Weeding

It was a beautiful sunny day today, hurray! By late morning it had warmed up so we were able to get some weeding and trimming done. The rosemary clump (which is enormous) had its first trim, although I would like to get it down to an even more respectable size - I might just give up and see if I can get cuttings to grow then start again with some smaller plants. After trimming, it's still around 3 feet high, and more than six feet across.



Last Sunday I also managed to get some citrus food down - it was raining heavily anyway so I didn't have to water it in well myself! This is the first time our three lemon trees, lemonade tree and orange tree have had any attention in the almost seven years we've been here. They have cropped quite happily despite the neglect, so I'm expecting big things of them now they have been fed!

And STILL more rain

This week there was supposed to be several days in a row with no rain, including this weekend. But no, of course it rained today.

It's clear the weather is warming up though - and warm damp soil means the phacelia seems to have doubled in height this week! It REALLY needs to get dug in, but I guess it'll have to wait another week until it dries out.

STILL raining

Everyone else out there is completely over it too, right? On the bright side, it's inching closer to seed sowing time.

Jungle cat

There's a patch of soil in the garden that was very dry and tired so I didn't plant anything there last spring. In autumn it got a healthy dose of compost then had the cover crop Phacelia planted in it. As soon as it stops raining and the ground drains a bit it'll be time to dig it in, but until then Bugsy is enjoying her jungle - it's a great spot for birdwatching.

Guilt

Here's a new trick to make yourself do weeding - post photos on your blog and feel really bad that everyone can see your shame.....the current layer of fallen camellia flowers, oak leaves and weeds have now been removed from the garlic garden.

Winter Solstice - the beginning of the harvest year

Last year was my first time growing food (or indeed anything from seed). I started small, trying courgettes, capsicum, two types of tomatoes, and plenty of basil. It's now time to plan the new season's planting so I thought I'd track this year's harvest progress online. I kept an offline gardening diary last year, but blogging has the advantage of being able to add photos and categories to blog posts, so at the end of the season I can search out a complete set of illustrated posts related to a particular crop.

My harvest year begins at the winter solstice. Not much else is going on mid-winter, but this is when garlic traditionally goes in the ground to begin its six-month growing stint until harvest time at the summer solstice (ie late December). We use a reasonable amount of garlic (and it goes well with the bounty of tomatoes we will hopefully get this year!) so this year we're growing our own. All you do is grab a single fat garlic clove and pop it in the ground, 5cm down and pointy end up.

I've planted garlic in two spots. Six cloves of organic garlic (imported from California) went in by our letterbox on 14 June - this spot has good soil, hasn't had anything growing in it before except weeds, and does get sun although not so much in winter. These took no more than a couple of weeks to sprout - I wasn't expecting this to happen so quickly so I hadn't been checking them, but they were a reasonable size by the time I noticed them.

I also purchased some Printador garlic cloves from Kings Plant Barn and planted 15 or so of these out by our barbecue on 28 June (a couple of leftover cloves ended up in the letterbox row). This area has clay soil and again gets a reasonable amount of sun but not in winter. These took three weeks to just start peeping through the ground.

Unfortunately there's been a lot of heavy rain since they went in, so hopefully they aren't busy rotting away underground. Here's the letterbox row today (and yes, I really should clean up the dropped camellia flowers):



We also impulse-purchased some strawberry plants at Kings Plant Barn, half a dozen Pajaro and half a dozen Camarosa, and Kere has kindly constructed some planters for them. The plants were starting to look a bit sad by the time I actually got them into the planters on Saturday (in between the showers) - and the next 24 hours brought heavy rail and hail onto them! So we're keeping our fingers crossed they survive.

The only other things growing in the garden are the citrus trees (two lemons, one orange, one lemonade, all relatively neglected), and a sole surviving purple broccoli seedling. This has managed to survive the two months of storms since it was planted by the letterbox but no sign of anything other than leaves yet.