It was overcast this morning so we just potted around in the garden for awhile then after lunch the sun was out, & in, & out again so we went for a ramble along the boardwalk of our local mangroves swamp! Very inspiring – not! I’m not holding out much hope for a better day tomorrow, mainly because rain is forecast!
Here’s a few photos of our garden, I thought it best to get in with the photos now before the insects & diseases take over once more! I would rather not use chemicals to spray on the garden, especially the stuff we eat, so by the end of the summer it’s not looking so hot!
This is the new raised herb garden we put in down the side of the house, it only gets the sun during the middle of the day so not sure how they’re going to go here. Still a few places to add more yet, when we find some we don’t already have.
The lettuces in the hydroponics are starting to grow once again, that’s rocket in the front, it sprouted up and went to seed within a few weeks! More lettuces will be added soon so we have new ones coming on regularly.
This is what our garden looked like this time last year before Dennis retired. Look at those weeds!
And this is what it looks like now, much better with the new raised vegetable garden in the middle. On the right is a retaining wall with a fence on top of that, our next door neighbours are behind the trellised fence in the background. Not very large but just a nice size for us. When we first shifted in 10 years ago we planted four slow growing palm trees across the back of our garden. It’s taken 10 years for them to have grown this much! One of them died so now we have this gap in which we’ve tried to grow other things but never had much success because this part of the garden is usually in shade most of the year except in the middle of summer. So now we’re hoping to at least get a good crop of peas, beans, tomatoes, silverbeet and beetroot.
In the background is the olive tree which is covered in little olives. Would you believe in the foreground is a miniature rose! Years & years ago it was planted in the corner of one of the steps leading up into the garden and it has never flowered. I kept on saying don’t pull it out I want to see it flower and it just grew bigger & bigger until this year I gave it a good talking to and said ‘ok this is it, you flower this year or I’m pulling you up’ and blow me down it’s absolutely covered in buds! Not the most inspiring of blooms though, a flat white one.
Seedling lettuces getting a bit of sun and in the background is a blueberry bush, there are two of those also covered in pretty white flowers that will <hopefully> eventually turn into blueberries.
One of my favourite plants – Coprosma Golden Glow. Transplanted after being in a pot and just shot up overnight. You might think we have funny looking soil in our garden, up until last year the whole garden was covered in weedmat underneath wood chips. We decided to pull up the weedmat and start again, there was so much wood chip that in the end we left some of it hoping it would rot down eventually.
Another miniature rose, buds are orange, flowers open to yellow and fades away to nearly white.
This is the New Guinea Impatiens ‘Red Fox’ that I bought yesterday, I can’t get a decent photo of it without the colour being overblown. It’s definately bright orange when you see it next to a red one.
Two climbers, purple pelargonium and an apricot rose.
The Avondale Mangroves Boardwalk.
Dead supermarket trolley! See what I mean – not that inspiring?
Mangrove fruit.
Dawn was the drive behind getting this boardwalk made, beats me why?
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