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...

I feel a bit of a fraud calling what I did a design.  More of an evolution. A note about my old photos: I was having trouble with my smart phone and stopped syncing photos, then thought I would delete them off my phone so free up room.  Take my advice - don't do that - it removes them from Picasa permanently.  So you will just have to use your imagination about what the garden first looked like. :( Basically there was just lawn and I covered sections with cardboard, and lots and lots of mulch.  (I got an eight ton load from the tip)  Slowly as that broke down I planted, ornamentals on the side and a veggie garden out the back.   The veggie garden is a triangular shape. One of the first things I read about was a herb spiral and I got a few big rocks and built up a small spiral, filling in the centre with crusher dust which is very well draining. I managed to retrieve an old photo of the herb spiral.  My main purpose was to be able to grow rosema...

When my brother was visiting with his very fancy camera and lots of long lenses, he took some awesome bird photos. I will share with you one of the awesome photos my brother took of a kookaburra when he was here... He said he was happy for me to share it here. Sometimes though it is not so much the equipment, it is what you have on hand.  I captured this lovely rainbow on my phone camera on the way into work one morning, and now use it on my desktop.  It makes me feel so peaceful. I dont have the equipment to be taking professional photos, but it got me a little bit interested in what all the birds in my neighbourhood are called.  I was sitting watching my veggie garden grow last weekend - that is gardening too isnt it?  The rainbow lorikeets make such a racket feasting on the berries high up in the neighbours garden, and then I suddenly noticed two large white birds sitting on a branch.  From lots of running in and out with bird books, binoculars e...

My microgreens came up so nicely and I was just about ready to harvest some for my dinner, when -whoosh - overnight something mowed them down - they are now just a bunch of little green sticks.  Sometimes growing food in the tropics is just way too hard. Luckily I can spend time with my flowers - the sexy pink lady is flowering again.  I was trimming some branches and look who hopped onto my hand!  I found him a nice leafy branch to move onto.

This month is all about seeds.  Connect with others at the Garden Share Collective. I must admit I am not always very good at saving seeds.  Last collective I showed a lovely photo of my bok choy flowering.  I have been keeping an eye on the seeds as they began to form, last weekend I looked for my little paper seed collecting bags, and then got distracted.  Ooops - now they seem to have scattered with the wind.  A lot of my seed saving is like that, and next year I will have bok choy coming up in that same spot. A while back there was a competition to grow oats and my grand kids got quite excited about it.  They are now ready to harvest (I think!)  I pulled out the plants and lay them over the compost, then cut most of the seed heads off.  the remainder of the plants went straight into the compost tumbler - lots of lovely greens (and probably a few seeds I missed!) The seeds are now in a paper bag pegged on the washing ling line under ...