The Front Garden

Pass... the less said about this side the better.... let us just say that alternating warm weather and heavy rain has led to huge growth in all plants... wanted and unwanted! Luckily, I haven't seen the elderly neighbours for the last month (yes... they are still alive... I've not yet cashed in my one free "get away with it" card yet!).

The Back Garden

Well, the main task for the month was to hack back at the ground ivy that has started to see large growth into one of our neighbour's gardens. So, time to slash and burn (well, no burn... but that would have been fun!)... no mercy, it grows fast...

Which did lead to several very full buckets (I had already emptied out most of them) of random green waste. We have a green waste container right outside on the street, so that is pretty handy... You just dump the green (food as well) waste in... and sometime later in the year, there is a big compost collection week at the local tip!

However, the danger of leaving almost full buckets of cuttings around (to be filled at a later date and taken out into the green waste when full...)... is that they sit there for the next few weeks, waiting to be filled. Unfortunately, that meant that they were filled with water and hail (these were pretty big hailstones!) over the next week or so... and then left to sit around in the heat for another week. Let me tell you, there are no words to describe the fetid and putrid smell that was coming out of them... guess who had the pleasure of emptying them into the green waste...

New additions to the garden include these two parsley plants and a basil plant. Parsley, well... we don't use too often in the cooking... but basil, we use heaps! There is nothing better than making fresh pasta and then a quick and easy tomato sauce with basil and anchovies!

As the month went on, the parsley seems to have held up well...

...however, the Basil has not fared so well... a mixture of adults plucking it for eating... kids plucking it for making "potions" and snails (I think) taking snacks from it (although, one of our kids thinks it is the neighbourhood cat that is doing it...). Anyway, I've taken to laying out snail pellets around this area to ward off snails... I heard that coffee grounds can also work?

Meanwhile, I took all the aphid crumpled leaves off the cherry tree... I figured they weren't really contributing too much to growth any more anyway. So, that was quite a few leaves...

... and so we have a handful of little cherries coming... I really have to get some netting, so that we end up eating them instead of the birds!

The Blackberry plants are growing like crazy... and have started invading the space of the plants surrounding them... in particular, there are shoots that are growing strongly through the cherry tree and out to the hedge... I probably should do something about that... They are flowering though, which means that we should be getting some blackberries in the next month or two... which is great, as the todler has just gotten addicted to berries!

Likewise, the Strawberries are growing at a furious pace... throwing out new shoots to entrench themselves in the soil around (I'm starting to think that this is going to turn into a growth war zone between all the plants...). Our kids were excited to start seeing the first of the white coloured strawberry shapes taking form. In fact, we are told this every day by our little one.... As for the two sides that I had planted the strawberries on... it doesn't seem to be making much of a difference at the moment. Both sides are growing fast, but maybe they will have a different amount/quality of fruit?

.... and last but not least... the grape vine... which I had to hack back to stop it intruding on the other neighbour's side! It's gotten a bit unruly... but the plan is to try and train it around the the fence (we will put up some sort of wooden structure to help it....) to try and get a bit of privacy and shade. On the left of the photo, you can see another climber (just a flowering one...) that we hope to train over the shed door and down on the other side... I'm not really sure that will work, plants don't seem to want to grow downwards... but it is a plan from my wife, so I'm tasked with trying to make it work! It might be easier to start a new climber on the other side though....

To Do list

We have a bunch of little plants and cacti that are just sitting around barely living or dying on our kitchen window sill... I had recently learnt from a student of mine about how she was making Terrariums (self contained and self regulating ecosystems) with plants in a large jar! I think I'm going to give it a go with these ones... the idea is that the bottle ecosystem finds a balance... with dying plants feeding the living until an equilibrium is found (hopefully an equilibrium that also includes some living plants...). It is going to be one of my projects for this coming month!

I probably need to mow the lawn again... at the moment, the official reason is that I'm letting the seeds come so that the patches will be regenerated... but I'm starting to suspect that that line is not going to hold up for much longer... I might need to come up with a manufactured crisis to distract attention and scrutiny from the public!

There are some little projects that need to be fixed up... which will involve some drilling (small, but it does mean I get to use the hammer drill!). An insect hotel, and some ideas to try and train the climbing plants... plus some trials to figure out how to best get netting over plants to stop birds eating our fruits!