To bed

 Huh a week into lockdown and today is a rain day to spend in bed. Mum split and potted up all the zygocactus, I've split and potted up all the aloes, repotted spider plants, shifted granny bonnets, and done general tidy ups. Our floral meeting was again postponed. Otherwise I would have picked hellebores, daffodils, pineapple sage, orchids, african violets and abutilons for the 'best bloom' or flower interest table. I also had my first dutch iris bloom of the season too. It's gloriously purple. And also freesia, which is  flaming bright orange. 

Still not much luck with my  passionfruit, which is now in a pot after looking decidedly spindly, sickly and yellow. What does it take passionfruit??? Blood and bone? (Which I cannot source, as we are in lockdown). 

And what's eating my magnolia flowers? Or who? I didn't know they were so tasty, as they've been chomped by something...birds I suspect as I can't find any tell tale bugs on them. After looking online I found they are edible, so I furtively tasted a petal. It tastes like ginger. They are delicious! I didn't know I had to eat the before the birds did. 

My next thing to do is maybe buy some seeds online as I don't have many for spring. So I ought to make a list...even though I'm not the best at seed raising. I remember I didn't have much success with Kings Seed. On my (very small) wishlist is...

love lies bleeding (amaranth)

gourd

I'm going to attempt to grow choko...somewhere. Surely I can't fail at it but you would be surprised at the number of so called easy-to-grow failures on my clay soil. Maybe thats what we get for chopping down all the Kauri trees long ago. If they aren't allowed to grow here, then nothing will. A curse on our land! What is Auckland?  Once lush Kauri forest but now a waste land of leaky homes, NO homes, barren clay soil, polluted streams, oil slick roads and silted up sewage engulfed harbour? 

Tane Mahuta isn't very happy with us. 

Locked down again

 Well it was too good to last.

Auckland has gone back up to level 3 alert as the nasty coronavirus rears its ugly head. Or body. Or whatever viruses have. Coronas. 

But this means yesterday, I was able to get into the garden again..hooray, so I have claimed more territory for New Gardenland, extending the cabbage patch area beyond the azalea to the next concrete fence post, which was just enough to use the last batch of compost. The compost didn't look very composty, it looked kind of dusty really, or fluffy, because it mostly consisted of lawn clippings and vege scraps. I cut down the green manure crop of mustard, and also for good measure added some dried yarrow and lambs ears, made a fennel woven fence to cordon it off, and manuka and feijoa tree prunings. This was all placed on top of turned over turf that was a lot easier to dig thanks to the weather being rather benignly cloudy, not wet mud and not baked hard by the sun as of yet. 

I didn't have any gypsum or blood and bone or horse manure or seaweed, that's still to come. But I have made a start. It should all break down a bit and be sort of workable by spring, and I'm planning on an initial crop of potatoes, provided I can find some that are sprouting. In the meantime I have shifted one diosma that was being crowded out by the sweet wormwood. a pineapple sage division, and a lavender cutting. I've also snuck in some pelargonium cuttings. If these don't take I will just clear it for potatoes.

The potting mix bag got ripped open for the aloes, which are now in the last remaining pots I could find, and some are planted by the driveway, I'm thinking they do a bit better on the cooler and less sunny side of the house, as they seem to be badly scorched by direct sun, which is a bit strange seeing as all the books say they love full sun. They also don't enjoy frost either or being exposed and would rather be sheltered by other plants. 

After this sudden burst of activity my nails are now extremely in need of a manicure, and my mind is on further parts of the garden that need attention, like the languishing raised bed trough, the hanging wall mangers, and the very back corner that has grown wild with applemint. I pulled out one remaining rose that had sent out a very long and spindly barbed shoot, without regret, seeing as it had hardly flowered at all and was still taking up space in one of the buxus beds. The buxus could do with a clip but I am still not sure at this stage what shape I should clip them into. If it were up to me I wouldn't have buxus hedging in the first place, I would have corokia or manuka, or possibly rosemary. Having a buxus hedging means you can't grow much beside it as the buxus are taking in all the nutrients. One day it might possibly get blight as that's whats happened to all the buxus in England, and so they don't have all those miles of hedging anymore that is the English hallmark. 

Buxus and roses. Yes well that's the vestiges of my brothers' attempts at gardening that was all the rage in the 90s. Our house is possibly the only one in the entire street that had a buxus hedge with roses, before that it was conifers and flax on a bed of scoria. I shouldn't mock it though there are worse gardens. The house further down has a berm full of agapanthus and no lawn at all but pebble rock, a magnolia and a tree aloe. It's the height of minimalism. The owners have left the agapanthus to go to seed and don't even weed between them. I think they just don't like mowing, but surely they could make the effort to clip off the dried agapanthus heads. At least they aren't yuccas. 

 

Potting around

Mum said we needed potting mix and the new Bunnings was open up at Massey, so I resolved to go check it out. I wasn't that keen because last time I went to a Bunnings for potting mix on advice of a friend they had sold out. I also recall the last time I shopped for plants there (at New Lynn) the staff were less than helpful.  Well I couldn't even get in the doors since the carpark was full. 

I carried on down the road. I guess we can get potting mix at Palmer's. Or Mitre 10. Even though I have a Mitre 10 just up the road on Lincoln.  When we got to Palmers it was like a ghost town as it had completely shut up shop. Huh. So I got the potting mix from Mitre 10 instead, which was doing  a roaring trade, and it had plenty of parking, now that Palmers no longer was open. 

So what happened to Palmers? It was a brand new store (opened 2014) although I questioned what a huge store was doing in the middle of nowhere the same with all the other Westgate shops with not a soul for miles around. It had a nice cafe if pricy and half of the shop was devoted to knick knacks like bbqs,  spa pools, designer scarves and kitchen utensils just like every gardener needs to complete their luxury lifestyle. Ha who are they kidding. Real gardeners don't have money, that's why we garden. 

If I know anything about retail it's this - a lot of retail business owners have more money than sense. The investment they put in to their stores hoping to recoup it in sales far outweighs the plain facts of economics like does anyone actually have that much spare money to spend every week to keep them afloat? The people who shop retail simply cannot afford to buy in wholesale the quantities that make the business owners able to purchase those goods in the first place. Certainly one was overwhelmed with choice when entering Palmers Planet. But gardeners want plants and not fancy knick knacks and certainly don't have the space in their ever decreasing urban plots for a spa pool. 

So I made the drive back home, with my Mitre 10 potting mix. Perhaps coronavirus had indeed hit businesses hard and I wondered what had happened to all the plants. If I had owned Palmers I would have desperately planted all my stock if I had known business was closing or given it to community gardens if I was unable to return everything to the nurseries or the other stores. On your approach to the former Palmers you pass by acres of weed infested empty land, when it was operating out in desolate Northwestgate I had hoped it would have somehow transformed the place into some horticultural paradise by proxy but alas the only thing that is there now is an empty concrete barn painted with bright yellow flowers, as a monument to what was, for a brief moment in time, a green oasis in the concrete carpark jungle of bulldozed development.