Africanaussie

A weekend coming up - yes!  It is a wonder I ever get any gardening done - looking at this scene is just so relaxing...  saturday mornings we have a cup of coffee and look out at this wonderful image.  My hubby often says that he feels as though we are living right in the garden, as from every window you can look out and see plants, flowers, birds and butterflies.  I am so blessed, and so happy to be able to share it all! We look out to the east, and as the sun shines through these plants, if it has rained in the night, the plants are often filled with sparkly diamonds! So hard to capture the feeling on camera though. I have always loved willow trees and this weeping tea tree is just the answer in our small yard.  Just look at the lovely detail on this bark.. Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Gosh I love my flowers! Happiness is... being a gardener of course!

After all this rain the colour seems to stand our more vibrant and alive on the persian shield. And the croton Right on time, as Easter draws near, I see the Easter lilly is starting to bloom! This spider looks happy - I am sure he is consuming plenty of mosquitoes. I hope you are not getting tired of looking at heleconias, I know I never will. This one is my daughters favourite!

Someone asked me the other day why I keep talking about the rain - isnt there a drought in Australia?  Not here, not in the wet season!  This was our backyard Friday afternoon...... We have had some huge electrical storms lately, and one of them knocked out our modem at home, so have been off the internet for a while.  Our local electronics man ran out of modems!   So we have been waiting for one to come up via courier.  We have at times been shut off at home unable to get out because of flooding over the roads, and on Friday I was the last one to get through. Is it any wonder this grass struggles to grow? I found a moth on this sodden plumbago, trying to search out some nectar, I imagine it would be well diluted. But when the sun comes out, it is so beautiful, and makes me smile Look at this spiderweb..... I am anxiously awaiting the end of the wet season, we do have changing seasons here, but they are different. This little purple anthir...

Rainforest gardener put out a few photos of an area at his folks place that he was going to make into a balinese themed garden.  He got some wonderful ideas and made a beautiful garden, so I want to copy his idea.  There are so many wonderfully talented gardeners out there (and some of them actually read MY blog) and I would like to get some input about what to do with my garden. a short history: we moved into our new home 14 months ago and there was a huge lychee tree and not much else.  Our idea was to create a screen of tropical plants in the triangular area under the lychee tree and along the back fence. I had accumulated a lot of plants in pots and so cleared the area and planted everything, keeping to the loose plan of higher plants at the back and lower plants in front.  I also tried to place plants that needed more shade in the shady area and vice versa.  this is the area to the right, which I am very happy with: My problem now is th...

I just love all the tropical colour in my garden at the moment the heleconia then this orange bud opens into this flower - doest it seem to be stretching its arms out to reach every ray of sunshine? The tumeric flower on the other hand hides deep within the fronds It doesnt need to hide away - look how beautiful the flower is! Everything about the tropical summer is intense - colour, rain, humidity, heat, - not for the fainthearted!

Well, I never!  I opened up one of the latest gardening catalogues to discover that my beehive gingers were displayed in all their glory but with different names to what I had been calling them - ooops! sorry! The one I was calling the shampoo ginger is in fact called Zingiber cocoa delight (Zingiber otensii)  and the one I called beehive is actually Zingiber yellow (Zingiber spectabile).  Closer, and a  deep look into the pockets  They dont show the infloresence of what they call shampoo ginger, but it has a variegated leaf.  I think zingiber is just the latin name for ginger... There is another plant that I bought at the market, that totally dissapears during the winter.  (I thought I had lost it!) It surfaces every wet season and I now discover that it is called Peacock ginger (Kaempferia pulchra) It was a bit drier this weekend and I was able to be outside without being attacked by too many mozzies.  They seem to get very agressive jus...

One of the principles of permaculture is to grow plants up , instead of letting plants scramble around the ground taking up precious space.  Just looking around the garden, I have definitely taken that to heart!  In actual fact the plants have done that on their own without my help. Take for instance this passionfruit vine:  When I first planted the passionfruit vine next to my little arch and alongside the fence, I knew it would ramble, but gosh, once it started to climb this happy plant it just continued to reach for the sky.  It suits us very well as we have a rather ugly Telstra building behind there, and I would much rather look at a 30ft wall of green.  When the passionfruit ripen, they just fall to the ground and I can walk around and pick them up.  How convenient is that? I planted pigeon peas as a green manure crop this year, and sometimes I miss the fine print when choosing plants - like how tall they grow!  I rea...

Over the last couple of weeks we  had a cyclone hovering around the coast and traveling up and down.  At long last it has headed further south and petered out.....  Hopefully we can begin to dry out a bit.  Over the weekend  when I walked in the grass I sunk down to my ankles in squelchy mud!  Everything was dripping with moisture.  As soon as the sun came out it got incredible humid - I guess that moisture began to evaporate into the air! We have received 900mm in January! Thats a lot of rain!  The thing I miss the most  though is the sunshine.  I think the sun infuses happiness right into my soul and when I am surrounded by heavy cloud cover I feel an oppresive weight on my shoulders.  That weight has lifted and the sun is shining hooray :) Actually I just read that vitamin D increases the seratonin in your body!  so my whole theory about sunshine making me happy is based on fact!  How is that :) I spent some time ...

During the wet season the tropical plants really shine, and my garden is looking quite colourful. We have created the privacy screen between us and the neighbours as we wanted. A close up of a bromeliad flower - what vibrant colour! the purple tips seem almost electric!

My aim was to try and grow and eat as much as I could from my garden year round, not just the drier winter season which is our main growing season.  I have been harvesting pawpaw and passionfruit, and then asparagus for the beginning of the wet season, but leaving the shoots now to grow the crowns.  Herbs are all doing OK, but do struggle with the huge amount of rain and bugs.  I was wondering what I was doing wrong with my luffas - The veggie garden fence is a tangle of vines - the thick snake beans, with their beautiful shaped leaves and delicate flowers then the neighbours passionfruit vine that keeps coming over to my side, then the luffa, with huge green leaves and tons of yellow flowers.  Often I would see the beginnings of a luffa, but then it would shrivel up and die.  I wondered if they needed more light, so cut back some of the excess vines, and trimmed some piegon pea plants that were growing nearby.  I see tons of honeyeater birds, but...