Saturday 20 June 2015

Winter Solstice

It is the shortest day.
My garlic I planted a week or so ago has sprouted.
My carrots are growing in their tubs and I thinned out most of the weeds. They are still tiny. I don't know how long till harvest...I've never grown carrots before.

I've been doing more 'musical plants'. I moved prostrate rosemary from the rock garden to hang with her sister in my window box bed. I also moved four hyacinths to the rock garden as they seemed not to enjoy the trough where they were going soft and mouldy. I think I planted them too early? Maybe you just meant to plant them now, because they had already started blooming, and the blooms don't look very good. I have removed the nasturtiums from the hanging baskets and mangers as they were were not getting enough moisture and going yellow, so put them in the ground.

Then the rain came, and I couldn't do any more.

I read on a media website that a lady asked the council if she could plant a lemon tree on her grass verge. Auckland Transport then said she had to pay $1000. ??! Ridiculous. I say plant the tree, don't tell the council as it's not their problem anymore, as now they refused to mow the grass anyway...but in West Auckland we've been doing that forever so I think we should be able to plant what we like. And we'll probably choose better trees than what the council chose, who now have the added cost of maintaining the trees that grew too big and then died of disease cos they planted the same ones everywhere. A lemon tree isn't going to drop needles everywhere and interfere with power lines and storm water systems.

At Woodside we have a lot of fruit trees that were actually gifted to us from the council..some of them were for the 'trees for babies' project (or scheme, or ...?). Silly thing is, the volunteers were directed to grow fruit trees entirely unsuitable for the area they wanted the volunteers to plant them. So they had this avocado which didn't like the wet soil it was planted in, and died. What did the council do? Replaced it with ANOTHER avocado tree, which will probably end up dying as well.

Hello?
Anyone got any common sense at the council? Do they know anything about trees?

Grr. Well, the answer to that is NO, which is why, I don't work for council anymore. They don't know anything. And if you try and tell them stuff, they don't even want to know.