Grow your own...

I love purple flowers - something about them.  So lovely this time of year. 

Karyn and Pierre are getting married on October 24th. It's official! Another friend June is getting married in November. It also looks like our Te Atatu Floral and Garden Circle trip to Tauranga is going ahead. 

Am so looking forward because I haven't been out of my little bubble in ages. If things go well we might even be visiting each others gardens in the Floral Circle. 

On the gardening front I haven't had to do much aside from pick flowers! This time I'm going to have a go drying them and pressing them in wax paper. Flowers are so fleeting that you need to be observant when they do arrive. Surprisingly mum did notice there were more flowers than usual that even my Aunties remarked on them when they came over. She grudgingly said 'oh its just Selina's planting them really there are too many'  (I won't translate what she actually says in Chinese but you can be sure it's a backhanded compliment. ) My garden has been attracting the cats next door and my cousin who comes when she want to pick fennel or rosemary or lavender. 

I'm hoping that people will get the message to try and do their own garden if they want to see the fruits (and flowers) of their labour rather than at present assume that all gardeners are dying to work on other peoples gardens for cash. It is really not fun if you spend all your time weeding and looking after a garden and you don't even get to pick the produce. Which is amazingly still what people think to do the world over, like all the people who are practically forced to grow coffee in Indonesia and then don't have enough land or time to grow food to feed themselves...the coffee just gets exported to some richer country so they can have it as a luxury good. 

Oh but we can't grow coffee in England or Holland or New Zealand it's too cold. Well tough.You can drink dandelion tea instead. I am ready to give up chocolate or rice if it can't be grown here so I can have my lamb and potatoes and crayfish and pipis. And chokos and feijoas. And possibly now its warmer..bananas. I'm sure nobody else in the world really wants our exports which is fine with me. Don't we have people living in poverty here that don't have enough to eat, so why feed those that already do? 

 

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.