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...

We had a local garden competition and our council managed to negotiate Costa from Gardening Australia to be one of our judges!  My gosh - heart palpitations!!!   I knew I had to enter, but was away just before that, leaving the garden in the hands of my non gardening hubby.  Added to that we were in a drought when I returned, and the bandicoots were wreaking havoc in the garden. I got stuck in, and tidied up, mulched, and planted new seeds in the wicking boxes (which were just microgreens when he arrived!) The first thing you see when you enter my garden is fruit salad alley and we began to chat about getting kids interested in gardening.  The volunteer tomatoes in the mulberry pot have had a wonderful side effect.  I tied the stakes up into a teepee and this protected the mulberries from the birds., plus it is also fun to go scouting around looking for a plump ripe mulberry.  The strawberries were also just starting to ripen, since then I have en...

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...

This dry season started out with lots of cloudy days.  Combine that with the fact that my neighbor has a high hedge that has grown on one side of my veggie patch and my veggie garden has been starved for sunshine.  This meant things like tomatoes were not doing too well. Lately we have had a little bit more sunshine and suddenly the tomatoes in  the wicking beds are looking a bit healthier. We may still get some tomatoes this season :)  A while back I moved my fig in a  pot out into the front, on the side of the carport.  Normally there is no car there, but at the moment we have our old car parked there, so the fig tree has been pretty much hidden and  ignored.   I have been going back and forth about what to do - do I leave it in the pot?  Do I espalier it?  Will I ever get figs from it?  Well - look what I found - two little figs :)  I am thinking I will keep it here in the pot but not sure about the espalier trellis - it...