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May Photo Challenge – May 11
I was feeling much better about my efforts today than I did yesterday.
We planted this, our first hibiscus plant, a year ago this month. It wasn’t much more than a stick with a few leaves when we put it into the ground. But it was flowering even back then. There have been plenty of flower buds over the past year but not too many of them have reached full flower, falling off before they properly opened. I’m hoping this one will hang in there and show it’s fully beauty before dropping off.Â
This is the same flower, just a different angle.
Another one of the many buds starting up on this bush. I might keep an eye on this one’s progress as it develops into a proper flower. Hopefully will won’t fall off too soon.
Our hakea laurina tree is absolutely covered with these seed pods. Most of them are looking old and grey but this lot of more brownish ones must be a bit more recent. I took more photos of the same pin-cushion flowers from a couple days ago but it’s quite difficult to get the focus right on them and they had to be binned.
Every autumn/winter, we have a couple of these plants pop up in our front yard. It eventually comes out with one or two pink flowers. I spotted this while revisiting our front yard gazanias and thought it might be interesting to track the progress of its growth. Hopefully the plant will be a bit more visible the next time. -
May Photo Challenge – May 07
I will admit from the beginning that I was rather lazy about taking photos today. I took my G11 camera out into our garden with hopes of using its macro function and took only a few photos. The pickings were rather meager for this set.
We have a grevillea bush next to our laundry door that has gone a bit wild. Some of its branches are attempting to move across to where our shed is located so I will have to get out there and do what I call bushwhacking. Even though it’s the middle of autumn, the bush has flowers popping up all over. This is one of the features of living in Perth that I like. Many shrubs and trees have blooms through the year, even in winter.
This orange honeysuckle flower is one of our many plants that have taken root and is difficult to remove. I remember my family moving into our house in North Carolina when I was eleven and having honeysuckle choking trees along the creek that ran behind it. I have no idea what I was thinking when we got the original plants, knowing what my parents went through to get rid of it all those years ago.
This is a pin-cushion flower from a hakea laurina tree that is growing next to our driveway. We planted one of these the first year or two we lived here. That plant grew tall and beautiful over a couple years. Then it suddenly died and we removed it. This tree grew from seeds that were dropped by the one we originally planted. Unfortunately it is growing mostly at an angle and I fear it will meet its end during one of our nasty winter storms. This particular tree blooms mainly in the winter but flowers have been emerging for a few weeks now. The “pins” normally have a cream color to them with a pink tip at the end but some will change color further along in their flowering cycle.
This is another emerging grevillea flower, from our sprawling bush in the front yard. This was one of the first shrubs we planted, a gift from my brother-in-law and his then girlfriend.
I have forgotten what this is called but we planted this and three other seedlings in hopes of starting some ground-cover plants. Two of the seedlings didn’t last the week as it was just too hot. They were all very small and we obviously needed to water a bit more often than usual until they were a bit more established. The other survivor is still alive but only just hanging in there.
After taking my photos, I went outside our fence with the large pruners and hacked off branches from a bottlebrush tree that is growing onto the fence. With winter coming I can just imagine tree limbs coming down and parts of the fence with it.
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Spring has sprung
I think spring has finally arrived. Usually we get quite a bit of warm weather, even in August. But this year it’s been mostly mild days and very cool/cold nights. This week seems to have heralded warmer weather. I’m sure it will be hot and dry before we know it. Actually, it’s already dry here so it just needs the warmer temperatures.
I noted the seasonal change when I went out in the night to pull something off the clothes line last week and it wasn’t even damp. We don’t have a dryer so winters can be a bit tricky when it’s cold and humid much of the time. Days aren’t so bad if the sun is out but drying clothes at nights is nearly impossible in the winter. I usually have clothes draped all over the house on the worst nights.
Another sign of the season is pollen. It’s showing up everywhere and our whole family has hayfever in one form or another. I’m not sure if it’s related to the season but my eyes have become incredibly dry. My Sjögren’s syndrome does give me a lot of dry eye problems and I use artificial tears like Refresh as needed. Usually, I can get away with one application a day and sometimes I just never get around to using them and get used to slightly dry eyes. In the past week I’ve found I absolutely have to use drops at least three times a day, especially when I wake up in the morning. I literally cannot see clearly some mornings until I’ve used them.
A rather exciting sign of spring is the re-emergence of leaves on our grape vine. We planted it last year and not much happened with it. At the end of the season, the leaves fell off and we weren’t sure if it was alive or dead. But little green leaves have come out all over the plant so we are looking forward to watching it grow this year. We will need to find some sort of support for it to grow this year. The garden arch we installed last year was very cheap and every time we had really strong winds it fell over. The passionfruit vine is still attached to what’s left of the arch and is looking quite decent but hasn’t started flowering yet. I seem to recall it flowering around this time last year so it should be too long now.
The bees are buzzing everywhere in our garden. We have a grevillea bush outside our laundry room door and every time I got out there is a loud hum from the bush which is currently in full bloom. The bottlebrush plants are all starting to bloom and will soon be heavy with flowers. It will be quite a sight to see the branches laden down with red flowers that resemble a bottlebrush.
The Scientist and I planted some native shrubs along the back wall of the house about a month ago. Previously I had planted tomatoes, lettuce, bell peppers and basil there. The only things that have ever really grown well there are the cherry tomatoes from last year (which were fruiting right through winter) and basil which grew like a weed there a few years ago. The cherry tomato plant only had a tiny bit of green left by winter’s end so I pulled it out. Our plan is to do a raised garden for the veggies this year. I’m hoping to do a no-dig garden in hopes of having more optimal soil than our usual sandy soil is for growing veggies.
I had a great disappointment a few weeks ago when I pulled out the beets we planted in May and discovered they hadn’t grown any beets. They looked perfectly fine other than the missing veggies. I put them back in the ground and will wait and see if they will grow in a few months. I planted some rainbow chard and after a slow start, that seems to have taken off a bit. I haven’t harvested yet but might give it a try some time soon. And some spinach I planted was nearly eaten by creatures during the winter but one planted remained in a rather shabby state. It has started to grow a bit more during the last couple of weeks so maybe it will be okay for a spring vegetable. I also planted out some oregano and mint in May and both are starting to take off. I hear that mint can be a bit of a weed but I think we’ll be able to make good use of it should that happen. The habanero chilli I planted last summer is looking very good right now and surely will start flowering in a few weeks. I’m feeling uncertain about some of the other chillies. The jalapeño is dead and the Thai chillies aren’t looking that well. The others seem like they might be okay in a few weeks. There is also a cherry tomato plant that has survived two winters along our back fence. The healthy part of the vine is a couple feet from where the plant is rooted. Near the roots it looks to be nearly dead.  There are Asian red mustard plants growing wild from seeds that fell from last year’s plant, more or less in our footpath. We haven’t removed them but they really aren’t in an ideal location.
I just about forgot to mention that a rather horticulturally-minded friend has given me seeds to plant a climbing plant called Kennedia nigricans, which is a native in our area. I’m really hoping a few of the seeds take off so that we can have an easy-to-grow climbing plant to cover some of the fence.
I’m looking forward to opening windows over the next few days with temperatures expected to rise several degrees. That is assuming we don’t get smoke drifting from any fires in the area. We already had a period of smokiness in the house today when I left open sliding glass doors at the back part of the house.
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Outdoor living
We built and moved into this house over fourteen years ago now. When we moved in, it was like a small house in a big sand pit. We did add some native plants early on and many of those are still around, including several bottlebrush bushes that aren’t really much bigger than when they were planted and several of another variety that have grown exceptionally well. Some grass was planted and various other plants have been added over the years with varying success.
I became the default family gardener, which is quite amazing since I am not a gardener. I’m getting better after many years though. I’ve been making attempts at growing vegetables almost every year for a while and this year I may have hit a small jackpot. Tonight I felt like we might be on to a good thing for the first time ever and even the Scientist joined in with adding fresh sugar cane mulch as the light disappeared tonight. Perhaps it was a matter of getting started earlier in the season or perhaps it’s the fact I’ve put a lot more effort into it. Today I harvested enough lettuce to make a small salad for dinner. It was extremely cool to eat food grown in our garden. I have several varieties of tomato growing well and showing promise of decent crops. Nothing like years past when we basically snacked on the food that grew because it wasn’t enough to do more. I think the real test will come when the bigger tomatoes grow. If we succeed there, I will be extremely happy. It’s not even just a matter of the success of growing my own food. I want tomatoes that actually taste good for a change. It will be worth the toil and the massive amounts of money invested in compost and mulch. It’s going so well right now that we are planning on adding more. I have a tray of basil seedlings to plant along with oregano and mint. I was going to plant the basil tonight but I started too late and it got dark so it will have to wait.
Anyway, I have gone off on a tangent. Over all these years, we’ve hardly spent any time outside, aside from the occasional splurge on plants where we do really well for about two weeks and then we lose interest. We spend too much time inside, to be honest. This year, I think we may have shifted priorities enough that we will make a decent attempt at creating an outdoor space to enjoy. Some of the changes planned or already done are:
- The Scientist moved our clothes hoist (rotating clothes line) from one corner to another. One of the trees/shrubs had pretty much grown into it over the winter which rendered it nearly useless. I had cut back the tree considerably and free up most of the contraption but it was still blocked by an overgrown branch. Now it’s in open space (over mostly sand) but it moves freely.
- I bought a garden arch to attempt to train the passionfruit vine over. This is essentially in the same location as an earlier one but since the vines never took off, it was removed. The passonfruit has already taken to the new structure and looks much happier in the open. We recently added a grape vine to climb the other side. I don’t know how successful that will be but there is a major grape/wine center just down the road so I think our climate and soil must be reasonably suitable.
- Today I bought a table and chairs so we can eat outside once in a while. We already have a couple cheap lawn chairs out there but until recently we hadn’t made much use of them. Since the clothes hoist was moved away, it feels right to sit in that area and we do. My mother-in-law is bringing her station wagon around tomorrow morning so I can get it home without paying expensive delivery fees.
- At the request of the Scientist, I bought a string of solar Christmas lights to hang outside. It’s a fairly small string that eventually found its way onto the mostly bare arch. It charges during the day and lights up at night. No electricity needed and it looks great. The Scientist also went out and got a set of ten solar garden lights. These used to be quite expensive but this year the price has really dropped. Lego Lover helped his dad put the lights out and they also look really great. We’ve been sitting outside enjoying the warmer weather and the lights the last several nights.
- We are finally going to get a fence with a gate installed between the house and the fence dividing our property from our neighbors. There has been a small picket fence going across from many years but it doesn’t go completely across and the gate has been broken for several years and has to be lifted to get it open. There is no privacy and no real barrier to intruders at the moment.
- We’re planning to have a patio running from the new fence to the back of the house (or a little bit beyond that). This is going to be a pretty major expense and will include a roof and some sort paving (probably bricks).
- These all pretty much center around one section of the yard. There’s a whole big area on the western side of the house that needs a lot of work. At the moment, cleaning it up and clearing it out will be our main priority. I’ve done some major pruning jobs on some of the shrubs and it already looks far more spacious than it has for years. There’s a giant pile of branches and foliage we need to either put through the shredder to make mulch or have it removed.
And the list goes on and on…but I feel like there is hope for us now that we are creating a nice space to enjoy outside. I’ll hopefully update as we progress through our plans this summer.
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Digging in the dirt
That’s what I did for much of the afternoon. I started around noon by going out to mow some of the grass in the backyard. I also pulled out the line trimmer to clear out some of the edges, then came across our clothes hoist (a rotating clothes line, essentially) that was rendered nearly unusable by the bottlebrush shrub/tree growing into and over and around it. I eventually pulled out a pruning saw and clippers and lopped off several limbs. It’s less shady but the clothes hoist moves again and can be raised high enough that I don’t bang my head on it. There is also space to hang clothes again.
I eventually got to some potential garden beds that had been overrun by the weedy couch grass. That was the hard work of the day because some of it has grown into the concrete around the base of the house. I had to leave some bits because they were just too hard. But I cleared enough to plant the bell pepper seedlings and four tomato plants. I’m hoping to get good results after all the work I’ve put into the garden this year. I do have cherry and grape tomatoes starting to grow. Several are on the plant that survived through the winter and has grown into a monster of sorts. I also planted some lettuce recently and hope that will grow well. I had to put out iron pellets to get rid of the snails in the area. I have a red mustard plant growing beautifully since mid-winter but the snails kept eating the leaves and I’ve not been able to use it. I had to break off most of the leaves to find all the snails and still I found another one the next day. I think they are all gone now and the plant is growing rapidly. Lastly, my chillies are doing quite well so far. One is a black pearl chilli and looks really nice in its pot. I might have to use a thin stake soon to keep it upright but it should do well based on what I’m seeing so far. The habañero isn’t growing as fast as I’d like but it is improving…oh and I also planted some bean seedlings but they aren’t growing all that well so far. Only two of the four seem to have survived.
While looking around the garden I found that a wild vine of some sort has a flower that has bloomed. I’m not quite sure what the plant it but it’s growing near the area where we previously planted passionfruit vines (that never did anything). I’ll have to identify the flower tomorrow to see what we might expect next.
Note: I just looked up passionfruit flowers and that’s definitely what’s growing so wildly. Funny how it never grew much all the time we planted it. There are two more vines growing along the back wall near the cherry tomatoes.
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Spring
It’s after midnight so winter is officially over, according to the seasons here in Australia. Hurray, bring on the spring. Alas, the warm weather has departed, leaving cool temperatures and rain in its wake. I can live with the rain but was really hoping to get a bit more warmth. So I’m now contemplating what gardening disasters to begin this month.
I harvested my pathetic crop of beets yesterday (Sunday). I only put in four plants and none produced more than two beets. The traditional purple plant had the best showing with two reasonably sized beets. The other three had very small beets. Once I’d cut away roots and leaves, there was little of the vegetable left. I boiled them all together and ate them with dinner. The Scientist ate a bit of it too, but only because it came from our garden as he’s not particularly fond of beets (or beetroot as it’s called here). The regular beets came out tasting well enough but the others tasted a bit off. I know they would have a different flavor but they seemed rather bitter. One of the beets was so small it wasn’t worth cooking so I ate it raw. Big mistake! I’m not sure why, but it seemed to cause a terrible irritation in my throat which lasted for a couple hours.
I still have a lovely red mustard plant which hasn’t been harvested in a while. I think the snails are enjoying their feast and I need to get some iron tablets to keep them away. It’s still growing well so I’m thinking of adding some similar plants in the same garden bed this week. My brussel sprout plant got eaten by insects and all that was left was the stem. My baby broccoli didn’t fare much better but I did manage to get one tiny “tree” of it harvested. I think once the insects had finished off the brussel sprout, they moved on to the broccoli. I guess they weren’t too choosy at that point.
My jalapeño plant seems to have died in the last couple of weeks so I have removed that one and will plant either seeds or a seedling soon. The other chilli plant is still alive and will hopefully be showing some new growth soon. Meanwhile, the cherry tomato plant at our back fence has started growing again. I’m quite pleased to see this since I’d taken almost no care of it during the winter. I’m going to put in a few more plants in the same area this year since they did so well last year. Last of all, my strawberry plants have new fruit coming up and so far it tastes pretty good. I will have to keep the snails out of that pot if I expect to get much out of them this year.
At some time this week I want to finally stop in at the Bunnings that opened in June a short distance from us. They have a good selection of plants there and I’d like to get a few seedlings for the garden. I’m forever hopeful of growing something right. I think I’m making progress but haven’t had a really successful crop of anything yet, unless I count the cherry tomatoes. Even those didn’t work out the way I had hoped. So far, I’m thinking about tomatoes and green peppers plus some lettuce and other greens. I also hope to find one variety of tomato I had put into a big pot last year. It came out tasting wonderful but didn’t end up providing much fruit at all. I might try it in the ground this time if I’m brave. I’m sure when the time comes, I will bring home more plants than I can manage. But hopefully this gardening thing will finally get a bit easier if I keep practicing.
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Growing things
I haven’t written about my latest gardening feats or should I say lack thereof. It’s not all doom and gloom but the cucumbers that were looking so well aren’t so well. The plants are still alive but any fruit seems to be eaten by creatures of the earth. At least something is gaining from the growth. I did harvest an odd looking fruit once about a week ago because it wasn’t really growing any longer and I decided I didn’t want it to rot. I took a bite and it was quite bitter.
I had two large pots with tomatoes growing. One of the pots has heaps of fruit and they all have tough skins. I guess we don’t water it enough. Maybe they need watering morning and night but we are just scraping along once a day. The fruit is reasonably flavorful so that’s something to appreciate. I’ve managed to get two fruit from the other plant and they were incredibly flavorful. Unfortunately other creatures agree with me because they seem to attack the bottom side of the fruit and it’s rendered inedible by the time they are mature. I’d really like to grow another one of these but I suspect it’s a bit late in the season now. I wonder how well they would last into the winter months if they were sheltered a bit. With a bit of research I should be able to figure out ways to repel some of the creatures without poisoning the earth any more. I’ll add it to my list.
I’ve had more success with the cherry tomatoes. I never managed to get the overgrown ones out of the pots and into the ground but they are still doing reasonably well. Some of the fruit went bad due to excessive explosure to the excessive heat but much of it has been quite good and it’s made for some good snacking over the last few weeks. The three plants along the back wall have done extremely well and are sprawling all over the place. Two have a treillis of sorts for support and that’s made a huge difference there. I might try to move others to the back wall too but probably won’t ever get a round tuit. :)
My coriander has all gone to seed but the leaves were wonderful. I’m going to attempt to reseed into the ground after I get hold of some soil improver. The sandy soil is annoying. Im also going to try growing some mint and plant a new crop of basil. The last time I planted basil, we had a jungle of it in the backyard. I think mint will do equally well. My intention is to have heaps of mint so that I can make fattoush more regularly. I might even try for some Italian parsley.
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Bits and pieces
Just some bits and pieces :
- New Year’s Eve was relatively quiet at our house. We were invited to a party this year but didnt go. The boys wouldn’t have coped, which would have made it rather difficult for the Scientist or I to enjoy ourselves. Earlier in the evening we took the telescope out and looked at the moon and Venus. It made for some interesting viewing and Lego Lover had a ball with it. Later we spent a lot of time playing video games. Just before midnight we switched to the television to see the fireworks in Sydney and we drank sparkling grape juice at midnight.
- Last Tuesday we were startled in the middle of the day by a loud noise that sounded to me a bit like the car hitting the fence across the street a few years ago. About thirty seconds later we heard a car screeching away. I had a quick look out our side door and noted nothing out of the ordinary but later on I discovered what had happened. We have a roundabout (traffic circle)Â near us and a car must have been going around it too quickly. Presumably the driver lost control and went right through the fence of our back neighbours and hit their clothes hoist, which went through the back fence through to our yard. It’s a small hole, in one of the panels that was replaced after a storm damage last year. We don’t know whether it can be repaired or will have to be replaced as yet. This damage is quite unlucky for our neighbours who now have a rather huge area of fence that is broken. But they were lucky that the vehicle hit the fence where it did because the fence runs just along the side of the house and it easily could have been the building that was hit.
- The Scientist and I are again thinking about taking a cruise, either at the end of this year or early next year. There’s one on offer right now for a reasonable price that goes from either Fremantle to Adelaide or vice versa. The only hitch is we’d have to fly one way and Lego Lover is terrified of that possibility. We do have the alternative of taking the Indian Pacific one way but I’m not sure if it will be as cost-effective as flying.
- Lego Lover got a new mattress at the beginning of the month. He’s been using the same one for many years now and it’s not terribly supportive for a bigger kids so we got a new one that hopefully will last well into his teen years.
- We have several upcoming appointments in the near future with two this week, one for each of the boys. Otherwise our schedule is pretty empty. I’m hoping to get together with my friend K and her kids some time soon but these days we find it harder to coordinate our schedules than we did when the kids were younger.
- I’ve seen some really interesting programs on television lately, mostly screening on ABC1 or ABC2, as I recall. It’s nice to have such wonderful programming in the midst of our generally listless summer programming on the commercial channels. New Year’s night was especially memorable with:Â The Story of 1, presented by Terry Jones and tracing the history of numbers; Destiny in Alice, about the large lesbian community in Alice Springs and presented by mock anthropologist, “Destiny Attenborough”; and Happy News Year which presented a less conventional look at news events of 2008, presented by The Chasers’ Chris Taylor. All were entertaining, yet informative programs.
- Our washing machine requires a repair. We have an LG front loader and it started making thunderous noise while spinning the other day along with shreds of rubber showing up in the finished laundry. Repairers won’t be here until the 20th. We used my MIL’s machine on Saturday while there for a family lunch but she lives too far to make it time, cost or fuel efficient to use that machine. I suppose a laundromat visit will feature into this week along with some handwashing.
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Cucumbers
I’ve been adding to my garden pots lately but trying to grow continental cucumbers from pots just wasn’t likely to work. These are my only seedlings to go into the ground so far. I planted three seedlings and included soil improver and organic fertiliser along with some stuff to help hold water (Wettasoil or something) in the soil. Just behind the cucumbers, I stuck some of the overgrown cherry tomato plants that had been all crowded into one pot. The plants were looking a bit yellow, possibly due to lack of soil and other nutrients. I’m hoping to grow these up some old trellis pieces we’ve got around the place. Just have to remember to water out in the back regularly.
Other new plants: I bought two tomato seedlings to go into two very large pots I got from Kmart the other day. I also bought two chilli plants. One is jalapeno and I can’t recall the name of the other one. It’s supposed to be good in Asian and Mexican food though. I didn’t have enough potting soil to plant the last chilli seedling so will have to get that sorted out tomorrow. The jalapeno didn’t look quite as healthy as the other one so I planted that first. After all was planted, I did some watering and due to sprinkler issues got quite wet. The sprayer nozzle is broken or I would have used instead.
The strawberries are doing pretty well. Snails have become less problematic since I put the pots up on brick pavers. The fruit is now tasting really nice so I’m kind of wishing we had more planted to keep up the supply. The thyme is doing well as are most of the cherry tomato plants. I’d like to add basil and mint to the garden but need to figure out locations. It would be nice to make a proper herb garden some time.
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Strawberries and tomatoes
The strawberry plants I potted a while back are doing quite well and I finally harvested about six strawberries yesterday. I discovered, to my horror, that the snails also like strawberries and have been chomping on the fruit and leaving little to taste. I’ve put the big planter box up on bricks to try to keep the snails away since the other plant hasn’t been bothered at all. The harvested strawberries are okay but not nearly as flavorful as the ones being sold about six to eight weeks ago just about everywhere. I don’t suppose I will ever have such tasty fruit.
My cherry tomatoes are also doing quite well, except for the ones that are crowded into a pot. Those are looking a bit yellow right now. If we don’t do something with them soon, I suspect they will just die out for lack of nutrients. That will still leave five plants, which I believe will be more than enough. Still haven’t planted regular tomatoes or chillies or cucumbers. Maybe this weekend I can put some chillie plants into a big pot like the cherry tomatoes.
