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?