gardening without watering in a heatwave

To garden when it's very hot, I suggest you (dear reader) do it early in the morning or early in the evening. It’s usually cool-ish at those times, and you don’t have to bother with sunscreen or hat which is very liberating.

Dig over the compost, which is usually damp if watered with saved kitchen and shower water. Take quantities of half rotted damp compost and spread it on the soil between plants. This will stop the soil being exposed to the hot sun, and encourage worms and helpful micro organisms to party in the shade below the mulch.

Sometimes plants are drooping and miserable. There’s no need to water them. Just trim them back. They usually respond by sitting up straight again. Sometimes they don’t. Then it’s the old story of life, death and compost in the garden.

Lots of plants adore the heat – they’re the ones you want. For example, tiny teeny parsley plants got established and mulched before the heatwave. Now every hot day they’re getting bigger and stronger. I have had great success with Australian native shrubs like alyogyne huegelii (Australian native hibiscus), thryptomenes, correas and many others. Actually just about all the plants you see in my garden are tough survivors – the others are only seen as temporary empty spaces – blurred shadows that have become partly decomposed mulch.

So water the compost and water the bird baths. But never water plants, unless newly planted or transplanted. If you do water them, you’ll find they’ll grow OK but they will forever be dependent on a human to cater to their water needs.

secret bloggers business

Who knows how the Honest Scrap Award started? The truth is buried somewhere in the vast records of blotanical…

This is all I know for sure: Someone gave Rosey the Award. Rosey gave the Award to Wendy. And Wendy gave the Award to me.

The idea as I see it is this. We’re all part of this huge and growing online community, making new cyber friends all the time. It’s quite a compliment to receive the Award, because it means one of your new friends wants to get to know you more.

After initially feeling a bit overwhelmed by this, I am enjoying thinking about ME and what I want to share. So here goes …

1. I am known as catmint but my real name is Sue.
2. I am part of a family of four generations. The oldest is my 97 year young mother and the youngest is my grandchild Joey who is one year old.
3. An ideal 24 hours for me would be 8 hours gardening, 8 hours blogging and 8 hours dreaming about gardening and blogging.
4. My favourite foods include fairy bread (white sliced bread with butter and hundreds and thousands), carrots, iceberg lettuce and jelly babies.
5. I love reading. Among my favourite authors are Peter Carey and Margaret Attwood. My favourite genre is science fiction.
6. My favourite holiday is going to remote wild places. Notable trips have been to the Indian Himalayas, Borneo, the Simpson Desert in Central Australia and Siberia.
7. Some of my friends have retired. I am not retired and enjoy my work as a social worker and being busy.
8. I used to be scared of moths. Now I love and am fascinated by all bugs, even moths and spiders. One exception to this is vine weevils, which ate a lot of my garden one summer.
9. I resist following rules wherever possible. That is why I will stop at 9.

Now we come to the Award Ceremony. Please forgive me if you have already received this award and please ignore it if you wish.

I hereby award the Truth Scrap Award to

1. Hermes has a range of blogs, all of them exquisitively beautiful and interesting, featuring gardens, childrens book illustrations, Victorian art and acquariums.
2. VW is generous. As well as sharing her garden joys and frustrations, she shares her learning curve in garden photography and the technical aspects of blogging.
3. Wicked Gardener as the name indicates has a wicked sense of humour, and her blog is fun to read.
4. Gabby is a landscape designer and I have just discovered her blog which is attractive and informative.
5. Joanne has similar aesthetics as me, loving cottage gardens. I respect and admire the way she authentically relates her garden blog to her health problems and her recovery.
6. Jenny blogs about her Sydney garden. As a fellow Aussie, much of the material is familiar to me, such as rainbow lorikeets. The photos are wonderful, I strongly recommend this blog.
7. Titania is another Aussie blogger. She is a multiple blogger, and a warm, dynamic and interesting person.
8. Pomona Belvedere is a typical blotanical plantaholic with a particular penchant for tulips. Her blog is colourful and a very enjoyable read. Pomona is a sociable and sharing person, who often has guest post-ers.
9. Alice Anastasia is a garden traveller and photographer. You learn so much about gardens all over the world from reading her blog, and she is extremely creative and artistic.

blackbirds, bye bye ...

This morning the chicks left the nest. The day started out just like every other day over the past three weeks. Mother brought breakfast.




A bit later I noticed some young fluffy blackbirds in the garden, looking uneasy and not relaxed. But maybe I was just projecting ...





Three blackbirds left the nest, leaving only one.



Soon that one left too.



Now I'm an empty nester.

spring garden pics

This smoke bush has been moved at least six times. It has survived, even thrived and seems to be enjoying its well deserved rest. I think it will stay in this position, it looks right, but you cannot be sure of the future ...




In an earlier post I wrote how I took out lots of opium poppies. But I left them in the front garden, never want to be completely without them ...




This climbing rose and I have been together for a long time - at least 25 years. Some years it is covered with aphids. A couple of years ago I hacked it back a lot. As you can see, it didn't mind in the least. It is an old fashioned rose, and I cannot remember its name.



This is a rosemary plant. And, inexplicably, it is dying!



This is called a chocolate lily. It is a bulb, disappears before the heat of summer and returns the following spring. It is an Australian native, so called because it has a chocolatey perfume. It reminds me of the delicate orchids I have seen while bushwalking. Its botanical name is Arthropodium strictus. I planted it about ten years ago.

life and death in the garden: an update

This is a happy feel-good sequel to my recent post life and death in the garden.

1. The caterpillar does not appear to have eaten destructively in the garden and hopefully is now one of the lovely butterflies I have seen flying around.

2. The dead possum was not the one that lives in my garden. How do I know this? Because yesterday the lid of the nesting box was up. I climbed the tree (very proud of this) and checked the box. Possum was curled up cosily. So I put the lid down and climbed down (phew - survived!) Pleased I did this because today it is raining hard and the nest would have got very damp.

3. This is the best news: THE BLACKBIRD SITTING ON THE NEST RIGHT OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR HAS HATCHED 4 CHICKS. They are about a week old, and growing bigger every day. Mother and father spend most of the day flying backward and forwards bringing them food.

gardening is political

This is a crude old fashioned Australian revolutionary poster dating from the Cold War in the ‘fifties. This poster reminds me that gardening and growing our own food had, and still has, a political dimension.

Growing your own food has become a grassroots movement in both senses of the word. It encompasses community gardens and school gardens as well as private gardens. It can be seen as individuals and communities taking charge of their nutrition, instead of buying exclusively from large scale impersonal costly agribusiness and supermarkets.

Food growing is necessarily a business of course, and increasingly we can choose to buy from farmers markets, or local organic growers such as Eco-Organics near Auckland, New Zealand.

Here is an example from a recent newsletter of Eco-Organics:

I really do appreciate being able to supply you directly so that it’s extra fresh from the farm. It’s a great system; we get such good feedback and always love to hear from new people interested in the convenience of home delivery with the extra bonus of such unquestionable freshness. By cutting out the middleman the produce we grow ourselves would be at least 2-3 days fresher when it arrives at your place than anything just arriving at an organic outlet shop.

So now we can grow our own food if we’re lucky, and buy directly from small organic farmers, whom we know and trust.

Back to the poster. "Grassroots Defiance Against the Capitalist Diet" is not just about a need for fresh food. It is about the negative consequences that follow from homogoneous industrial food production, namely the commodification of food.

The Slow Food Movement represents one type of contemporary defiance by promoting good food grown with respect - respect for local cultures and respect for the whole environment, which includes all life: humans, animals and plants.






(photos from Wikipedia)

problems with annuals

“Why are you taking so much out of the garden when it’s looking so lush and green?” queries Ron, my non-gardener partner.

Why am I trying to remove nearly all the opium poppies (OP) and love in the mist (LITM) from the back garden? When these annuals are flowering the flowers are to die for. And the sight and sound of blissed-out bees, pollen-drunk, sensually buzzing inside the flowers, is also to die for.

Before flowering, these plants grow large and tall. Unless other plants happen to be fully established (which is unlikely given my habitual plant-shifting behaviour) they dwarf and shade and squash surrounding plants.

But the worst thing is that when they die it is at the end of spring or the beginning of summer, when the garden is already being subjected to harsh dry heat. Pulling them out then leave large areas of unmulched soil. I imagine I can hear the worms screaming in pain as the surface dries and hardens.

Forget-me-nots (FMN) and Johnny Jump Ups (JJU) are also annuals. But they are polite and considerate. They do not take up stacks of room and trample over the permanent members of the area. Forget-me-nots and Johnny Jump Ups will continue to be welcomed, nurtured, appreciated.




PS My Old Year Resolution is to make more effort to include proper botanical names in the blog. So here goes:

1. FMN = myosotis
2. LITM = nigella
3. OP = papaver
4. JJU = violas

Feedback / corrections / more precise specifications welcomed.