Last night 70mm of rain fell all at once and our garden turned into a moat. We were out at the time and the water came within a few inches of the front door - none got inside, thankfully. But the garden's a mess. Everything was covered in muck.
And there on the house. Those poor geraniums!
The most bizarre part were my big pots. My zucchini was up near the driveway, and there were too other large pots next to the front porch. All three were picked up, carried around the corner, and set down gently. The terracotta pot was tipped over but unbroken.
This is where half the mulch ended up, as well as one of the bins, swept all the way from the street to the back garden.
And here's the other half. That's meant to be pebbles. You can see the water line on the gate.
We did the most important cleanup today but haven't tackled all that mulch yet. The plants actually survived really well, even the cuttings I planted only a week ago are still there. The alyssum and little geraniums copped it badly enough that I pulled them pu. My goldfish are still in their pot, it didn't go under entirely. Even the worm farm made it ok - it had fallen over but not tipped out. Messy, but we were so very lucky.
The mulch was all washed away. You can just see the high water line along the garage there.
This poor wet crow wasn't looking too happy though. They don't usually come into my garden but this guy was just outside the back door. I had a look to see what he was doing so close to the house, and he was pulling something long and white out of the crown of the evergreens along the back. No idea what it was, but he ate it, found a second one, and at that one too.
I watered the box down again and as I listened to the water trickle into the lower box I thought I should check on the worm wee box. I'm glad I did, because it turns out they were trying to escape through the bottom too! So I filled half a bucket with my first harvest of coffee-black worm wee ... straining it through shade cloth of course and rescuing a golfball-sized clump of worms in the meantime. I didn't take any photos of the worms, partially because I was too busy trying to rescue them and partially because they're not pretty to look at. But I did take this photo of my first worm wee harvest, the January 2009 vintage Petit Chateau.
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.
It's still the middle of winter, but it's just starting to turn the corner. I noticed the very first signs of spring in the garden this weekend. The first was this little pale purple spring star. The leaves have been above ground since the autumn, courtesy of my mother in law who gave me dozens of the tiny bulbs. This is the first brave blossom to come up, hopefully there will be dozens more like it.
Around the back bed I planted some miniature bulbs in the autumn, iris reticulata (a tiny, miniature iris) and a species tulip (small wild tulips, I can't remember which kind though!). I was weeding the bed when I noticed a few strong shoots like this one. I can't wait to see if it's a tulip or an iris!
I promise not to keep showing photos of my oh-so-exciting rain gauge, but we had some serious thunderstorms today and I couldn't wait to get home and check the gauge. Look how full it is! 2.4cm, that's almost an inch in one day!
I bought a cheap little rain gauge. I'm pretty obsessed with checking the temperature and weather, I figured I might as well start obsessing over rainfall too. Unfortunately in Melbourne, if I get any rain at all this is generally what the gauge looks like: some spatters but not even enough to reach the 1mm mark.
The rain sure does bring things back to life. There are more birds, bees, and lots of new plant growth. Unfortunately it also means the weeds are back with a vengeance after sitting patiently inside seeds for the last few months. As you can see here, my lawn is starting to look alive again ... but so are thousands of tiny weeds. I'm not looking forward to dealing with all of them.
They're not the only thing sprouting though. It only took four days before the first of the alyssum seeds began to sprout, and here's were they stand one week after planting.
Well in the two weeks we were in Texas, three more pumpkins somehow pollinated. I kept expecting them to shrivel and fall off, but on the contrary they now look like this!
Here's a portrait of the little culprit who's responsible for these three new pumpkins - a bee taking shelter from the rain. See what happens when you pollinate irresponsibly, little bee? You make unexpected babies right when I thought this vine would be retiring!
We had house-sitters taking care of the cats and watering my garden. Most of it came out very well and there are signs of recovering from the heat (more on that later). The one tragedy is that my tomatoes for some reason ended up taking a beating. I don't know what happened there, maybe not enough water. So I've picked off as many of the fruit as I can, but it looks near the end. We'll see if the green fruit on there ripen up, I think they will.
The other great news is that a few of my rhododendrons have put out new growth and so has the maple. It lost a lot of foliage and a few branches have died, but it's started to sprout new growth on other branches. If it survives this summer, it will survive anything.
First I bought more shade cloth, in a bigger piece this time. I found before that I was having trouble tying up the cloth - I tried stapling string to it but the staples fell out, I tried tape but it kept falling down and I ended up just draping the damn stuff over my pots. So this time I got out the sewing kit and stitched the string to the corners of the cloth! Then I tied separate pieces of string to the door under the house, the lamp, and a nail in the porch so I could adjust the length as needed.
And now voila! Permanent, secure shade. It should cover off the whole side of the porch without blowing over. Not bad for only $9 worth of shade cloth and some string.
I decided to try it out. Some of my smaller pots, including my tomatoes, dry out so quickly in this heat that if I water them before work they're already dried out by the time I get home. Here it is with one of my spray bottles until I can get a used water bottle or something.
And I decided to try it on my Japanese maple. The poor thing. First it got water-logged in the wet spring and I didn't notice until it took some foliage loss. Then I dug it up to raise the bed. But then when it dried out I didn't keep on top of watering it, and after the heat it looks like this. I still haven't given up on it though, because the branches haven't died, only the leaves. In fact the tips of the branches have little buds of new leaves! I hope they don't come out for several weeks when this heat is over with. In any case, I thought it could use some nice, deep, consistent watering so I used a milk jug. There's a bit of Seasol in it which is why it's brown. I had to poke a little hole in the top, though ... it was creating a bit of a vacuum and the jug was crumpling over on itself.
This is what my tomatoes look like. The linen cloth certainly helped, I don't think there'd be anything left without it. But I don't think this new growth is going to come back.
This ugly mug is blossom end-rot. I'm pretty sure the heat brought it out. It's taken two of my Better Boys, and will probably take more before the wave is over.
This one absolutely stuns me. Geraniums are meant to be one of the toughest things you can grow in Melbourne. They're meant to be drought-proof. but this is what they now look like. And if you look very closely in the top left corner ... see that tiny spec of green surrounded by shriveled brown? That was also a geranium.
