sunflowers are also powering along, and one of them's forming a flower head.  Unfortunately the new leaves are coming in a bit warped which is worrying.  But on the up side, as you can see, the geraniums are recovering from their combined ordeal of rust and getting the soil under them replaced.

My melons are only coming along slowly, which is disappointing.  The weather's been a bit cool for their liking.  But I also think I had unrealistic expectations for how quickly they'd grow, since last year they were around this size in December too and I was harvesting them in March.

I planted some African blue basil in the bed below them.  Last year I had some near the bird bath and the bees went absolutely nuts for it.  This year I decided it was better to put it next to the melons for pollination.  It's already got some flowers on it, yay!

Speaking of flowers, my qarabali zucchini has already put out a few male flowers even though the plant is still pretty small.  The leaves are going a bit funny as they age, though, I don't know what's going on there.

And finally, I snapped a photo of some of the neighbourhood lorikeets who were having a look into the garden.  I think they periodically stop by to see if the figs are ripe yet.  The breba (early) crop is just starting to look like it's thinking of ripening, the main crop won't be ready until autumn.  This year I put a few cheap mesh bags over some of the fruits to see if I could save a few for myself, we'll see how it goes!

geranium surgery

I started feeling bad for the geraniums on one side of my house.  They got bad rust during the winter which made them lose a lot of leaves.  Then as soon as it warmed up a bit they dried out.  The soil in the bed is awful builder's infill, almost pure sand.  I've tried putting compost on top but sand just makes it disappear.  Between the hot afternoon sun on the house bricks and the dry soil, I was very worried about them surviving the summer.  So I decided to perform a bit of geranium surgery.

I dug each one out partially or completely and dug out four buckets of sandy soil.  As you can see here, even after all that rain patches were still dry.  Some of the sand was compacted down very solid into those clumps.  I replaced the sand with compost from the bin (full of worms!) and a bit more of the manury soil I've got leftover. 

Then the geraniums each got a haircut - all the flowers and buds came off plus a few branches.  Some of them lost a lot of roots and are looking wilty today but they all got a dose of seasol to help them along.  And the weather this week is perfect for their recovery - low 20s and cloudy with drizzle.  My only worry is that the rust will keep eating at them in the wet.

I've also planted a pair of sunflowers in the bed this year, at the base of those two stakes.  I'm hoping they'll cast a bit of shade to give them a bit of shelter this summer.  I'm just hoping my geraniums recover!

october in the garden

Just a little update of what's thriving in the garden this month.  My geraniums are at their spring best.  They've overcome some winter rust (still hanging around but not keeping it down) and they're just bursting with colour.  In fact a few branches have flopped over from the weight of the flowers!

In contrast, the side bed is usually ugly and plain: to the right of this picture is all the utility crap like the water heater.  But in this brief moment, the hebe are blooming and the alyssum are going crazy.  Look at those clouds of white!  I let the alyssum self-seed about the place, including the path.

The clivia's looking amazing too.  The begonias survived all winter long without stopping.  Doesn't quite match the orange of the clivia, but who cares.

And finally, my little maple is looking stunning!

Did I mention already that I love spring?

the summer's begun

We've had a run of record hot weather - days in a row over 30 and several over 34 is not normal for early November.  I'm already having to keep an eye on the garden and figure out what isn't handling the heat.  The young oakleaf hydrangeas are doing OK - the one in the hot sun is a bit singed but it'll be fine.  However the geraniums on the sunny side of the house are already suffering.

Granted it's a very hot spot - afternoon sun and the hot house brick reflecting the heat.  But mostly I blame the rubbish soil.  It's practically dust, that lifeless fill dirt they put around foundations.  It dries out incredibly easily and once dry, water just pools on top leaving huge pockets of dust below.  I added some compost last summer but you wouldn't know it.  What I should have been doing was adding more and more all winter long and letting the worms and bugs slowly turn it into decent soil. 

So now I'm trying to make up for lost time.  You can see in this photo how shriveled the leaves are from the heat.  I started by brushing back the mulch and scattering some "Saturaid" (some kind of commercial soil additive that's meant to retain moisture; just looks like coir powder to me).  On top of that went a few handfuls of clay kitty litter, that white stuff.  From what I understand it's one of the quickest ways to get more clay into your soil to retain moisture.  You just have to be careful not to let it cake up into a glob when it first gets wet.

So the moisture-retaining agents were important, but more important is to get some more organic matter into the soil.  For this I went to the compost heap.  My heap has four sides but the back is pretty close to the fence so this was the first time I'd tried to squeeze my hands back there to shovel some compost from the back.  And what compost!  Because it'd been sitting there for almost a full year, it was black, crumbly, and full of goodness.  Just look at all those worms!  Unfortunately it was also full of earwigs who like to nibble young growth, so there was much squashing.

After that each plant got a good dose of water with some seaweed solution to help them get over the heat shock.  No fertilizer though, the last thing they need right now is to put out more tender new growth to get burned in the sun.  Hopefully the compost will help the soil hold more moisture, and I'll be sure to keep topping it up every month or so until I'm happy with the soil in that bed.

happy little maple, the back bed, and favourite flowers

I'm glad to announce that the sad little maple tree survived its ordeal.  As you can see the tips of the longer branches have died, although some of them have buds that haven't sprouted yet.  But I'm very proud of its tenacity, and I hope that this year is kinder to it than last year.  Hopefully I'll remember to water it more often!  In the meantime it's going to get some coffee grinds around the roots this weekend.  It loves acidic soil and the grinds should keep the surface roots cool.  I just had to learn the hard way last year, only to put a thin layer of grounds.  Anything as thick as even 1cm turns into a hard caked crust!

I thought I'd add a picture of the back bed whilst I was at it.  The pansies in the raised beds are doing OK but I don't think I'd plant them back there again.  They want more sun, the blooms are large but don't last long, and any bit of rain makes them flop over.  Compare that to the smaller violas I describe in a moment...

In the meantime the oakleaf hydrangeas are starting to wake up from winter dormancy (they're too stick-like to see in the photo but they're near those lamps in the raised beds).  I also wanted to bring the perennial statice to your attention, it's those clusters of broad dark leaves with the whispy purple flowers.  They are fabulous plants, the blooms last forever, all through the autumn.  And when the autumn flowers faded it had already put out another set of buds which bloomed with the spring.  Two long shows per year, and they're tough and drought-friendly.  A great find for any Melbourne garden.

The big bed in the middle is full of manure and waiting for this year's veggies.  I'm thinking I'll try edamame soybeans, the kind you eat freshly steamed as a snack.  It's a Japanese snack I highly recommend if you haven't tried them.

As promised, here's another look at the violas at the front door.  Now you can see why I prefer them to the pansies ... they put out so many cheerful blossoms and they've done so all winter long.  The trick is to pick off the spent flower heads every so often so they spend their energy making more flowers instead of making seeds.  Will definitely grow again next winter.

Next we have probably my all-time favourite flower, geraniums (pelargoniums).  I keep showing photos but I can't help myself.  I can't quite get over that twelve months ago these were tiny seedlings with maybe six leaves.  And now they're going nuts!  This is the cluster that's done so well I've had to prune it back already.

My clivias are doing well too.  I planted them in the autumn and they've all put out new growth, though only one decided to bloom this year.  But what a bloom!  This variety is meant to blossom twice a year, so maybe by the autumn all three plants will be ready to bloom at once.  And in the meantime, I think one of them has had a baby.  You can just see a little green leaf coming out of the bark in front of the parent.  I think it's a "pup", which would be great, I'd love to have a thick cluster of clivia in this bed.  Though I can't recommend them yet as they haven't survived a Melbourne summer yet...

And finally, another flower I can't yet recommend because I don't know if it'll survive the summer.  My hellebores survived a vicious aphid attack, and one of them decided it was ready to flower this year.  I'm very happy with the colour, they came from a mix so I didn't know what colour they'd be.  They go semi-dormant over the summer so I hope that means they'll survive the heat.

more signs of spring

My first iris reticulata bloomed today!  How stunning is this tiny beauty?  It's only a few inches tall.  I just hope the rest of them come up soon, I'd rather see a little row of irises than have them come up one at a time.  I've got some species  tulips in the same bed but I actually have no idea if they bloom at the same time or if the tulips come up later than the irises.  I just hope they all settle in and start making babies, both the irises and tulips are meant to "naturalise" easily.  That means they spread by making more bulbs until they form big clusters of blossoms.  How wonderful would that be?

These aren't really spring flowers, I just wanted to show the progress of my geraniums.  They simply have not stopped flowering since they got their first flowers last spring.  And in the winter their lovely brown "horseshoe" leaf patterns are really showing off - they fade in the summer sun.  The alyssum is going nuts too, and supposedly they self-seed so with luck I won't ever have to plant more.  All in all I'm really happy with this bed, it's right at the front of the house, it's always flowering and it takes care of itself.

Finally, here's how far the geraniums have come in the last year.  I first planted them last winter and they were no bigger than a few tiny leaves.  This is what they looked like in March after the brutal summer heat.  The three on the left had to be replaced.

By May they looked like this:

And now they're in gorgeous full form!

geraniums and alyssum

I just wanted to post some pictures of my geranium beds.  The white alyssum has come in nicely.

Here's the left-hand bed; unfortunately the alyssum under the bigger geraniums died, maybe competing for water with the geranium?

And here's the left-hand bed.  I had to replace some of the geraniums after the summer heat so the ones on the left are quite small still.

Pretty, huh?

getting busy ... with flowers

I realized when I got back to Melbourne how much my garden keeps me grounded.  I feel unsettled if I don't know what the weather is going to be, if I don't know how my plants are doing, if I don't know what's starting to ripen.  So the first day back from two weeks overseas and I was getting busy.

I'd decided not long before the trip that I wanted to plant more flowers in the garden.  Veggies and fruit are still my first priority, but flowers not only add pizazz but attract all-important pollinators.

My first project which I'd decided on before I left was a row of vinca along the front path.  As you can see here (first photo), there aren't any flowers at all, and for this project I was focusing on the bed next to the garage.

I decided on vinca because it looks almost exactly like impatiens.  I adore impatiens, and they just bloom and bloom from the end of summer through much of winter.  But they love their water, and I just couldn't bring myself to plant them.  But vinca, on the other hand, is much hardier and shouldn't need much water at all.  You're meant to plant them in the hot sun but I've heard they don't mind shade so I thought I'd give it a shot.

It ended up being quite a workout, and it felt good to get the exercise (though my muscles are killing me today!).  I had to dig into the rock-hard, chalk-dry clay along the front of that bed, then try to soften the soil by adding some home-made compost.  They got a good deep watering with seasol then the return of the mulch.

Now instead of a plain path, it looks like this!  And with any luck they'll keep blooming for months yet.  This is now the first thing you see when you walk up.  A nice welcoming sight if I do say so myself.

But I wasn't finished yet, I continued my rampage of flowers. 

I so loved having poinsettias outside the front door during Christmas, I decided I'd plant feature pots of flowers year-round, changing them up every few months.  For the autumn I chose salvia (blue) and alyssum (white).  My next project, when I get around to it, will be to find matching plant stands so they're a little bit off the ground.  By the way, no sooner had I planted them when a bee buzzed up to the salvia!  It flew away before I could snap a picture but it made me happy to see it.  I also saw a bee the next day in one of the pumpkin flowers - the first time I've seen one back there.  Might just be coincidence, but again I took it as a good sign.

Finally, the garden centre I frequent had some geraniums that were outgrowing their tiny punnets so they marked them down to $3 for three of them.  As you can see here, my geraniums on one side have been suffering in the heat as they get the brunt of the afternoon sun.

So I replaced the three tiniest, most struggling plants with these seedlings to give them a bit more of a head-start.  I'm hoping the whole row takes off over the winter and will be much stronger in next summer's heat.

I was exhausted after all this, but in a good way, and mightily proud of myself!  By the way I've also ordered some spring bulbs (miniature iris, species tulips, and snowdrops) which should arrive in a few weeks, as well as planting out a bunch of spring stars my mother-in-law gave me.  Flowers, flower everywhere!