Spring Gardening Time for your eyeballs

After winter I am in the garden almost everyday planting, mulching, composting, sowing, smelling, tasting and harvesting!

Last year we planted a little verge garden filled with spinach, rainbow chard, strawberries and herbs which are freely available for anyone to pick. Not a lot of people do yet, but many people stop and look and ask me about different plants.

I painted up some little plant labels using acrylic paint pens and sprayed them with sealant.

My 3 year old garden is booming. There are a few small trees mostly on the west side as the wind whips fiercely down the street from there.

One of my favourites is this Native frangipani. Not related to the tropical frangipanis, this is a Hymenospermum. Known as a native frangipani because it smells just like the tropical one. It's intoxicating!

I've popped a bird bath and tray with wild bird seed right outside my bedroom window as that's 8Tracks favourite window to watch birds.

Soz dude. No outside for you... You'll get skin cancer. And kill stuff.

I'm quite excited about this modest little hydrangea. It's the first time I've been able to get one to thrive. This spot in the garden is the only place that gets the right amount of light and shade. 

There's a path in there somewhere but it's overgrown with Japanese Windflower plants and sweet peas. I didn't plant the sweet peas here. I'm not sure where they came from but it popped up last spring. Yep, a year ago. And really didn't do much. They also didn't flower at all so I figured they'd die off in autumn as they usually do. But they were still there through winter and in August started growing again. Now they sprawl over the little pathway.

I try and go out every day or 2nd day to pick every single sweet pea to keep the plants blooming and blooming! 

Now we're out the back under the pergola. The pergola is a mess and filled with all sorts of crap, so no big wide shots here! Just sweet little close ups of pots that give the false impression of green and tidy.

My pop grew the most luscious and massive zygocactuses (zygocacti?) so the fact I haven't killed this yet and it's about to flower is a minor win!

I'm also really chuffed that this maidenhair is happily thriving.

However I am guilty of committing several acts of Singapore orchid manslaughter.

Here is one of my baby plant nurseries on top of Jerry Halls hutch. Jerry is protected from the elements, while the baby plants have a nice warm spot under some perspex. At the moment I have zinnias, cornflowers, romanesco broccoli, fuscias and gloriosa lily seeds (which don't seem to want to sprout).

At some stage I will need to find space for them in here.

Vegies, fruit and perennials all crowd in beds and pots together. I don't differentiate unless I know one plant might have a toxicity that affects the edibles.

This area is the 'official' vegie garden. Yeah. I know what you're thinking. I need more garden space, don't I. I keep telling Bear that. But he wants his turf. 

We're literally never short of parsley.

Soon I'll have to come out and place little netting bags over each of these plums or the birds will eat them all! They won't really 'eat' them. They'll punch little nasty holes in them so the whole plum is scratched and ruined. On the other hand so far there have been 2 cute little Silvereyes who have been fluttering around eating all the bugs so maybe I'll leave a few uncovered for them. As a thank you treat.

This messy patch down the end is actually filled mostly with edibles gone wild. A lemon tree, spinach and rainbow chard, nasturtiums, and an edible fuscia. I have also planted a bouganvillea which isn't edible but it needed a home so I squashed it in here to grow over the fence. I come to this garden every evening to pick spinach for us and some for Jerry, and pick nasturtiums for salad.

We compost as much as possible. And these 3 composts are not enough but they're all we have space for. I'd love a compost system like those made up with pallets. The old silver washing machine drum holds potatoes. We have a couple of big, black, plastic bins for potatoes as well.

And finally my favourite tree. A 3 year old flowering crabapple. It always starts flowering on my birthday in the beginning of October and flowers for a month.

Cheers Spring! I bloody luvs ya.  What's happening in your garden right now?

Louise

Red Haired Amazona