Africanaussie

The sexy pink lady has been blooming - right in the back corner, and high up so nobody could really get to enjoy it.  I cut it down and put it inside in a  vase - luckily I have this wonderful vase big enough to accommodate such a large flower.  a week or so ago I noticed that the other large heleconia is also blooming - there was just a bit of red peeking out between the leaves.  Now it is beginning to unfurl - I always think the flowers that take so long to open seem to last the longest, so I am curbing my impatience.  It is a fairly large plant, but hopefully I can curtail its growth enough to have  a few flowers yet not allow it to overtake the whole garden.  I have already transplanted a few cuttings out into the central island where there is more room for it to grow and spread. I am linking this post to Noels hot loud and proud meme - check out more hot loud and proud tropical plants and flowers here  hot

I just love my ground orchids, and have three different colours. this is the most common one  Then the white one is less common, and I love the way it brightens up the area right under the base of the tree.  They grow mostly in the leaf litter, and are so easy to subdivide when they get bushy - you just gently pull apart one of the tiny bulbs and re-locate it into another area.  I am so lucky to have these as staples in my garden.  Then further up right where the new path turns towards the fence is the other colour - a much deeper purple - they have not flowered for a while since I was laying the path and moved them a bit.  . Lots of new little shoots starting up though, so I don't think it will be long until they flower as well.  They are in fairly deep shade on the other side of the tree in this photo. I see some on the Florida gardeners blogs which have a few different colours - I will have to look out and see if they are available here in Australia.  You can also see how we

My little seedlings had all shot up overnight and when the sun came out over the weekend I thought they might enjoy it, but they all flopped over like skinny 18th century ladies in a  faint.   Well, they need to toughen up a bit to survive the tropics.  The tropics is not for sissies.  Anyway I put up the shade cloth that will give the little seedlings a bit of shade during the day. My hubby spent hours cleaning out my potting table area, and we cut down an old picnic table to add a shelf underneath it.  It looks nice and tidy now, I will have to try and keep it that way. I heard that with a long big wet season such as we are just coming out of, that the insect population explodes.  Well they are not wrong about that.  Every lettuce seedling is now just a few little stalks!  I suspect grasshoppers, so am going to brew up a batch of chili garlic spray, because this year I am going to grow lots of vegetables, come hell or high water.   I wonder what beneficial insects I can attract

Just recently I posted about an area that I thought was getting too full. This is the pathway leading to that area, and I do think I need to thin it down a bit, but which plants do I get rid of?  It is so hard. The little ground orchids multiply fast and so I have been subdividing them and scattering them all over to add greenery and colour. This bud is just starting....  then once they open the flowers stay around for ages With all the rain we have realised that walking on the grass continually when it is wet and muddy does not do the grass any good, so I have removed the end of the bomeliad bed and am filling it in with stones so that we can avoid walking on the grass. Hopefully that will give the grass a chance to recover.   I didnt really want to make a path through the grass and this idea looks as though it will work. 

My wonderful hubby gave me a huge hand tuned wind chime for my birthday, and the sun shone all day so I was a very happy camper working out in the garden with the gentle sounds of the chimes ringing in my ears every time a gentle breeze wafted by.  Oh heaven!  The sunshine has brought out all the flowers :)  I knew that would happen - sunshine does marvellous things. I never even knew this plant flowered - I have had it for years, in quite  a few places, and mostly at the back so never really peer in between the branches.  Isn't it lovely against the background of its striped leaf?  so many tropical flowers are like this, a bunch of succulent little bulbs that the flowers peep out of. The crepe paper costus is similar- it will soon stop flowering as we enter our dry season and then this little beauty carries on throughout the year - tiny flowers, but oh so pretty with the variegated foliage and the stephanotis are opening up - aren't they so pretty? - but they don't

For my birthday my older brother sent me this photo (and gave me permission to post it on my blog) .  It is a malachite kingfisher. Isnt that colouring just amazing?  He is a very talented photographer - maybe it will rub off on me some day..... I feel a bit responsible for his marvellous talent - I gave him his very first digital camera!

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 have another sexy pink la

I mentioned that next Saturday is earth day and that we should turn off the electricity for an hour.....   mmmm -  maybe just the lights?  Not the TV surely :)  that doesn't use much power..... So how sustainable is my lifestyle really? I wouldn't consider myself a "greenie" as they are called here in Australia, but the more I garden the more green I become.   As I watched five caterpillars eat half of the leaves on my lime tree I thought about the butterflies that this would produce.  If I was greener I would probably have left every Caterpillar I ever saw, but I do recognise the orchard swallowtail caterpillar and so they got to stay (just five of them mind you, I would like some limes in my future).   When you have seen a butterfly emerging out of its chrysalis something changes deep within you: We compost everything we can and I so enjoy digging that black gold into the earth and finding my soil wriggling with earthworms.  Since we live in the tropics and every

Years ago at the sunday markets I bought this vine - stephanotis - she said it was called - it has lovely white very fragrant flowers - the type that florists use in bridal bouquets.  Well, I planted it and forgot about it - firstly it just grew one long stem, which wouldnt  twine around any supports I provided and kept flopping down.  Eventenually I nipped off the growing end and it began to put out a few branches.  Not too many mind you, and since it was in the corner out of the way I really just stopped thinking about it much.  It has been a couple of years, and then then, during all this rain I noticed a few buds - yeah. :)  I guess maybe I need to be more aware of some of these plants that seem to require a lot of water. Originally I thought I would start this post and track the progress as the beautiful flowers opened up and even have a scratch and sniff ( :) ) since they supposedly smell so amazing. for a week now the buds have looked exactly the same - maybe they dont ope

"You are my sunshine,.......... you are my sunshine" has been playing through my head this weekend.  We have been having a few days where the sun is shining during the day although it still rains at night.   The garden is loving it, and look!  a butterfly hatched!  I only found out after the fact, so didn't see it emerging, but there are three empty chrysalis cases.  One has still not hatched, so hope I can catch that one in the act. It is weird that this one has so much white on the wings - maybe this is a female and the other one might have been a male? http://africanaussie.blogspot.com/search/label/orchard%20swallowtail%20butterfly I saw an image like this labelled a female on wikipedia.  In other news around the garden: The cats whiskers are always lovely, and I thought this one looking at its own reflection in the birdbath as a few petals dropped off was rather a nice image. The beehive ginger flower has collapsed under the weight of all the water embedded i

One of the major reasons for starting the herb spiral - growing rosemary - was a huge flop!   I now have some little cuttings in a pot.  Rosemary is clearly not happy in a hot and humid climate.   The arch over the top for passion fruit to clamber over provided too much shade and the ground in the herb spiral  never dried out.  Firstly the arch was tidied up - old dead branches of the vines were removed and tied back to allow some sunlight in.   The mandevilla lies over the arch too, with its very heavy branches, so it all got a good cutting back (what I could reach that is  -  it is aiming for the sky!). I removed the Ceylon spinach - I still don't call it edible!  I would rather make room for something I am going to eat.  One thing we eat a ton of is parsley and so I removed the top layer of rocks out of the herb spiral and extended a parsley bed out to the side.  This has made it flatter and wider, and also will allow more light.  Most herbs do not do well in this climate so

After a shopping trip on Saturday I was anxious to get out into the vegetable garden.  I had purchased some seedlings and soil amendments and seed starter mix.  This is the first time I have used seed starter mix, but I often have trouble with damping off.  I think it might be worse in this hot humid climate, so want to do all I can to prevent it, and losing all my precious little seedlings.  I will water them with chamomile and seaweed tea as this is also recommended.   So in the interests of full disclosure (so I cannot just remove the evidence if my seedlings die)  the seeds I planted were  Zucchini, spaghetti squash, parsley, tomato tropic, lettuce, Chinese broccoli. Then I went out to the vegetable patch - looks different now doesn't it? The first thing I did was remove the pigeon pea plants - I suspect they should not be kept in the garden for another season.  They were originally planted as a green manure crop, and then I thought they could stay as supports for climbing