gardening

And the winner is…

by frogpondsrock on March 2, 2010

in Amy,blogging,Family,fauna and flora,gardening,The pigs

I went to Veronica’s yesterday and watched Amy bounce on the trampoline as Vonnie pressed refresh on the bloggie’s twitter page.

I am thrilled to bits to be writing out a congratulatory blog post to the NDM, as her blog is well written and very funny. She writes about her life with humour and honesty and I find myself nodding along in recognition. You really should do yourselves a favour and go on over and check out her blog, I have no doubt you will add it to your favourites.

I had a small visitor for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon and together we went outside and played in the mud.

Then we went down and fed the pigs and had a bit of a chat about how delicious they are going to be.

We went and raided the fruit trees and Amy found that she didn’t like the furry skin on the peaches but was more than happy to munch away on the plums.

This year has been a really good year for most of my fruit trees, due to a wetter than average winter and spring. We normally struggle for water up here and I am really pleased with how much fruit my trees have produced. Amazing what a bit of water does for a plant.

The whole time that Amy and I were pottering around outside, Harry the dog was at our side. Harry loves the apple trees as he is sure that those green balls are just for him.

And finally here is a photo of my latest garden project. The spouse cut an old water tank in half for me. This autumn and winter I will be busily filling it up with sheep poo, mushroom compost and whatever else I can get my hands on. I am going to turn all the vegie garden into a series of raised beds over the next two years, as sitting on a milk crate and weeding is just so much more civilized that kneeling down on my dodgy knees.

Once Amy had gone home I went to turn my laptop on and found that my grand daughter had decorated it for me. That was my day yesterday, how was yours?

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Gardening is good for your soul.

by frogpondsrock on December 14, 2009

in cancer,gardening,Grief,Hope,Sadness

I have finally decided on the spot for Mum’s garden. I had to think about it a lot before I was happy with the position.

The first spot that I had chosen was always going to be too hard to protect from wallabies and possums and it was just far enough away from the house so that I wouldn’t have watered it as often as it needed.

Mum had a stone birdbath in her garden and when we were cleaning out Mum’s things prior to putting her house on the market, the spouse brought her birdbath home. For a couple of weeks it just sat in the middle of the yard, empty and waiting.

I worried that it would get knocked over or broken, so I asked David to move it down closer to the house so it would be safe and this is where it ended up.

Mum's birdbath

The birdbath sat there in front of my frog ponds and neglected flower garden, for a few more weeks.Slowly I began to feel that this was the proper spot for Mum’s garden.The spouse erected a climbing frame for me and David rolled over some tyres for easy planting.

It is not easy gardening up here in the hills. We have severe frosts in winter and sometimes a few inches of snow as well.We are in a low rainfall part of the state and we have just come out of a horrible drought.Everything is generally brown, parched and crunchy by January and the garden has to survive on the water I bucket out of the shower and washing machine.

The soil here is sandy bush soil on a rocky sandstone base, the soil repels the water rather than absorbing it and to say that gardening is challenging is a bit of an understatement.

the bank behind the garden, this bit is next on the list.

But,I am an optimist and we have been gardening here for twenty years now so I have a fairly good idea of what will survive. I have my system for the ornamental garden down pat. I use tyres, old metal bins, baths and kiddies clam shells as garden beds and frog ponds and it all seems to work.

Mum's bird bath.

Normally I make the soil for the tyre garden by mixing together sheep poo and mushroom compost and half filling the tyres with it. Then I add a bag of potting mix and plant into that. Then I top dress with a layer of compost made at the local school farm. Finally I finish off with whatever straw or hay is available for mulch.

This time though I used bags of “pot luck poo” from the school farm, potting mix and powdered cow manure. I haven’t been able to find any decent mushroom compost locally and what we have found has been earmarked for the vegetable garden.I will have to wait and see how this lot goes without my favourite ingredients. I like mass plantings and so as well as the grape vines to climb over the frame I have put in an Italian lavender, penstemon, globe pumpkins, a giant sunflower and some petunias.

Italian lavender, penstemon,red table grape and globe pumpkins.

This year has been very wet. The drought is well and truly broken, everywhere I look the grass is thigh high and it is very easy to forget that it isn’t always like this.The roses are the best I have ever seen them and this is mainly because the wallabies have plenty of feed elsewhere and haven’t needed to eat them.

The spouse has been very busy up here getting ready for the bushfire season and I have just been grumping about the place building gardens and trying not to think about Christmas. We live in a very flammable part of the world and I have to keep that in the back of my mind as I plant out Mum’s garden.

It isn’t getting any easier going down to Mum’s empty house but I went down and raided her garden while the spouse mowed her grass. I dug out the Sweet Williams that were the last flowers mum planted and I have potted them up ready to share.

Mum’s friends have given me some plants and I am going to plant a red leucodendron and a white diosma in here. There are heaps of daffodills and irises in here already. I just need to pull out the grass and add some more manure to give the soil a bit of a boost.

in here i am going to plant a leucodendron form Mum's friend Jane. A white Diosma from Mum's friend Lyn and irises from my friend robin.

So this is what I have been doing all December as I try not to think about Christmas.

standing at my front door.

If you walk around the corner from this photo you come to my kitchen garden.

my kitchen garden.

This is protected from the frost by a roof of laserlite and finally after twenty years of struggling against the frosts I can grow capsicums and cucumbers.

Gardening kimmy style.

And this last photo just makes my fingers itch. I have just cut back a crop of broad beans from here as well as pulled out a heap of old silverbeet plants.I used one of the precious bags of mushroom compost to give the soil some oomph and I will plant bush cucumbers in here later on this week..

mmm, bare soil makes my fingers itch.

I have just given the occupants of this garden a really hard prune. Two wheelbarrows full of clippings went down to the chooks.Normally I would freeze some silverbeet just in case, but I have just discovered Kale and it just crops and crops and crops so I don’t have a shortage of fresh greens for the table at all. Here is the kitchen garden after my big tidy up.

I like to mix flowers, herbs and vegies all together in the one garden. a potter with a potager garden.

And here is Amy’s happy hen.

This is Amy's hen. she lets Amy pick her up and pat her.

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The wallabies are at it again…

by frogpondsrock on July 27, 2009

in fauna and flora,frogs,gardening,Hope

For my overseas readers wallabies are small kangaroos.

Small, tasty, kangaroos.

Actually, to be precise they are small, tasty,plentiful, kangaroos that are in imminent danger of providing me with a nutritious lunch, if they don’t stop eating my garden right this second!!!

*takes a deep breath*

Normally the wallabies and I get along quite nicely. They keep the grass down. They only eat the lower branches of my fruit trees and they aren’t as destructive as those rotten, bloody possums.

I loathe possums.Possums will seriously damage a young fruit tree in order to nibble on one or two blossoms. Possums will break half a dozen branches climbing to the top of a young tree and then once they are up there they will break another couple of branches, just for fun as they go about their possummy business.

I went outside today and found that parts of my flower garden had been seriously nibbled. I had planted out some chrysanthemums, pansies and marigolds. The wallabies, thanked me for my thoughtfulness and chomped away merrily. They also had a snack on a pot of geraniums that I had been thinking about planting out into Mum’s garden.

My flower garden is in a constant state of flux. Sometimes it is quite nice but mostly my garden is in a state of rambling neglect. The plants need to be able to tolerate severe frosts, occasional snow, baking heat and prolonged drought. When you factor in wallabies, possums and the occasional passing deer, combined with my she’ll be right attitude you have a garden that looks like this.

Green and straggly.

Which brings me to the point of this rather rambly post. Mum’s garden.

I have been thinking a lot about the plants that I want to use.They need to be colourful and fragrant, drought tolerant, frost hardy and not on the local wildlifes most nommed list.

This is going to be the site for Mum’s garden. There is a natural hollow there that is filled with the remains of a bonfire at the moment. I am going to put two kiddies clam shells in the hollow and voila we have two frogponds.

The site for Mum's garden.

Mum liked proteas as well as those giant banksias that were the baddies in snugglepot and cuddlepie. I know those plants fit the climactic bill and are pretty inedible as well.

I have lots of bulbs already. White Nerines in a pot, that I gave Mum one year for her birthday. Red Jacobean lilies that Mum and I got from Nan’s garden. Nan has promised me some orange Tiger lilies as well as some white Christmas lilies.

Mum and I had also gathered other plants from Nan’s garden. An orange climber thing that has bell flowers and seems to be quite hardy, whether it gets eaten or not is another matter.

I have a bell shaped trellis thingy that I was originally going to set up out the front here over an Amy sized wading pool. I had planned to grow kiwi fruit over it and the idea was that Amy could eat kiwi fruit whilst she was paddling in the pool. The kiwi fruit turned out to be the sookiest, thirstiest plants ever and the wallabies adored them. Oh well, the best laid plans…

So I will put the trellis thingy over the frog pond and grow the orange climber up it, along with a lovely white, super smelly, honeysuckle. The small honey-eaters will love it. There is a bird bath down at Mum’s that I am sure was a gift from one of her brothers. I will add that into the mix as well.

I am going to buy some mushroom compost and sheep poo this week and then I can make a start. That is the plan so far. Stay tuned..

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Let’s talk about sex..

by frogpondsrock on May 6, 2008

in gardening,general silliness

My spam emails have been giving me a bit of a giggle lately. I have been intrigued by catchy little lines like this gem:-

MALE FEATURE WORTHY OF CASANOVA! Of course I then opened the email to read this. Don’t you want to spend your life suffering from your moderate love luger?

Well no actually, I dont. And how exactly does one suffer from a moderate love luger hmmm???

Then there was this, “Love tool deserving of a titan” with the following promise.

“You’ll cause her eyebrows to raise, when you pull out your newly upgraded love gun!”

I think I would do more than raise my eyebrows if my hubby’s penis had suddenly turned into a gun.

Another reference to a ‘love luger’ promised, As it grows longer, she will beg of you to penetrate her flower!

Ok, so if I am not mistaken, penises are guns, whilst vaginas are pretty flowers. So now I can just casually mention to the spouse that my flower needs shooting, and I don’t even need to say the word sex anymore. I could even yell it out loudly in public, “Jeffreeey shoot my flower” and casual passers by would just think that I was having issues with the roses. Hmmm…

I just raced out to the shed, camera in hand and demanded that Jeffrey shoot my flower. Here is his reaction. Yes, he is looking at me like I am a total nutter.

Rightio now back to the emails.

Then we have the miracle cures. Add 2 inches to your dick size easily with just 2 pills of our formula per day.

At least this one called a penis a dick, I was getting a bit tired of lugers. There were promises of permanent huge enlargements of your erect penis. Wouldn’t you get a bit tired with a permanently erect penis even if it was huge? Well it would be fun initially but I am sure that it would be a bit of a nuisance after a while and If the penis is as large as these miracle pills promise, well then there is a very real danger of slamming your penis in the car door or schwacking it accidentally or even *gasp* receiving a black eye from your own penis.

Phew I am glad I only have a flower.

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