My garden needed a trim and I'd just come back from a pruning workshop at Woodside where we shaped fruit trees into vases so that we could throw a cat through it. Or a bird could fly through. One of those anyway.
So I was busy pruning and clipping the grapevine into shape by the back fence which had grown into a massive tangle. My own fault for neglecting it, although we did have some tasty fruit from it, if it was out of reach from the chickens (they could jump up). I then pruned the meyer lemon tree as well, and even took cuttings from my Chinese lantern. Maybe those cuttings from the lemon tree, the grapevines and the chinese lantern will take if I poke them in the ground? Who knows, but can't hurt to try...
Mum reluctantly agreed to come along to the community garden as I promised her kumara which needed to be cleared. We harvested masses of kumara leaves and big fat tubers that made good eating. Then yesterday she trimmed all of the ginger lily that had flowered. Of course I didn't plant those and there are too many massed in front of my bedroom, blocking the path. So I will need to remove some of them maybe today.
Beth bequeathed me another mini glasshouse and so now I have two. It's on loan though, until she gets her place sorted. However all the plants she gives me from her abundance are starting to flourish. I planted another cutting of new guinea impatiens in the back corner and moved three renga renga lilies to the log burner bed. The celosias didn't look very happy there nor the lavender and they hadn't grown an inch. But beefsteak plant, iresine, had taken, and of course the bronze carex didn't care, they just waved their tousled blades at me. They are not dead but actually are already brown. But I think anyone unsuspecting or horticulturally illiterate would think that my grass had died.
I'm worried about my magnolia. Her leaves are looking a bit spotty and brown curling at the edges I'm not sure that bark mulch is any good. I have taken to feeding her seaweed fertiliser hoping she will perk up but at loss of what to do. She has flowered twice but the second time round wasn't so spectacular. I can't risk transplanting her again, if I do that she'd leave a massive hole in the ground...although I suppose thats where the pond would go...
