Africanaussie

I think my theory this year has become to fill every inch of space.  Luckily MrFothergills gifted me with lots of seeds, and since I have a small garden I am planting seeds in any empty spot I see. The bok choy is doing very well this year, and I have not been shy with lettuce seeds, scattering them quite thickly.  I tend to like picking the small leaves, so there is no sense in spacing the leafy veggies out to give them room to grow to full size. With the lettuces I cut the outside leaves away, but with the bok choy I cut the middle out and it grows a whole new bunch.  We are having a bit cooler weather than last year, and so the snow peas look as though we might get a good crop this year.  I planted out two trellises. We have had a lull with pawpaws, I think they like more sunshine, not these overcast days we have been having.  I like to start my day with pawpaw and passionfruit.   One of these days I will have to lop the top off my tall tree so that ...

As I mentioned previously, the back section was getting rather overgrown, so I ventured into the heleconia/ginger section with my loppers.   Heleconia stalks flower and then die, so I decided to cut back some of the flowering branches and bring them inside. These red heleconias are my favourite, and I am so glad that they are now flowering profusely.  I need to figure out how to divert the new shoots so that they remain inside the bed, and I think continually cutting away the dying branches will allow the room for them to stay contained.  There is still way more to cut back, but for now I am enjoying flowers in the house.   The sexy pink ladies are so hard to put into an arrangement - maybe it would have looked better with another one in the center instead of the cordeline.  I was cutting back the lemongrass and found this tiny creature -  his skin had a metallic sheen to it.  I am still trying to find a way to make the perfe...

I was talking to my neighbour the other day and she said that a visitor had commented on the lychee tree in their back yard.  They don't have a lychee tree - we do!  Because we grow the same type of plants along our fence lines both of us can use the illusion that our gardens are bigger than they actually are. This large tree and the palm trees are in her garden, but who would know?  The heleconias and gingers are a bit overgrown now and are going to have to be cut back to contain them, but I also don't want to lose the illusion of space.  Once a heleconia stalk has flowered, it dies, and sends out another stalk.  So the ones that have already flowered are taking up use-able real estate.  This bed is full of these lovely big red heleconias.  The red ginger are way too cramped and overgrown.  Here you see them from both sides of the fence.   There is a little path that leads just to the back fence, but...

In the tropics everything grows so well, that sometimes I have to think about a certain plants aggressive nature.  I like to be able to see that all the plants are surviving ok, but still have a full tropical look to the garden. I am often torn about removing certain plants that have become too aggressive for my small garden. A plant at the back has huge leaves, rounded, and very firm, and I love the way they scratch against each other in the wind.  I planted two of them - one against the fence and the other at the back, next to the sexy pink lady. Hubby loves the feeling that we live in the middle of a lush tropical rainforest.  I worry that the plants are crowding each other out. Is there too much now in that corner? The difficulty is that some of those plants will go dormant in the dry season.   I see more turmeric has come up, so have to be careful I do not create bare patches..  I have that in the...

I used to love to move the furniture around, but our little unit is so small and everything is just where it has to be, so I had to take the urge outside. :) After my lovely neighbor gave me a garden chair a couple of months ago I placed it snugly under the tree fern.  Nobody sat there, leaves fell all over it, and as the fern got bigger I wondered about where else the chair could go.....  (I put up these "bali" flags for my MIL's 80th birthday and quite like them there - they might stay).   Back to the point - that chair did look a little less than inviting didn't it? So.... after giving the ponytail palm a  bit of a haircut and moving it over to share its space I found the perfect spot for the chair.  It also means that the small heleconia plant can spread out a bit and be noticed - gosh you cant even see the space that the chair took up... While I was checking out the cha...

I was sitting on the swing this weekend with my hubby sharing our morning cuppa and revelling in the fact that there has been no rain for two days.  "I think this area is geting too full - That big heleconia has to go" "What?  I .....love feeling like I live in a forest, dont change anything..."  A lot of our conversations go like that..... - a gardener knows things do well after a big cut back, but maybe nongardeners dont have that confidence. .but this area has got a bit overgrown and when I bought that big plant I really wasnt thinking how small our garden is..... so I thought I would take a little wander down the back garden path.   and saw.....a bud.  a beautiful big red bud! Quickly I ran in to get the camera. "You know that plant I was going to rip out? well its flowering. My hubby just smiled - he knows that once a plant flowers it has wedged a plance in my heart (and my garden) forever. Right in the back corner I h...

I spent all day Saturday digging out all (hopefully) the roots of the invasive Lady Di Heleconia.  That area is now a bit bare, but I am sure it will all fill in soon enough.  I moved a couple of cordelines there that were not doing well in the shade and along with the crotons should create quite a colourful spot.  I cleared a path behind that area to go to the back of the garden as it sometimes gets a bit prickly going past the duranta.  I think the franzipani will do better now that it has more light and air.  Good, another job to tick off the list.  Behind the tree fern these heleconia are flowering.  Maybe they should be further out in the front as they are quite low and hidden. they have great detail in their colouring. My neighbour gave me a piece of her tassel fern......hers is in a hanging pot  the last one I saw was in Delaware at Longwood Gardens.  I cant believe the tropical plants they grew there in the "ballroom", and...

Last weekend I began to thin out a few of the Lady Di Heleconia.  Now these have been my favourite heleconia by far, BUT the problem I now discover is that they are very invasive.  Sooooo.... I made the huge decision to rip them out - yes all of them.  So far I have just removed them from the front section. My hubby is very nervous as he loves the privacy they give, but  just one day of digging out roots made me convinced that the sooner I get rid of them the better.  We are going to have a bald spot for  a while, sorry Hubby!   I cant afford to go out and buy some full size plants, so will have to start out with some more cuttings, but look how quickly the garden filled in before from nothing.  I like the look of the purple flowers  and yellow leaves together alongside this area and the red of the pointsettia in the winter, although I wonder if it some sort of diesease with the yellowing of its lea...

Over the weekend I decided that I had to clear the pathway behind the back of the garden.  It started out with the visit to the gardening group on Saturday where I came back with a bunch of cuttings and small plants - yeah!   I got some growing galangal and ginger roots.  The ginger I tried to grow from the supermarket ginger always rots away.  This is the ginger, it grows up to about 2ft high and has very spindly leaves. This is the galangal - it grows very tall, and I planted it just behind the costus, close to the lychee tree.  While digging around there I discovered that the costus is flowering right at the base.  No-one can see the flowers there unless you go bundu-bashing, so if the glalangal takes off that costus will just have to go.   I have seen the costus that I want to grow there, it is lower with little orangy bud type flowers on the tips.  I guess when I pinched this plant, I must have got the plant next to ...

I have a lot of red flowers in my garden,  but this weekend, pink seemed to be the colour of choice. The sliver of orange peeks out ready to erupt into multicoloured heleconia. A different type of cordeline - this type has large very leathery feeling leaves and a close up of the wonderful colours inside the new leaf My cordeline in full sun in the front garden has turned very pink.  I think this aswers my question as to whether they have better colour in sunshine.  I am thinking of moving all my cordleines (or most of them) from the deep shade to alongside the wooden fence which looks quite bare now that the shade cloth is gone. This little pink foliage plant is easy to propogate from cutting and I have it scattered around the garden. I love the way it looks next to the cordeline leaf. The central rib is quite  a stunning hot pink shade. as you can see from the photos we are having quite  a bit of sunshine.  The plants seem to have got used to all...