Frosty reception

The frost hit last night and wilted the impatiens, taro, nasturtiums and some of the spider plants. But the potato bed is done for now! I know it's cold but I did put a few kitchen sack potatoes in that were budding just for an experiment. Some I had left in the ground that were growing in the raised bed I lifted to put in the new bed succumbed and their leaves are dead as doornails.

I've found another garden centre - Jack's in Henderson Valley. The guy at Central Landscaping Swanson directed me there as they didn't have any straw and only 25kg sacks of gypsum. I dumped my dead plants in the compost yard for $5.  I found gypsum at Jacks which is like a little boutique garden centre, a $2 sack of pony poo from the horses across the road, and then was directed to the Bird Barn for straw. I found straw for $9.95 a sack and bought two, and then was stuck in traffic so walked to Mitre 10 up the road and bought $2 sausage while waiting for traffic to clear.

I had to get home quick because the pony poo was starting to stink out my car. I am taking Funcargo to the car wash tomorrow. The pony poo is dumped on a pile of newspapers and covered in straw, which is my new potato patch. I also moved a rose, I believe it is Margaret Merril, from the back yard to the front along with a rosemary bush, and moved a flax and gotu kola in the back.

My washing was drying on the line and mum and dad had gone off to my brothers so spent the whole day doing homework. I watched a gardening video about Newby Hall (giant herbaceous borders, taking cuttings, and compartmentalised garden rooms) made a macaroni cheese, had dinner, folded all the clothes (including my fresh, clean garden uniform) then went to bed. The next day I woke to ice in the birdbath and my giant impatiens looking like a horror shop plant.

Clematis was on my mind and I don't think God will let me rest until I cover the wire fence with it. I found a few at Mitre 10 on special but will have to go there tomorrow to get them. Mum later wanted me to drive her to Pak n'Save to get groceries and food for dinner and I said well I will drop you off while I go to Mitre 10. I need some gardening tools. Mum said, no more garden plants. I countered, if you trying to stop me from buying plants I won't take you to Pak n'Save. So we ended up having leftovers.

I should not have said anything. If I don't get this clematis in  tomorrow, it will be too late to plant them in spring later because the soil is nice and cool now and they will be settled in growing roots ready for spring.

I'm not sure why I am planting all these flowers. Maybe it's a waste of time.  It's not as if am planning a wedding or anything. But since we can't really have a proper garden at church - it's just pebbles and weedmat which is not really my idea of a real flower garden - even raised beds were no go.  I think too bad - will just need to plant my own.

I saw this poem carved in stone at one of the retirement villages I worked in last week.

Kiss of the sun for pardon

 Song of the birds for mirth 

One is nearer to God's heart in a garden 

Than anywhere else on earth.

Secret Gardening and dirty laundry

I am hungry for potatoes. Here is my plan. Lay down all these chinese newspapers I can't read. Go to Buffie's and haul in buckets of horse manure. Go to central landscaping and buy a bale of straw, while dropping off some green waste for their compost (dead lemon tree, dead grevillea, camellia hedge prunings). Scrounge some potatoes that are sprouting in the sack in the kitchen. Make a potato bed. Wait for Christmas.

I will site this little potato patch on the corner bed next to the yacons and broad beans, and mum won't notice it's there because it's disguised as part of the border. I am just extending it a little outwards.

I have learned that growing potatoes in tyres is not a great idea. Whoever advocated that was a bit nuts, or just had too many tyres they didn't know what to do with them. I would suggest upcycling them into rubber shoe soles.

My other plants I snuck in while mum wasn't looking was a punnet of strawberries in amongst the pak choi, and sweet violas or is it pansies? Pansies are just giant violas aren't they? A dozen violas for my symphony orchestra garden. The soil there is basically stone chips and clay so I can't even dig a hole to put them in I placed them sideways. I am hoping to attract some birds to my symphony orchestra garden as I have all the background music but no choir. I have put in some limelights or rather liriope, and there's a few strings which is fuschia procumbens, but since I moved the heavenly bamboo I might need some other kind of bamboo for flutists. Camellia is the fat lady who sings.

Well I better get going. Mum has just said I have to do all my washing by hand as my muddy gardening uniform will dirty the washing machine. I am turning up to work grubbier and grubbier each day. One of the gardening club group asked me if my company washed our uniforms for us. I wish!  Where do they do that? We have to wash our own.  It's just bad luck if it's raining on the weekend which is the only time I can do my washing.

Bring on the mud baths.

The Artist's Garden

If you like Claude Monet, then you may like this movie about his influence on American impressionist painters who were inspired by his lifestyle of painting his garden at Giverny, France. There was a whole colony of them in Boston and they would go on garden retreats and hang round and just paint the garden. This was in the days before colour photography was readily available.

Although it's a lot of talking and looking at gallery paintings and not enough describing the plants and gardening and how you too can have an artist's garden if you have the vision I would say aside from all the history and analysis, the paintings themselves are absolutely beautiful. This one is called Crimson Rambler by Philip Leslie Hale.

This has inspired me to paint my manuka and kowhai that is climbing up the verandah with the muehlenbeckia. I will have to ask the lady of the house (Mummy Cat) to pose for that one. I did paint one earlier but did not include any rambler as back then I wasn't a gardener. I just call this one 'Fluffy'.

Isn't she beautiful? Wrow!

Tree dahlias and gardening movies

They looked like green sticks for sale at the Te Atatu Garden Club and Floral Circle but the ladies said these sticks would grow into tree dahlias, higher than the doorway, over 20 feet, towering above the house. They have to be seen to be believed. So I bought three and planted them down the back fence, next to our neighbour's cabbage tree, because I figured it would like another tree companion.
The cabbage tree isn't really a tree it's just a giant lily apparently. The tree dahlia is a giant dahlia and so now I will have some height to my garden. I just won't tell mum I have planted a tree because if she knew how tall they get she would have it immediately removed, but since its flowers and they will need to be cut down anyway this could be the exception.

My other spot of gardening was edging my camellia woodland bed with liriope or turf lily. I had a big clump of it to divide so put in a curved edge and hopefully it will grow in 5 cms of soil. Well maybe not but it was growing on top of the stones quite happily not dying for a few months so I think it will survive where I've put them. It's just I haven't quite been able to make enough of my own soil yet to cover all this clay, and I don't have a dump truck that can truck it from somewhere else. But at least it's not growing on weedmat.

Am going to the movies tomorrow and seeing another gardening based movie. The other week it was 'This Beautiful Fantastic' which was highly unrealistic movie about a librarian who writes stories and attempts to make a garden. I say unrealistic because its very stererotypical about librarians, writers and gardeners. Of course, what would I know having been all three, but the thing is she hooks up with a cute guy who is an identical triplet inventor she meets at the library, and they start talking, and then he gets chucked out and she gets fired for talking in the library??!

I was very annoyed at this movie because this is not how libraries are in the real world. I got told I was too quiet, and never once did I meet cute identical triplet inventor - all I met were drug addicts and homeless people and nobody ever spoke to me except to ask where the toilets were. And the garden part was a let down because she only dug out a pond yet didn't plant any plants, didn't make any compost, and didn't even have her mother on her back because she was an orphan and raised by nuns. I just think it's easier for fictional characters to be orphans because being a mother is too hard to portray in a movie and no actress really wants to be a mother. It's more drama and fun to be young, attractive and beautifully eccentric than to act out being a mother and your lines full of nags like.... 'How many times have I told you??' and another thing is,  being told off by your mother does not really attract movie-goers. She just had a grumpy neighbour instead. He was into gardening, but in my experience its the people who aren't gardeners that are the grumpy ones.

So I hope 'The Artist Garden' is more realistic. I actually have been painted in a garden and you can see this painting at the Korero Cafe I am in it. One day at the Ranui Community Garden an artist asked us horticulture students  if she could paint us in the garden so she set up her easel and we just went about our business and next thing I know we are immortalised on impressionist canvas amongst the tomatoes, silverbeet and fennel.

If money grew on trees

If money was no object for my garden, well, I don't know, would I pay someone else to do it?
I'm really not sure because I can get plants free, and the plants that are super expensive probably won't do well in my garden anyway. I don't think you need money for a garden, because, even if you bought everything you would still need time to plant it...so, I think I may pass on this question NZ Gardener.

However if you did decide to give me say $10,000 I would probably go on one of those gardening tours all around the world, thank you. That would be where the money goes, and maybe for some timber for the Woodside raised garden beds, because two still need to be done, even though Mitre 10 gave us free timber, Nicole didn't include two of them in her quote, and they are falling apart. And I don't think we are allowed to chop up any trees in the reserve to make raised beds.

Anyway I would invite all my gardening friends to come with me. But good news, of a sort, even though it's tentative, I may be going on two garden rambles. One is to Matakana with the Te Atatu Floral and Garden circle, and the other might a work trip  to Taranaki, to the Powerco Garden Spectacular. I'm not sure why they call it the 'Powerco' Garden Spectacular you'd think it would be the 'Flowerco' Garden Spectacular but then they seem to do things different at the 'Naki, like export  their petroleum overseas, while we Aucklanders import petrol from some other country which contributes to even more global warming.

That aside, I am really looking forward to those two trips, and maybe if I save enough money I will get all the way to the UK and see for myself - Highgrove, Lost Gardens of Heligan, Sissinghurst, Hidcote Manor, Bodnant Green, Powys Castle, Grand Dixter, Beth Chatto's Gardens, Helen Dillon's Garden, Chelsea Physic Garden, Kew Botanic Garden and my sister's London windowsill garden.

My sister says her landlord put in buxus, which died, and so they replaced it with another buxus. Which will also probably die. I am thinking her landlords are not very imaginative gardeners. If it were me I would have ivy and roses climbing all over the flats walls and dichondra hanging off the windowsill plus pansies. So I will have to go over there and convince her landlords to at least put some tulips in pots by the front door. I mean dying buxus on a windowsill? Come on.

My beautiful fantastic garden carpark

What a week, did roundabout bedding plants on Tuesday it started packing on Wednesday and we were hit by the cold, wet and rain on Thursday, then on Saturday I had my permaculture workshop and by Sunday I am knackered!

On the homefront my hardenbergia or coral pea vine is in full bloom. It's beautiful, covering the arch with graceful arcs of white flowers. And it will hopefully do that every year. Grape hyacinths are out under the Magnolia, and narcissus are blooming tall under the maple.

I managed to do a bit more clipping hedging of the box at the front, also harvesting the capsicums, but am disappointed my winter veges - the pak choi, silverbeet and spinach have not grown very much at all. Has mum cursed my vege bed?

I should digest the rest of the permaculture workshop but there's so much to think about that I absentmindedly left my notebook behind in class. It was about urban design and we got to play the real version of Sim City by creating our own slice of suburban paradise with blocks and wool vegetation. I don't know if I will ever be in the job of town planner, but for those that are in the business of making  developments aside from Donald Trump, you might want to consider doing these workshops. However, bear in mind no matter how well you design the environment, if people's hearts aren't in it you can't design a loving community, someone somewhere will always be unhappy.

My solution is to give them flowers.

The other thing I need to think about is NZ Gardener magazine has posed the question 'if money were no object, what would you have in your garden?' Where do I start??? They are not themselves offering any money, but dreams and visions are free.

So I think that's a whole 'nother post. I also have another book to read, after I finish 'The New Wild', which exposes the dark underbelly of plant and animal-cide wars the conservationists are having (terrible, now Phoenix Palms are officially weeds!) making Nazi style eugenics look tame in comparison. The other book I have on request is 'Help! My Garden is a Carpark: and other design dilemmas'.

Because it truly is. I'm calling in the depavers, to unpave the parking lot and put back paradise.

The Backyard Garden Project

I turned up for Saturday for the workshop at Ranui Community Garden where we learned how to plant by the moon, make compost, use up our leftovers, and handle our seedlings with care. We were given two bags of compost, seedlings and seeds to put in our brand new beds, one filled with soil and one we need to make ourselves with our new compost bins (made from old recycling bins).

After that went to the manse and found the beds there to put the seedlings in, being extra careful not to create more mud tracks - this is the hazard of gardening this time of year, everyone needs gumboots with no holes in them. When Annette comes back next month she will have kale, parsley, and spinach to munch on. And possibly lettuce and peas, if my seeds grow.

My boss must think I'm nuts to be gardening on Saturday as he casually asked me what I do in the weekends. I feel like a garden nerd to say, well, I'm going to be gardening after gardening all week at work. He himself plays and coaches sport, or goes fishing, but I just started gardening and can't seem to stop.

I was never much of a sport player anyway. People were always trying to drag me to play it at school but chasing after balls never really appealed for some reason. Besides, after smashing the garage window playing cricket in the backyard Dad kind of banned us. I can't remember the last time I played a full game of anything unless I was being roped into it. All I can say is I don't get evangelised into playing sport unlike some people who just seem to walk down the street and get picked to join a team by random people in official uniforms. And that's fine by me, because once you join sports you can't get out of it, training three or more days a week, getting up early on Saturday and waiting and standing in the rain, refereeing games and putting up with parental abuse from the sidelines. Then having to watch it all on tv and keep up with it.  No thanks.

Anyway so my backyard is not the place to play any sport. Dad wants to keep his windows intact.

Thanks to Margaret I have another hydrangea which is now in Sock's bed where the azaela was. I have given her plenty of compost and sheep pellets, and it's near the other hydrangea which is not in the bed, partly shaded by next door's pine. I was also given some New Zealand Iris, which went near the dietes (I've learned they are the bane of the landscape gardeners, worse than agapanthus) down the back, and some pretty ferns which I suspect are bracken but Margaret thought they were silver ferns so I am trialling them in my fernery. And then it rained.