Africanaussie

The lady slipper orchid is beginning to flower again!  I have a few dichondra in a hanging basket, and like the way this is becoming the "hanging garden"!  I never tire of these beautiful flowers, and the fact that they are growing in my garden fills me with such pleasure.  The vine needs to be cut back so that it doesn't take over the entire garden.  I want light to be able to get in, and it also strains the branches of the weeping tea tree it scrambles over. In other orchid news I cut back the plants around the back fence, letting in more light and neatening it up a bit more.  Often when one does such a thing though it can still look a little messy for  a while until new shoots start to fill in the bare areas.   All my orchids need a bit of TLC, but they have survived the neglect pretty well. My phalanopsis has two flower spikes!  yeah!  They all got a good dunking in some seaweed solution.   This little...

I arrived back after more than four weeks overseas to discover that my garden had done just fine without me, thank you very much!  The peppercorn vine is full of little bunches of peppercorns.  Last year I pickled some, but might do some research on drying them instead.  I made a lovely pepper sauce to go with our pork chops last night.  The lady slipper orchid has made its way into the veggie patch, so I now have flowers and fruit intermingling. This bed required lots of weeding, and then I quickly planted some seeds to make the most of whatever growing season we still have.  Tatsoi, rocket and whatever else was left in the packets. The asian greens in the one box were pulled out to make way for bok choy.  Mizuna was my clear favourite, so I will plant that again.  For the first time ever I have been able to grow rainbow chard - isnt it pretty?  I never grow huge leaves of kale - think it is still too hot here, even in our winter. ...

I try to cut everything way back at this time of year so that I dont get lots of leggy growth as the plants spurt forth with the approaching wet season.  Last year our wet season was very late in arriving and in fact, we did not get as much rain as usual. The mandevilla vine which shades the herb spiral has had a very severe haircut, which let in lots of light. I need to cut back the lady slipper orchid vine as it is too heavy for the tree it is clambering over - weeping tea tree.  It is looking so beautiful though that I am going to leave it a little longer.  No photo - it keeps turning sideways - does anyone else have that problem? Vegetables and Herbs  I am going to try to keep some greens growing until the very end of the dry season and in actual fact planted out a new supply.   Tatsoi has become my very favourite green, it survived with very little care while I was away, so I added a little more compost around the base of each plant.  The eggpl...

In my last post I talked about how much I love to entertain in the garden. Recently I hosted an afternoon tea, and this weekend a dinner party.  Both of these were outside in the garden.  I made sosaties and tried a new recipe for samoosa pancakes found  here  .  I changed it quite a bit - added waay more spices, and they were a real hit.  I will post both these recipes onto my recipe blog for safekeeping, as I will be making them both again. This is what you look out at when you sit in the gazebo.  We had lots of sunbirds and honeyeaters splashing about in the birdbath - they seem unconcerned by people.  You can see all the fallen blossom on the ground - they get quite aggressive sucking out the nectar from the flowers. A close up of the lady slipper orchids.  My guests response when they saw the orchids up close was amazing.  That just makes me fall in love with my garden all over again. Are you the same?  When...

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...

Last night we had a little rain, and it was lovely to walk around this morning and see how the garden had drunk it all up.  We have stage two water restrictions at the moment - unheard of at this time of year here in the wet tropics......  The grass is brown and dry and crunchy underfoot.  The wet season is taking its time arriving, it is muggy and hot as we wait. The kookaburra like to sit on the fence post surveying where their next meal will be coming from.  With this dry weather my poor dear hubby is on a conintual quest to mulch up all the leaves.  All my bins are full, and yet they continue to drop.  The evodia tree is in bloom - so pretty as the flowers from along the branches.  This tree hosts the ulysses butterfly and lots of other nectar feeding birds.  Look at the flowers close-up - arent they awesome?  They start out like little pink origami boxes, and then the white loops arrive and pop!  they open up! The la...

The little section which I think of as my fan palm forest is coming along nicely.   I wanted to be able to look out and not see any fence.  I also wanted to look up and see the sun shining through the beautiful shapes of the fan palm leaves.  One of the most beautiful tropical sights in my book. I also have a fluted fan palm.  They both seem to have shot up this last year. I purchased this plant at one of the orchid shows, and it has multiplied and I need to reduce it in size once more. The foliage is so interesting. It does get some yellow flowers right at the base, but the interest is in the leaves. Of course my favourite bit of colour at the moment is the lady slipper orchid - sorry if you are getting tired of seeing this from every angle.....  the sunbirds are always flocking around sipping nectar from these flowers and often get a bit rough and I find these little flowers scattered like confettiti under the tree. The vine is climb...