I always start the year with good intentions and normally by now my new year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside. However there is no rule to say this is the only time of year you can try to reset things and so I’m taking the opportunity with the start of a new month to be more focused and intentional with telling you about the …...
I’ve been away again. I suspect it will happen a lot this year – the stars have aligned to make 2023 the year of travel for us. I don’t mind, so long as the garden still gets what it needs and remains productive and in control, with opportunities for exciting projects, and that I can squeeze in some horticultural goodness while out and about. And …...
A pinch and a punch for the first of the month and no returnsies. (Such a strange tradition!) But here we are celebrating the start of a new season. As much as I can’t believe we have arrived at March already having lived through the first two months of this year that still feels quite new. Ordinarily I would be bemoaning the fact that it …...
I’ve been away – not for long, but just long enough to soak in a few days of someone else’s summer, which was a lot better than ours. I got away to Flinders, outside of Melbourne for three days for all things gardening, hanging out with my fellow Botanical Guides from the fab tour company Botanica World Discoveries. It is a privilege to be counted …...
The answer to this is ‘Yes it could’. There is plenty of room for improvement. We barely set things right after the last storm and here we are again with an even bigger one, that was even more destructive as there was wind in its midst. I am grateful to say we survived the storm unscathed. For the most part the winds were blocked by …...
Once the weather returned to some kind of normal summer-esk conditions, I took the opportunity to process the harvest I was able to salvage. While not everything did well this summer – namely my tomatoes, some things have done exceptionally well and the beetroot can be counted as a success. The good thing about beetroot is I can pretty much grow it all year round …...
Firstly we’re ok. There has been an extraordinary amount of rain in our neck of the woods this week. So much so the word unprecedented has been bandied about quite freely. But it isn’t everyday you see people wading through the airport up to their knees or water cascading over motorway barriers like a infinity pool or sloshing about inside buses. Sadly this has been …...
This is not how I meant to start the year. I have dropped the ball and started to fall by the wayside. But I had a very good excuse. I somewhat foolishly decided it would be a good idea to open up my garden to the general public so they could see what I had done. I had no real plan – a sort of …...
I am determined not to moan about the weather this year, but to be honest it leaves me no choice. We got home on the 4th of Jan, and it has done nothing but rain or be gloomy and bleak. To be fair yesterday was nice and today was nice-ish, but the weather is closing in as cyclone Hale is heading our way. Hopefully it …...
In the Northern Hemisphere, the opportunity for a fresh start seems to make more sense. It is the middle of winter, and everything is dormant or done and as the year gets going things wake up or are restarted. Here, down under, we are in the swing of things. My garden is full, as is my life. I couldn’t be busier, but we take a …...
Today is the longest day and finally I have something to be joyful about. The weather seems to have turned. It is sunny and warm; the sky is blue and the cicadas are singing. Now that is kind of summer I’ve been looking for. The garden is bursting into life. The plants are putting out tender new leaves, accentuating their old weather weary leaves that …...
The weather is still being weird. It is still gloomy but the nice days are fighting for their right to shine, so we have had a couple of days that offer the promise of summer. But for the most part this struggle of the seasons are showing themselves as hot and humid with bursts of rain temporarily cooling things down. The garden is coping well …...
After days and days of the wind whipping through the garden and whistling through all of the gaps, tearing at the windbreak, requiring repairs, it stopped. It was kind of abrupt in that I went to bed with sound of the wind knocking on my window and awoke to birdsong. It had gotten to the point that I thought it would never end and I …...
Now is a good time to start to organise for the new growing season. With hope in my heart, I began taking dreaming about the next season to the next level and started making plans. Last season was a complete washout – literally! I only used my irrigation system a couple of times. Ironically, the only time it should have been used but wasn’t, was …...
You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been missing in action here on my blog and for good reason. I handed it over to the loveliest person on Fivver who did a bit of an update for me. I’m a gardener not a technical whiz and I knew I wanted to update the look of the blog but was frozen with fear for …...
I opened my garden up to the public so they could come and see what I had created. But not everyone could come, so I decided to do a virtual tour, replicating the tour from the open day, while the garden was still looking great so no one misses out. So sit back and enjoy a personal tour of my garden. It is a little …...
Out here on the coast the sandy soil is pretty much held in place with the kikuyu grass, especially on the hills and I have no problem with this. The last thing we need is erosion or even worse – a blow out, where the wind whips away the sand causing a deep hole. Once you get a blow out it can be difficult to …...
Historically May has been my least productive month. I prematurely convinced myself that it is close enough to winter that I might as well just settle down in the warmth and cosiness of indoors and wait for things to get better outside. The thing is, May isn’t really that bad in the grand scheme of things and it should really be spent finishing off projects …...
I’ve done loads of things in the garden lately and it feels really good. Up until recently my garden time has been limited and to be honest I didn’t realise how much I’d been missing it until I was fully up to my elbows in dirt, ripping out weeds. There are a few areas in the garden that have slipped into a shameful state, and …...
I always start the year with good intentions and normally by now my new year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside. However there is no rule to say this is the only time of year you can try to reset things and so I’m taking the opportunity with the start of a new month to be more focused and intentional with telling you about the …...
I’ve been away again. I suspect it will happen a lot this year – the stars have aligned to make 2023 the year of travel for us. I don’t mind, so long as the garden still gets what it needs and remains productive and in control, with opportunities for exciting projects, and that I can squeeze in some horticultural goodness while out and about. And …...
A pinch and a punch for the first of the month and no returnsies. (Such a strange tradition!) But here we are celebrating the start of a new season. As much as I can’t believe we have arrived at March already having lived through the first two months of this year that still feels quite new. Ordinarily I would be bemoaning the fact that it …...
I’ve been away – not for long, but just long enough to soak in a few days of someone else’s summer, which was a lot better than ours. I got away to Flinders, outside of Melbourne for three days for all things gardening, hanging out with my fellow Botanical Guides from the fab tour company Botanica World Discoveries. It is a privilege to be counted …...
The answer to this is ‘Yes it could’. There is plenty of room for improvement. We barely set things right after the last storm and here we are again with an even bigger one, that was even more destructive as there was wind in its midst. I am grateful to say we survived the storm unscathed. For the most part the winds were blocked by …...
Once the weather returned to some kind of normal summer-esk conditions, I took the opportunity to process the harvest I was able to salvage. While not everything did well this summer – namely my tomatoes, some things have done exceptionally well and the beetroot can be counted as a success. The good thing about beetroot is I can pretty much grow it all year round …...