Maybe plants can read too!

When I started buying seeds and seedlings for the veg garden earlier in the year I decided that I wanted different varieties than the normal things you usually get at the shop. To that end I have collected things like both red and purple carrots, green grape tomatoes, red spring onion and golden beetroot among others.

Ages ago I also planted some purple sprouting broccoli. It has done one thing really well, sprouted.

The plants are thigh-high with beautiful big green leaves. Unfortunately, their sprouty green-ness had gone on for so long I wondered if anyone had told them that they were supposed to do anything else!

The other day I rearranged the tag on their row and they must have finally read it. I was very excited to see that over the next few days they all managed to summon up some of the ‘purple’ and ‘broccoli’ part of their name. Yippee!

If only some of the other colourful things were ready for picking, now that would be an interesting looking dinner plate. 😀

More interesting than the green variety!

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Waiting for rain…..

While you Northern Hemispherians are feeling the cold down here in Australia are frying our butts off. Not only our butts, our poor gardens are suffering horribly.

Western Argus 18 Feb 1930 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article34493350

The summer battle to save our patches of grass (so dismal they can’t really be classed as lawns) is not a new thing either as this article from 1930 reminded me. In it they suggest the use of waste water from the house to keep your most special plants alive which is something most of us Aussies are not strangers to!

This post was prompted by a comment conversation with Meeks the other day when I described the lengths I had gone to in order to get the water coming out of my washing machines grey-water hose closer to the dried up patch of grass-like substance near the washing line.

Usually I just run the hose (actually two 10 metre hoses joined together) out of the back door, off the verandah and onto the lower level of grass nearer the house.

This year my efforts have really paid off as that part of that garden has stayed green(-ish) regardless of the hot dry weather we have suffered through lately.

As you can see by the photos below, the part which gets the water from every load of washing I do has managed to resist drying out completely, whereas the other part can barely be described as grass (these two photos were taken only ten steps apart).

Grey water grass.

The upper level of grass though, well, that takes a much bigger effort to get the water to and I had use a bit of imagination to get the water there without making my washing machine pump the water up a flight of steps and blowing it up!

It looked ridiculous but I passed the hose out of the back door, through the verandah rail, through the branches of a tree fern and into the Grevillea nearby, through the handle of the Weber (kettle bbq), tied to the kids totem tennis, over the wheelbarrow and under two bricks to keep the tension in the hose.

Amazingly this ridiculous contraption worked and as you can see the grass there has taken on a (very) slight tinge of green.

Crunchy grass…

Who would have thought a few cheap lengths of plastic hose and garden friendly laundry liquid could turn out to be the most important pieces of gardening equipment I own!

Watch out while you’re weeding!

Over the weekend we were weeding. We are usually quite tolerant of things that turn up unexpectedly in our garden, our soil is so impoverished the rule usually is; if it is green, and doesn’t need watering, it stays. Really, if something has gone to all the effort to grow here it deserves a chance!

Occasionally though, we decide that some things have to go, and one of the things that had to go this time was all the self-seeded parsley plants that have infiltrated almost every part of the front yard.

I may have left my run too late to slow them down for next year though as they had already gone to seed. Again. I never told you I was a good gardener!

These herb-plot escapees pop up everywhere, on the edges of other flower beds and in the gaps between the pavers. If they weren’t so useful I would have to say they were a terrible weed. One advantage is that I never have to go far when I need some for dinner!

One of the plants in particular was weeded more carefully than the rest. Over the last week I noticed that a katydid had made its home in the flower heads and was seen every day just hanging around, looking for lunch, and trying not be noticed by being as green as possible.

Obviously our gardening efforts had been noticed and he was nowhere to be found when we uprooted his home. Just as well for him, many of the weeds made it into the chook run and the tasty green morsel he was would have only lasted mere seconds with those hungry girls…..

“Nothing but flowers here, keep walking”

Gardening can be deadly.

As you know, the Man and I have been doing a fair bit of work in the garden at the moment. Reading this article from the Herald-Sun website today makes me glad that we aren’t getting any garden supplies delivered from these guys in Perth.

Today a house in Hazelmere, a suburb East of Perth, received a delivery of sand that came from a building site in Perth’s south. Mixed in with this delivery is what appears to be a 14 inch bomb left over from the Second World War.

I say appeared because at the time of writing the street is cordoned off and I expect that people are giving the sand pile quite a wide berth!

After all, if it is an old bomb it has recently been picked up by a mechanical loader and dumped into the back of a truck, driven across town, then spilled out onto the ground. Any one of these indignities could have detonated a live bomb so I think we can assume that it is safe.

Doesn’t mean I would want to be standing poking it with a stick though…

A very tiny invasion…..

It is spring in Australia and that means that the garden has been invaded by multitudes of tiny, newly hatched critters.

The weather was splendid over the weekend and that meant spending the day out in the garden. It also meant I probably spent as much time taking many breaks with my camera chasing the tiny beasts as I did actually doing something to help…

We have a load of new plants to put in the garden bed we had to clear out after a tree fell on it a few months ago, and while we were out there I found a few of these tiny mantis walking on one of the new plants.

They were very cute and so tiny (about 1 cm long) they were walking from leaf to leaf on the spider webs. They were quite hard to get a decent picture of, each time they saw me looking at them they would retreat to the other side of the leaf they were on and I would have to start all over again!

tiny mantis

Another reason not to eat cauliflower. 1929.

Northern Territory Times 22 Jan 1929 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4558889

After yesterdays death by fish, here is another unexpected end.

Poor Alfred Charles Smith. The guy was digging in his veggie garden and BAM! an aeroplane cut his head off. What are the chances?

Of all the things that he could have expected to happen to him that day in his caulie patch I am sure dying in a plane crash wasn’t on the list. Poisonous spider or snakebite, both unpleasant but not entirely unexpected. But decapitated by an aeroplane?

On my wanders today, I will not be expecting death from above but as these articles show it can come from anywhere, above or below, at any time…