Monday, May 3, 2010

Good evening . . .

and welcome to the blog of the world's most lazy and ineffective gardener!

It's been ages since I had a happy, productive day in the garden.  Oh, I've had weeding days, days last week where I pulled out weeds that had been there so long, they had roots that went to China.  Runners of kikuyu that were longer than I am tall.  Almost impenetrable carpets of yellow oxalis that, when I dug into them with the garden fork, I ended up digging into bulbs that are just starting to sprout but which were totally unable to be seen in the weeds.  Ugly!  And depressing!

But today, by some stroke of magic, I had a productive gardening day.

My first job was planting a new clematis in the pot vacated by my mum's dear departed climber.  It's called Multi Blue.  My first job was to get the old potting mix out of the pot.  Old potting mix is usually spread on the garden somewhere, but this lot I first tipped into my garden barrow, where I removed 25 grubs from the mix!  Good grief!


This is only some of them, I had already fed a whole lot to the mynahs!

Because the clematis was being planted into a pot on the verandah, and because the pot is a big terracotta one, I decided to plant it into the biggest plastic pot I had, which was then buried into the new potting mix.  Hopefully that will save the clematis from drying out quite as quickly as if it was just in the terracotta pot.

Next, I moved a buxus out of a pot on the verandah and into the pot vacated by the recently departed buxus.


Things were starting to really work!

Quite quickly, I realised that the whole garden bed along the front of the verandah was a shambles.  The tall bearded iris were drowning in a sea of fallen rose leaves, and without too much thought, I realised that I got a whole 2 stems of flowers last year!


Out they came!  Some have been replanted around the feet of the while Iceberg standards and the rest will go along the curve of the driveway/path.  That will be tomorrow's job!

When I brought the irises from my previous garden, somehow a little piece of violet came too, despite my best efforts to leave them behind.  I kind of regard violets as 'almost weeds', but decided to replant the ones I removed today with the irises and have spread them out around the base of DA Leander and Reine des Violettes.  I think it's called recycling!


Tomorrow, I will continue to work my way along the front garden bed, I have weeds to remove (oxalis - aargh and onionweed - double aargh!) and spent mushroom compost to spread and dig in and nepeta 'Dropmore" and stachys to plant.  It's going to be a good day!

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