Further gardening progress

This is a bit late since I’ve not done much in the garden in the past week or so.

Last weekend I did a lot more cutting up of branches on the shrub/tree that was reaching out across our bedroom window at the front of the house. There are still a couple of far reaching branches to be sawed off but it doesn’t look too bad now. But now our bedroom window  is quite visible and they looked particularly dirty. I started to wash the outside of the windows until I realised it was actually more dirty from the inside. I have managed to wash the upper part on one side but there’s the bottom panels left and the other pane of glass. Our windows are two panelled ones that slide open. At the bottom of the bedroom window there are more panes of glass right to the floor. These parts of difficult to reach because of a chest of drawers on that side of the room so I haven’t gotten back clean that up yet. It also became quite obvious we need to replace the 20 year old cheap blinds that are looking tattered with curtains. I’m hoping to find something suitable at a low price to have something up there. Meanwhile the bedroom is getting a lot more light these days. And the front yard looks a lot bigger since there is less covered ground than there used to be. I still have a lot of shrubs to cut back out in the side and corner of the yard (we are on the corner of the street) to get things really looking tidier. I will likely wait until after the flowering is done to get out there and hack those bushes down…well I do plan to get rid of a couple out on the corner that have gone out of control in size.

Meanwhile, the Scientist has moved the two shrubs on the back all of the house to the front yard and moved the frangipani to the side of the driveway. There’s still a hibiscus and a solanum plant to move away from the patio area but he decided it was going to be a bit much to see everything die at once should none of it survive. Since the move, the frangipani looks just fine. It didn’t have any leaves on it at the time anyway so perhaps that was a good thing. The other two were severely cut back but it looks like all the leaves are falling off the one. I am not too bothered at this point. I think there’s a bit of new growth coming out so it should be okay if I am correct. The Scientist thinks the new growth was already there so time will tell whether it all falls of or not. I feel pretty confident it will all grow back for this plant though. The last one is hard to judge. It has lots of needly sort of leaves instead and they all look quite wilted right now. There’s a similar shrub already out there that has stalled in growth. I think it’s mostly just a different color but it never got terribly big so I am unsure if this will do much better. Just have to wait it out and see if it will survive. It’s a native so hopefully will recover.

Our tomatoes are doing really well so far. We got wire and plastic frames to train them up and all but the beef tomato one have grown heaps since they were planted. I am hoping the small one is just taking more time to grow since it will be bearing the heavier fruit if it survives. Then there’s the purple cayenne pepper plant that I planted about a week ago. I haven’t seen one that color before, which is the main reason I got it. I plan to get some other chilli plants so we can have a bunch of different varieties for cooking purposes.

After strong winds blew for much of yesterday, we have a carpet of red on the side of the house where all the bottlebrush flowers were blown around. I didn’t get a photo of it but it looks quite cool. If it lasts, I will try to get a decent photo of it.