november on the patio

The patio plants are slowly but surely filling out.  The cannas are starting to put out a few leaves and the annuals are really showing off.

The gingers are putting out lots of sprouts of new growth.  I hope the grow a lot taller than the older foliage.

And I did succumb to temptation and got a calla lily.  It's a lucky dip so I don't actually know what colour it will be.  But I love the speckled leaves.  It'll die down over the winter but I've tucked it into a corner so it won't be a bit gap in the winter.

And one afternoon I had a surprise.  I though there was an ugly bird poo on the new couch, then had a close look and realised it was a moth just trying to blend in.

tomatoes almost ready to go

It's time to swap over the beetroots to the tomatoes.  Unfortunately not many of the beetroots reached even "baby" size but I really needed to make the swap!

Once they were out I finally had to dump out all the dirt in this tub.  For the last two years I suspect that my tomatoes have gotten some kind of disease that's in the soil.  Which meant I needed to get rid of all the soil and I even rinsed out the tub with bleach.  I got a bit of a surprise when I pulled the tub away from the steps - a whole colony of snails!

Once the snails were dealt with I put together the wooden frame I use to keep the tomatoes in shape.  This year I got extra-fancy and fit cross-beams along the length of the tub too.  The soil is a fresh mix of potting soil and mushroom compost plus a sprinkle of some sulphate of potash and organic fertilizer pellets. 

The only down side is that I can't plant out my tomatoes just yet.  I was out of town this week so I haven't had the chance to harden them off yet.  But hopefully mid-week I'll be able to finally put them in their new home!

beautiful mona, hydrangeas and bees

My plectranthus Mona lavender has really come into its own!  Just look at all of those flowers.

I've got a little bud vase inside and picked a few.  It made me realise something I hadn't noticed - the "face" of the flowers is beautifully patterned.  You just can't see those details from above.

My oakleaf hydrangeas are also looking lovely.  They put out a second flush of flowers mid-summer and they're starting to colour up beautifully. 

I'm also realising this year the value in having autumn-flowering plants.  I've started to notice so many bees on my salvia, basil, gaura and the last of the lavender.  They probably appreciate this last feast before winter.

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.

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!

the butterfly miracle

It happened!  Remember these ugly caterpillars?  I saw them here and there back in February.

And in May I found chrysalis.

Well yesterday I was out the front to have a look at repairing our front gate.  I saw a movement in the lemon tree, and look who I saw!

She was still emerging, her wings were still wrinkled and her body was fat.  A few hours later she was gone.  I feel so lucky to have seen her before she left!

the gall that wasn't

The other day I was having a look at my lemon tree and noticed a citrus gall I had missed.  I got my pruning shears, came back, grabbed the gall and was shocked to find that it wasn't actually attached to the drunk.  Because it wasn't a gall.  It was a chrysalis!  It's the chrysalis of the dingy swallowtail butterfly, the caterpillars of which I've seen on my cumquats but hadn't seen on my lemon tree.  But obviously they're there.  Thankfully I didn't know the chrysalis off, just moved it a bit, so hopefully it will still emerge as a gorgeous butterfly.

It just occurred to me that I never posted a picture of these caterpillars.  Normally caterpillars are a pest that munch away at my veggies and require a dose of dipel.  But these caterpillars only eat citrus leaves and so far only much on my cumquats and lemons so I really don't mind.  And in adult form they're just stunning.  Even as caterpillars they're great fun to look at.  Those orange antennae are a defense they only shoot out if they're disturbed.  They release a smell like rotting oranges to deter predators.  Chemical warfare, amazing mimicry and stunning adulthood - they definitely deserve to live!

bats and redbacks

I'd suspected for a while that possums weren't the only nighttime visitors to my fig tree.  I'd seen bats flying overhead and heard ungodly screeches but never seen one in the act - until tonight!  I took a peak outside and there was a grey-headed flying fox!  By the time I went inside to get my camera it was gone, so no picture, but they look like this.

Now most Australians might think, big deal, in fact, fruit bats can be a major pest.  But as an American they're still exotic and exciting to me!

I discovered a bit more wildlife in my nighttime garden.  I've got a loud cricket near the front door, including one flat dead one the cats probably found.  And whilst looking for the living cricket I found my first redback spider!  I've never seen one before.  It was right up against the house in a thin web and it instantly ran away from the light from my torch.  Their bite is nasty but hasn't been deadly since they created an anitvenom.

After having a bit of a look at the spider I decided two things.

One, that I should explore my garden at night more often.

Two, that I really shouldn't do so barefoot.

melon sex, bees and marigolds

Last year I learned a lot about pumpkin sex: how to tell the male and female flowers apart, how to hand-pollinate, and how to tell if the pollination worked.  This year I've had to learn how rockmelons and watermelons get busy.  The biggest difference is that the flowers are smaller and there are a helluva lot more of them.  But I couldn't tell if there were male and female types as there are with pumpkins.  It turns out that was because for the last month it's only been making male flowers.  I'm finally starting to notice more and more of these little ladies with their little baby melons.  They're not easy to spot but it doesn't seem to matter because they're not really practical to hand-pollinate.  I just have to hope that the bees visiting the nearby statice and lavender stop by the melon patch.  I already know that some didn't pollinate properly because a few mini-fruit are yellow which I assume means they're about to drop off.  Hopefully the rest start taking soon.

I thought I'd compare this patch to where it was last year at about this time.  I was behind schedule this year because I was giving the granex sweet onions a bit of extra time to ripen.  I wish I hadn't bothered because I am indeed behind schedule; at this time last year I had potimarrons the size of two fists put together.  However the pumpkin vine did last until April last year so hopefully I'll get at least a few watermelons, rockmelons and pumpkins.

Speaking of pollination, I've been paying attention this year to which flowers attract the most bees.  They seem to love the lavender, like the statice, and adore the African blue basil (which is near the bird bath, unfortunately, and not near the pumpkins and melons!).  I haven't seen them on the marigolds or the alyssum that's self-sewn around the place.  They also loved the catnip before I tore it out. 

This afternoon I stalked a few bees and his is my favourite photo of one on the African blue basil.  It's a great plant, not a basil for eating but it still smells amazing, it has lovely green and purple leaves and it gets these incredibly long flower stalks.  I believe it's a perennial and over-winters better than culinary basils.  You don't have to worry about it going weedy as the seeds are sterile, but you can propagate it easily from cuttings.  This little bee was hard to snap because he was dashing about so quickly.  If you have problems with pollination in your garden, I highly recommend this plant or its relatives.

And finally, I also got distracted by the marigolds.  I started them from seeds (a French variety called "Sparky" from Eden Seeds) and the ones that get the most sun have grown up into gorgeous plants.  I loved all these photos so I thought I'd share all three.

the scourge of mint and parsley

I've been very hit and miss with fruits and vegetables in my garden. My designer twig is at least a year away from fruiting. My plum tree isn't actually very tasty. I've hat potatoes rot, tomatoes wilt and peas fizzle. But my herbs have been loyally chugging along, requiring little and giving a lot.

There simply is no substitute for fresh herbs, and nothing like being able to snip a bit from your own garden instead of paying for a massive bunch from the shops. I've got sage, oregano, fennel, chives and spring onions as well as two types (each) of rosemary, thyme, basil and parsley.

I probably use the most parsley and mint so I go out of my way to keep them happy. The twin scourges of my mint patch are the catnip and caterpillars. Last year I planted a little seedling of catnip in front of my mint bed. It grew like crazy and it's heavily crowding out my mint. I tried chopping it back and it just grew back twice as big. Much as it amuses me to see my cats occasionally roll around in it, it had to go.

This photo gives you an idea of how huge it had gotten. It hardly fit in my compost bin even after chopping it up.

The other scourge, caterpillars, is shared with the parsley. The little green buggers are impossible to see until you go to snip some parsley or mint and you see all the nibble marks (for the record, caterpillars do seem to leave curly-leaf parsley alone but I prefer the flatleaf). The last few times I went to get mint I could hardly find it among the catnip and what I could find was decimated by caterpillars. I've also decided to plant some extra parsley where the catnip used to be. It does OK in pots, but parsley has a pretty long tap root so they're always a bit stunted in pots. But with plans to grow all that caterpillar food together I decided I needed to try some sneaky tactics to keep them safe.

What tactic you ask? Butterfly scarecrows, idea courtesy of the Garden Express forum - butterfly scarecrows. You cut the shape of a butterfly out of a white plastic plate, punch a little hole, and tie it to a twig. The theory is that when another butterfly visits it'll see the fake butterfly and think "no point laying eggs there, it's already been claimed."

They've certainly fooled the cats. No sooner had I set them up that they did their best to eat them. Do you like how much they flutter in the breeze? Surely this will work. I hope.
In any case, that patch now looks incredibly bare. I ruthlessly cut back the mint, no point in keeping all of that shredded and nibbled foliage. And I'll be planting parsley along the front soon. So hopefully in a few weeks it'll be a thriving herb patch thick with mint and parsley!

roasty toasty and rescuing worms

Yesterday was our first 40+ day of the year: 43.6C (that's 110F).  Last night it dipped down to a low of 30.6, the equal hottest night in recorded history, tied with a night in 1902.  Today was still in the 30s until about 3pm.  Fun times in the age of global warming!

I managed it better than last year's heat, though last year we had three 40+ days in a row, another record.  I made sure everything was well-watered beforehand, including the geraniums and some of the younger shrubs and the Japanese maple.  The tomatoes have a shade cloth shield this year which helped enormously.  The multi-graft citrus took a bit of sunburn because unfortunately, it's in the middle of a flush of new growth.

The close scare was the worm farm.  The day before the heat I soaked some newspaper and put it in the freezer, then put it into the worm farm in the morning.  This morning I went to check on them and got a real surprise when I opened the lid.  It was like and exodus of worms desperately trying to crawl out the lid, but too scared of the light outside.  They were obviously not happy.  I got all the ice in the house, wrapped it in newspaper and put it in the worm farm.  I also hosed it down with some cold water and hoped for the best.

This afternoon I checked on them again and the ice obviously helped, they were no longer trying to climb out the top.  Next time there's a hot day coming I'm going to freeze a few plastic bags full of water and use those.

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.

Watered down, it's meant to be a great liquid fertilizer.  I'm looking forward to trying it out and seeing how my plants like it.

plums, melons and tomatoes

No, none of the plums, melons or tomatoes are ripe yet but I thought I'd update you on their progress.  The melons are settling in well and putting out some good growth and even a few little flowers.  This first one is the Green Nutmeg.

And this is the Minnesota Midget with one of its little flowers.

And this is a little watermelon of some kind I got from the B-store.  I ended up freeing up that big tub only recently so I bought a rather advanced seedling.

And this is the Baby Blue pumpkin seedling.  I'm not sure why it hasn't "vined" out at all, I hope it hasn't stunted from being in a punnet for so long...

The plum tree out the front has a few fruit starting to ripen.  They're still small, I don't think they'll get very big.  But they're starting to lighten up in colour. I wonder what colour they'll be in the end?  Shouldn't be long now.

And finally, I've started to lose tomatoes to little grubs.  I had some do this last year too, they lay their eggs in the flower and the caterpillars eat their way out of the green tomato, leaving poos behind.  I don't think there's anything I can do about it once they're in there, just hope there aren't too many.  I've lost about 4 so far but there are heaps more green fruit waiting to ripen.

That's the round up for this weekend.  It's almost Christmas and we've had beautiful weather - some hot days but they cool down quickly, plus a bit of rain here and there.  Can't ask for much more than that!