Late garden

I seemed to lack much motivation to get out into the garden this spring and summer. In the spring I was still finding many of the gardening tasks a bit awkward with my knee so I procrastinated a bit. The Scientist has kept things alive out there by making sure it’s all watered on our appointed watering days. We have a large bottlebrush tree/shrub that has grown up and out and finally about half the tree started tipping away from the main part of the tree. One large branch hovered over our garden table and it was difficult to get to the table for the overgrown tree. The Scientist and I were trying to cut off some of these branches when the last grass seed made itself apparent in Maromi’s ear. The Scientist managed to get almost all of that main branch of the tree cut off but there’s still a couple more parts to remove. It all looks rather bare out there now and the sun is shining on areas that have been in shade for much of the last year. As the other main branch of this tree has split slightly, we are aware that the entire tree may eventually have to go. We’ll just have to keep an eye on it to see if the roots will be strong enough. It would be really sad if the tree has to be removed.

I am suddenly reminded of returning to Perth after our year in Canada to find one of our two protea shrubs had died for no apparent reason. It had been quite healthy when we left and dead on our return. I remember feeling a great sadness at that loss as it was one of the first shrubs we planted in the yard of our brand new house. We’ve had other plants planted and die since but that one was in such great shape when we left that to find it gone was quite a shock.

We have a tea tree on the side of the house that we do plan to cut down. It’s another of the original shrubs but it hasn’t served much useful purpose in recent years as it’s just sprawled out over a large corner of the yard and it’s hidden usable space behind it. Even though there may be twinges of sadness to see it go, I think it will be better for that part of our yard in the end. We also plan to get rid of pretty much all the grass in the backyard as our plan is to turn it into a natural area instead. Finally there’s a grape vine that we planted a few years ago that has never gone anywhere but not died either. It may be a fatal move but we plan to transplant it to a hopefully better location once it goes dormant again. There are many vineyards near us so I think we are in a good climate for growing grapes…if we can just work out the specifics on getting them to grow.

Yesterday the Scientist and I ventured into the garden center at our local major hardware store for the first time in months. We do have nurseries around us but none as close as this store and it sometimes gets our business just for the convenience. That said, it’s also fairly well kept compared to the same centers in other branches of this chain. In fact, it’s also better than the closest nursery which just makes me cringe when I go into it. We had a couple of missions when we arrived. One was to find a replacement water sprinkler for one that is broken. The one we found is far more expensive than any other we’ve purchased before so I hope it is very, very good. Our other main goal was to buy chilli plants to replace our old ones. We have five large pots in the backyard and each has held a chilli plant in the past. A couple grew quite well and produced heaps of fruit. Another one has never been terribly successful and borne only a small number of fruit. One was quite good for a year but died during the winter. One of the more successful plants had a fig tree start growing in it unexpectedly more than a year ago. We didn’t know what it was for a long time until I recognised the shape of the leaves on another plant in the garden center. The fig is still alive in that pot although it’s not really much bigger than it was. The chillies are gone and the plant is either dead or nearly dead.

In the past, it was always easy to find all the different varieties of chillies but this time we must have just missed them all the first time around. It took a bit of mixing and matching but we finally decided on half a dozen different plants. These will all go into the planter where I’d put the tomatoes and basil last summer. I also bought some mint plants to put into one of the empty pots in hopes of having a good crop. The Scientist found some really nice succulents to add to our front garden. The one thing we didn’t buy was more potting soil which I will need to fill up some of the planters now.

One other thing we looked at yesterday was cushions for our garden chairs as the dogs have destroyed the old ones. Unfortunately we didn’t find anything that suited our chairs and none at a very good price either. It would be cheaper to buy a new set at this point but we hope to find something suitable elsewhere.

Hopefully now that we’ve got going with this idea, we will carry through with some of our plans and make the yard/garden a much nicer place again.