Neighbourhood gardening update

In December I wrote about some gardening I'd done in my local area - here's a bit of an update.

This morning I buzzed out to Heron Park on my bike.  There's a surprisingly substantial wee orchard there:

I gave a decent dose of blood and bone fertiliser to all the trees that had set fruit - 4-5 apple trees, a pear tree and my key goal - the quince tree :-)

the quince is covered in fruit - click on the photo to see it better.

so much fruit!  Puts our quince tree to shame.  It's not much smaller, but has only set 3 fruit on the entire tree :-(  Most of our garden gets no light...

I then biked on to Rosebank Road, along to Patiki Road and back home along the Northwestern cycle way.  It was such a lovely day for a ride and it was such a happy thing to do :-)  There was absolutely no debris on the path, which was nice - maybe the storm didn't deposit any there, but more likely someone's done a decent job cleaning it all up :-)

Back home, I took a few more photos.  Firstly, the rose I transplanted back in December is doing so well - it's had near-continuous flowers for weeks now :-)

it's such a pretty rose!

At the same time I'd also transplanted (and divided) a clump of what I think is a tufted granite lily - an Australian native.  After transplanting, all the flowers died and lots of the leaves went black - but now all the plants are showing fresh green leaves, so hopefully they'll survive :-)

 Hurrah!

Lockdown 4.0

The other week Auckland spent a week at Covid Alert Level 3 - which, from my point of view, mostly means no buses, infrequent grocery shopping (with everything getting washed or put in quarantine) and Martin and Sarah working from home.  This time it also meant really not leaving the property for a couple of days, as I had a bit of a sniffle so had a Covid test on the Monday and we were told to not even go out for a walk till the result was back.

Still, I had quite a fun week.

A house on our street was knocked down that week to make way for 6 townhouses.  On the weekend (before my sniffle) Martin and I went scavenging and came back with these glorious flowers.

Kawakawa berries

Ages ago, a foraging blog I used to read taught me that kawakawa plants, not only produce leaves that make yummy tea: the plants come in male and female variants, and the females produce delicious berries.

I haven't managed to find anyone who sells 'sexed' kawakawa seedlings, but a few years back I did find someone selling lots of 8 seedlings very affordably.  So I bought them, and planted four each on either side of the oak tree.  My hope was that there would end up being at least one male on one side and at least one female on the other: when they revealed themselves, I would kill the rest :-)

Unfortunately, it initially appeared they were all male.  For some years now we have had many male cones appearing on both sides of the tree.  The seedlings are also all now large plants that are thoroughly intertwined: uprooting unwanted ones (without disturbing the others) is no longer an option.

Then, maybe a month back, I noticed one 'zone' on one side of the tree was covered in bright orange female cones.  I had at least one female after all!  I got to work picking the berries, and also cut back all the branches without berries: hopefully that will give the female plant lots of space to take off in future :-)

about half a cup berries, picked today (my third picking from the bush this summer)

 

A visit from a possum

Our garden's a wasteland at the moment - mostly neglect, but also a number of plants have been eaten right down to the ground.  We think this fellow (and one or more companions/rivals) are the culprits for that:

possum on the fence out our kitchen window last week

So we borrowed a trap off a friend, and on Friday morning woke up to this:

Some beautiful things

It's the time of year for Jerusalem artichokes and I'm greatly enjoying the flowers and the bumble bees they attract :-)

aren't they glorious?

And my moth orchid is still going strong (although with many fewer flowers after some wormy thing ate through lots of the stems...)

I'm also pleased with some cards I recently made:

The yellow and blue are glass paints on acetate.

The image was a reward given to my mum at Sunday school many years ago.  She came across a stash when they were moving house recently and I've kept a few and will be using the remainder on cards :-)

Gorgeous splashes of colour

I'm not feeling too well at the moment and am struggling a bit.  One thing that's helping is all the beautiful flowers around our house right now.  I thought you might enjoy them, too.

A moth orchid I was given for my birthday a month ago, and the bleeding heart vine I got for Christmas a few years back.  I can see these from my bed.

Edible weeds in my Auckland garden

The other day a friend saw I had a bowl of nasturtium leaves on the bench, along with other salad ingredients.  "Are those a vegetable?", she asked.  She was very excited when I said they were - she has lots of them growing in her garden and thought they were 'only a weed'.  Inspired, I enthusiastically showed her the oxalis that was going into the same salad.  She was positively ecstatic about that one: apparently it tastes very similar to a herb from her Thai homeland that she hasn't been able to find in New Zealand!

I love edible weeds like these: delicious herbs that show up of their own accord and thrive without care in our garden.  Here are some of my favourites.

Nasturtium

(source)

Spring is so early this year!

I've been very surprised by how early spring is this year.

Last year in autumn after it lost all its leaves I cut back my bleeding heart vine till it was just a few sticks poking above the soil.  It then sat dormant for a few months before putting up its first shoot.  This year, before all the leaves were even dead, I was startled to see new shoots appear!  I thought the plant was just confused and cut them back along with the rest of the plant.  New ones replaced them immediately.  I figured that meant the plant knew what it was doing, so I left them be and watered them.  Now, with theoretically another whole month of winter still to go, it looks like this.

The next thing I noticed was our local grey warbler singing its heart out.  My bird book tells me that they sing occasionally year round, but mostly in September and October.  It's only July, but it's been singing solidly for at least a week!

And then there's my hyacinths.  These sit in a pot tucked away in a corner for most of the year and are only brought out when they start to sprout.  I have a reminder in my calendar for when to start looking for the sprouts - if I miss them, something has a tendency to eat all the flower-buds before they open.  That reminder is set up for August 1st: a month earlier than I've ever previously noticed them sprouting.  On Friday, though, I saw some pink flowers out of the corner of my eye: my hyacinths hadn't just sprouted, half of them were already flowering!  They must have come up a good 6 weeks early.  Fortunately, whatever it is that likes to eat the flower buds hadn't got to them (maybe it's still too early?) so it looks like I'll still get a good show of flowers :-)

I'm not complaining, but it does make me wonder what's up with the weather!

Spring!!

Last week, Martin took this photo of one of the first blossoms on our quince tree.  I think it's beautiful :-)

Quinces

This year has been amazing for our wee 'orchard'.  First fruits of our own feijoa, first fruits of our own fig (grown from a cutting from my parents') and now: first quinces :-)

As a child I didn't really like quince, but now I'm looking forward to fruity tagines and a big batch of quince paste.  Yum!

Goldfinches!

 

Our Jerusalem Artichokes really are the gift that keeps on giving!

The flowers have all finished now and we're just waiting for the plants to die back before going hunting for tubers.  But then on Sunday afternoon I noticed some goldfinches eating seeds (presumably) out of the flower heads.  Martin and I were transfixed, often laughing, seeing one clinging upside down on a wildly swinging stem pecking up at a flower head, then another perched precariously on a head itself, picking between it's toes.  Maybe next year we won't be dead-heading the plants as the flowers die?

(Apologies for the poor quality pics - we were inside, and I actually did most of my bird-watching with binoculars!)

Garden

Our garden brings me so much joy!

This is what I look across at each day while I eat my lunch and get my Vitamin D:

 

The bumble bees absolutely love these flowers (Jerusalem artichokes) and I've had fun watching them through my binoculars out my bedroom window as they go about their business collecting pollen.

We're also harvesting all kinds of interesting things at the moment.  Nothing in vast quantities, but I'm enjoying figs (the first year our tree has fruited), tomatoes, beans, herbs, the occasional strawberry and now:

our first watermelon!  It's a 'sugar baby' and supposed to be small (the coffee plunger is for scale), and it was yummy.  We've got another three pretty much ready, and a few more that will hopefully get up to size before it's too cold for them.