Africanaussie

Welcome to the garden share collective hosted by  kate at rosehips and rhubarb  and  Kyrstie at a fresh legacy.   Thank you for doing this, it keeps me motivated! The theme this month is fruit, and since I have a small garden I never really thought I would be able to grow much fruit.  The main feature in my side garden is the lychee tree and this year I really wished we didn't have it in the garden.  We had it pruned a while back and the gardener said that he couldn't lop the height off for some reason (I was at work when this happened) Of course it has now grown higher and when it fruited over December, we couldn't reach a single fruit, but believe me the bats and rosellas could!  The noise, and the mess were horrendous.  My poor hubby was raking up leaves and rotting fruit a couple of times a week to try and gain control, but the fallen fruit still attracted fruit fly. Well, end of the sorry story we are digging deep in our pockets and going ...

Some plants love this heat, and one of those is the peppercorn vine.  I noticed a while back that I was getting little strings of "pearls" forming on the ends of the branches.  I cut about a dozen of them and put them into a brine to pickle,  I am not really sure when the right time is to harvest them.  I love them out in the garden just to nibble on, but in order to preserve them they have to be pickled.  I might make steak au poivre one day and put both green and black pepperocrns into the sauce.  Recipes are hard to find, so if anyone has anything to share I will be most grateful. I have also heard that the vine needs to be pruned properly after fruiting in order to produce the most peppercorns.  I am thinking of training it along the side of the perrenial bed, but want to make sure I do it the right way.  I saw something that said it only bears on outside shoots.  What does that mean? I am certainly glad that there are no maintenance...

Yesterday we had almost an entire 24 hours without rain so I sprayed myself liberally with mosquito repellent and went out into the garden and chopped and hacked my way through the jungle.  This will allow more light into the ground and plants and hopefully there will be less damp areas for the mozzies to hang out and breed in.  I also would like it to dry out enough to mulch up the leaves.  The rex begonia love this weather. I really chopped away a lot of hanging branches here to let the light in and scraped up some lovely mulch from the path to put between the bromeliads.  There are still lots of lovely strands of lady slipper orchids hanging down into the path. I was photographing the hanging lady slipper orchids and look at this funny face I captured! Underneath the fan palms the beehive gingers are going crazy - I will get into this area next and clean it out a bit. I hope everyone else has had a wonderful relaxing time with family and friends an...