Evidence of Spring

Of course if you don't believe me...here is evidence

Gladioli

Monarch butterfly on echium

The echium in glorious bloom

Even the aeoniums are putting on a show

Spring is here!!

 I think so anyway..echium is coming into bloom, the glads are out, as are the freesias, the geraniums, and the lavenders. What a lift to my spirit to see the garden coming to life and colour again. Not that it's ever dormant but now there is a definite buzz in the air from the bees! Plus I keep seeing butterflies. 

Sad news though, Rose our school gardener has retired, so I am not sure what we are going to do without her. Mr O is our caretaker but he doesn't have the green thumbs that Rose has. I can't just leave the library to go gardening could I? Unless I create a seed library or something?

My neighbour Shirley has some fruit trees that need pruning but I think she might be a bit too late on them as my peach tree has just started blossoming. I also saw small pink rose bloom on my Cecile Brunner climber - isn't it early for roses? So Ben our tree cropper guru said he'd come round and have a look.  Wow Shirley has heaps of backyard space for a potential garden but I must not be coveting even though I now have a fig tree, two lemon trees and two grape cuttings in pots and nowhere to plant them! And how did she get passionfruit to thrive when I've tried several times and come up with nothing? Shirley doesn't have green thumbs at all she claims all she does is mow the lawn and clip the hedge a bit. 

I have a few jobs to do, and no I didn't get round to ordering seeds online during lockdown. I figured I would wait till we reopened although there hasn't been  a mad rush to the shops just yet. I still need to get used to wearing a mask. As well as glasses, earmuffs, hat, gloves, boiler suit, gumboots...maybe we should all just walk around in beekeeper's gear as the next thing in fashion.

One thing I have learned though, is neem oil isn't just good for plants. It's good for immobilising nits in your hair. I've been having a double dose of it. If it's not an outbreak of one thing, it's another. It's just a miracle we've survived so far. I know how the Kauri trees must feel. The latest campaign is to Save School Libraries. 

When faced with sudden extinction at least Spring is not silent like Rachel Carson had predicted. It's actually quite noisy where I am, now the tuis have found my kowhai, and I suspect are the ones who've been eating my magnolias, though I am not 100% sure, unless I install a secret camera somewhere in the tree to catch the culprits. You know, everyone just wants to live. 

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. 

Garden time

The garden had been a tad neglected lately so I resolved to have some garden time and check up on the plants. They were all quite happy to be growing except for a couple of things that I will need to rectify.

I had pruned the feijoa bushes last month thinning out one that had grown bushy, and now there is a little platform of feijoa prunings I've used to create a base for orchids to grow in the tree. Like a little house for them. I hope it works as the orchids were in pots and not really liking it if they got too wet because water tended to collect in the pots.

The citrus was also given a spray of neem oil because I noticed it had scale and the leaves were getting eaten. Hopefully this will stop the critters in their tracks. I don't think I can plant them anywhere until they've served out their quarantine.

The other thing I need to do is split some aloe vera as it was getting pot bound and frost bitten, it seems to actually like being indoors so I may have to find some room for them, even though all available surfaces in the entire house seem taken.

Looking toward spring I'm thinking of extending a corner by the wisteria and covering the entrance to the backyard with some low growing perennials, perhaps lavenders and lambs ears, or maybe snow-in-summer and that will be a further no-mow area for Dad.

The buxus hedges need a bit of shaping but I'm not sure whether to continue clipping them into flat box shapes or maybe rounding them off. I just find them a bit awkwardly boxy...I know you are a box plant but do you have to be so rectangular? Would it look weird if they were cones, or spirals or pyramids? Or perhaps pear shaped?

Oxalis seems to have taken over Sock's bed and I'm not that keen on weeding it all out - the bulbils if you disturb them will multipy even more. So I decide maybe they can just be a pretty groundcover like the violets are. Eventually the taller plants will shade them out right?

So there's a few things to do and think on. New Gardenland I haven't been neglecting you. You are lucky that I live in you, and you kind of belong to me because I'm not sure I would ever do this again for another garden for someone else.

The rest of the year

I'm lying low.
I nearly caught the end of the cold and flu season at school but somehow I made it through - the flu shot worked after all! But since it's too cold to go out much I have just been resting at home, not even doing much gardening.

I have come to dislike people making demands on my time saying we must do this and do that and go out. It's winter people, do we HAVE to meet up every week just for the sake of it. Do we even HAVE to work? Would the world come to an end if we just took a break? The plants do.

I have heard of gardeners who try to make a jump on spring and get all their seedlings ready and started and growing only to be killed by a snap frost. Or a storm blows that newly planted hedge down. Or hail devastates an entire freshly planted crop.

This means more reading time for me.
The gardening section of my library has been growing. My last book I read was 'The orchid thief' by Susan Orlean. Apparently made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Nicolas Cage, I was drawn into an underworld of plant crime (or rather a swamp in Florida) with orchid obsessives. I am happy to state I am not addicted to any plant that I would go to great lengths to obtain, and break the law for, but sadly, not many in New Zealand can say that about cannabis. The mail came yesterday asking a referendum for two things - ending one's life, and legalising cannabis.

Decisions decisions. Can't they be combined into one law that says if you want to end your life by taking cannabis, you can be deported to Australia?