Taming the summer jungle

I've got a confession to make. Summer is not my favourite season in the Brisbane garden. It's a time where I think I'll get lots done and yet, things just get away from me.

The weeds are taking over the rosella seedlings in this bed

Firstly it's all hot and sticky. Even Special K is not interested in being in the sun during the day. I'm sure we've also been ruined by having air conditioning and can no longer tolerate the sun and humidity at full strength.

Then there's the weeds. They seriously seem to have a steroid shot and grow higher than the plants in half the time.


And the bugs! Biting bugs, sucking bugs, voraciously hungry grasshoppers, ravenous caterpillars... I swear there is an insect orgy going on every afternoon. So much so I feel like I'm intruding when I venture out into my own yard!! (Of course the mosquitoes are also a major deterrent, and donning head to toe covering clothing is less than appealing in the heat.)

These beans were producing
until they got eaten themselves!

A few days ago this was silver beet.
Now it's skeletonised nothingness!

The grasshoppers are having
a ball on my comfrey

So what to do to tame the jungle?

Step 1: Lather self in bug repellant

Sunscreen, cold water, a shade umbrella and mossie coils. Use all the weapons you have on hand to make your time in the garden as pleasant as possible. 

Step 2: Mow the lawn! 

Why?? Because the seed heads in the lawn are constantly getting blown into the garden beds. (And it will make you feel better to see something a little tidy!)

The lawn mower is a key
weapon in getting rid of weeds.

You always feel a bit better when things
look temporarily tidy.

Step 3: Concentrate on one area. 

Just like house work.... Don't flit from one garden bed to the other or you will spend a lot of time achieving nothing. Focus your energy on getting one area sorted and then move on.

Step 4: Plant something you want to grow in place of weeds.

It's all a competition folks! If you don't plant what you want, to use the available light and nutrients, the weeds will take advantage and simply grow back.

Step 5: Mulch, mulch and more mulch. 

Block out the light to stop more weeds from growing (see Step 4) and keep the plants you have put in nice and moist. This is the best way to try to give your plants the head start to outcompeting anything else and the key to surviving summer!

Pick a bed to concentrate on!
Before: unwanted plants and weeds taking over.

After: Rosella seedlings and plenty of mulch around them.

Step 6: Accept that things can get a little out of control in the subtropical garden in summer.

 Perhaps dull your view of the weeds with a glass of cold wine while you enjoy your yard. The weeds at least have been wonderful food for the chickens and I try to remember they are turning them into yummy eggs for me. (There's that silver lining!)

Step 7: Pick any produce regularly before the bugs beat you to your dinner. 

Brave the heat and get picking. Be grateful and use what produce you have and swap with your friends! If you have lots of eggplants (as I do), make roasted eggplant salad, make Baba Ganoush, throw extra in your spaghetti bolognaise and devise a new eggplant frittata recipe! Swap your produce with friends and hopefully between a few of you, there will be a larger selection of summer produce.

Pick your produce and use them before the bugs tuck in.

Step 8: Remember cooler weather is coming. Phew!

The saga of the fake cardamom

Crikey! I'm blogging! You know I hardly ever blog. It all seems well, so fiddly, and like you've got to have something important to say...or a real story to tell. It's so much easier for me to snap a pic of the vegies with Special K and put on Facebook. Tada! I'm done and onto something else.

Blogging, could after all, take up good gardening time. And any of you who know me, already know I begrudge the time it takes to go to the place we call here the Big W to pay the mortgage! So, time is generally, of the essence.

Still, today I felt there was going to be a saga. And sagas are surely blog-worthy? So, the story is, I've been unhappy with my fake cardamom for quite some time. Of course, I originally bought it thinking it was the real deal and even blogged about it here a few years ago (how embarrassing)! Turns out I shouldn't feel so bad - even famous horticulturalists can be fooled. You can read about that, and the difference between what I have growing and true cardamom here

The thick undergrowth looks like a jungle.

I don't want to totally get rid of it, as the leaves really are quite divine smelling, edible and if watered, it can be quite a lovely plant. My plan for this ever-expanding, monster of a specimen is to go into a large decorative pot which will add some visual interest to The Bountiful Backyard. In the mean time I need to dig it out. It's way too big for the garden bed it is in, and it shades some of the veggie patch.

You can see from the photo it is as tall as the fence and a good metre wide at the base. I've been wanting it out for ages, but, well, it seems like the Mount Kilimanjaro of garden tasks. In a word: insurmountable! The base of it is so thick with growth it looks as though nothing will be able to penetrate it. I hold back a sob and try to be brave as I pick up my trusty Felco secateurs. There could even be something LIVING in the bottom of this, I think. Frankly, I'm hoping it's only a blue tongued lizard and not a snake..... EEEEK!

I snipped until the green bin was full....

I snip and snip and snip some more. A large locust jumps out from the growth and I stifle a scream. I find the old carcasses of plants that have been swallowed up by this monster plant.  I snip so much I fill up my green bin... and until I have blisters on my hands.

and until I had blisters.

I start having fantasies about using a chainsaw to just lop off all the foliage in one hit. Alas, I have no chainsaw. I begin to wonder if a machete is sold at any garden stores. It DOES feel like I am trying to make my way through a jungle, you know!

Using the hose to make life easier

Finally, I've managed a first level cut through the whole plant. How to progress further without a chainsaw? Sometimes brains are more use than brawn in these situations, so I pop the garden hose on the earth around the base and to soak into the soil from the centre of the plant too. Seeing there's been no rain, the ground is rock hard, and that makes Mt Kilimanjaro seem even less doable. Hopefully the water will loosen everything up for me.

Kairos models my trusty mattock

It's time. It's time to bring out my favourite heavy duty tool - the mattock! I hack and chop and manage to dig out small sections of roots with my trusty mattock. 

Thank goodness it's a fairly shallow rooted plant! Faster, higher, stronger I tell myself, as I chip away - or in the words of the Olympic motto - citius, altius, fortius! It's getting hot. My blisters are stinging. I look down. I think I've maybe dug out a dinner plate sized hole.... 

root of Alpinia nutans

Hmmmm, turns out this could be a marathon, not a sprint..... 

It might be time for an afternoon nap. Time to dream of what I might plant here once this nemesis of mine has been removed. Stay tuned for what I hope to be the final episode, next weekend!

The foreman inspects the small section that's been removed.

A gardener's best friend and the alien dog

This weekend I've spent weeding the vegie garden, replanting some beds with seeds in the cool of the late afternoons, weeding and watering, watering and more watering. And still more watering. I've been collecting water in the shower and in the kitchen sink, like a Nanna. The temperature hasn't been too bad (hot) outside, but as you know, there's not been a drop of rain and the sun is just, well, really hot and burny when it's out!

Night time mulching will mean I finish Section 2

I was just sitting back enjoying a glass, or three, of wine after dinner and reviewing an idea on paper to divide my garden into sections so I could  work on each section in rotation. The idea is I systematically get around to each garden bed in what spare time I have. It's a bit, well, un-spontaneous, but it might mean that I don't 'forget' about some plants, and force myself to keep on top of certain areas.....

Anyways, I was just reviewing this new idea, when I realised I had worked on Section 1, and nearly finished Section 2, and if I just headed outside NOW...... Yes! In the dark!  I could also finish Section 2 before the end of the weekend.... So wine in one hand and torch in the other I head outside to lightly mulch around all the baby self seeded cosmos and under the recently planted Tamarillo tree that are in the new, arbitrary Section 2 of the Bountiful Backyard.

I was just congratulating self on how clever I was; this night time gardening caper really has its advantages with no sunburn and pleasant temperature gardening. What I wasn't planning on was coming face to face with the first (and massive) cane toad of the season!!! No doubt attracted by my diligent watering today. Luckily Kairos hadn't seen it and I managed to capture it via a bucket on the top, plastic bag underneath, dull its senses in the fridge before a proper freezer death method! All the while I am holding my torch in my mouth. It really was quite the night time gardening experience! <insert shudder here>

I go back to mulching, and re-congratulating self at such a good idea as working at night without the sun. (Surely there won't be another cane toad, so it's back to business.) The torch is getting heavy in my mouth (I need hands free to be mulching), when I have a sudden brainwave. I have a head lamp torch thingy somewhere inside.... A wonderful find in my camping gear a few weekends ago. A 200 lumen (or something) headlamp.

A large spider caught in the dizzy heights of the headlamp.

Wow! It's bright. It makes hands free mulching a breeze. A head torch - it's the best garden invention ever!! It's a gardener's best friend! I look up. A rather large spider crawls up a web just above my head. It seems there are a few more creatures out at night than I'd planned on. They're also a bit harder to spot in the dark. Nevertheless, I strategically bend over and continue mulching and avoid my new arachnid friend.  Insects buzz at my head. It appears it's not just me that thinks a massive bright light on my forehead is a great idea.

Special K as the alien dog.

What was I thinking with this night time gig? Or, what was the wine thinking? Either way, the moonlight glow on this idea is beginning to wear off. Special K is loving the night time jaunt, however.   Normally I'm asking him to lie down on his mat at this time. Instead, we're both outside chasing possums along the fence line (or so he thinks that's what I'm outside for). What's not to love? He makes me giggle, my trusty garden side kick. It appears my 200 lumen headlamp has turned him into the red-eyed alien dog. He doesn't seem to mind though, and if I'm prepared for the night time creature festival in the future, then perhaps this night time gardening idea is not totally silly. No, really.... it's not....

Loco Lindsay and a late race....

A massive day in the garden today. The rain yesterday meant the ground was still damp and conditions were ideal to do some serious weeding. I managed to weed 2 large beds and half of the parterre vegie patch. The chickens were the beneficiaries of  all the extra 'greens' Well, all the chickens that is, except for Lindsay.
It appears, she has gone loco again... and by that I mean, she's broody. How do I know? Well, she spent the whole day in the laying box, until I physically removed her late in the afternoon, at which time, she pecked me ferociously. I basically had to dump her on the ground away from the box so I could bring in the eggs Britney and Paris had laid. Once she's removed, it's like she comes to her senses somewhat, and realises she hasn't eaten or drunk all day and spends about 6 minutes stuffing her beak before returning to her post.
Bummer. I realise it was about this time last year that she started this crazy business for the first time and it took about 10 weeks for her to recover. And that was after trying every old home remedy in the book to try to 'shock' her out of her broody state. It's going to be another long lead up to Christmas in the hen house, it seems.

'Loco Lindsay' - broody and sitting on the other chickens eggs.

It was great weather for being outside today, not too hot and not too cold and it meant I had time to notice all the wonderful things that have been developing in the garden, despite the lack of rain. My dwarf mango seems to have quite a few fruit forming this year - only its second year to fruit.  I've been trying to tip the shower and kitchen water on it, so the baby fruit won't drop off. But today the fruit almost looked bigger, and the tree happier, after yesterday's showers.

Baby mangoes forming.

A sweet pea flower, where the  purple beans used to be.

There are some beautiful little flowers around the yard now too. The chives are flowering their pretty purple and this little sweet pea managed to survive the chronic lack of water. 

Also to my delight, and complying with my grand plan, a whole lot of cosmos are coming up. You might remember I had them growing between the broad beans in the parterre garden a few months ago. I let the flower heads dry and hoped they would drop their seeds so I would have a never ending cycle of beautiful flowers, without ever buying seeds again! I'm pleased to see it looks like this is going to be the case. You can also see a lebanese eggplant growing well now that its competition (the broad beans) have finished. 

Volunteer cosmos coming up and a lebanese eggplant. 

I planted a few other seeds in the parterre garden, to compliment the existing vegies. I put in a few zucchini seeds, grabbed a handful of sweet basil seeds drying on a plant and dumped them along the edge of another bed, and sowed a few different varieties of lettuce seeds too. I always do really well with cos, and I have to admit it is one of my favourite tasting lettuces too.

I planted sweet basil seeds along the border of this bed next to the very late parsnip

Peanuts are up and growing well. Some are even flowering.

Something I love about growing plants are all the wonderful surprises and constant experimenting that occurs. Behind my silverbeet in this patch, are some parsnip plants. They seem to be growing really well, even though I think it is much too late for growing parsnips in Brisbane. I wonder if they will form a root at all? I'm interested to find out what will happen, so I'll leave them growing. At the very least, the chickens will get the leaves at the top! 

Between the silverbeet and the parsnips, quite a few peanut plants have emerged. Last season, I left my harvest too late, and after the water logging January rains, the nuts were starting to go mouldy. I will have to make sure I pull them up this year prior to our really consistently wet weather. You can see the cute little yellow flowers on some of the plants already.

Along the fence surrounding the vegie parterre, are a few espaliered fruit trees. My espaliered peach is probably about 4 years old now, and this year it looks like the fruit is a decent size!! Very exciting. No doubt this has been helped by the neighbours removing a massive poinciana tree, which would have been competing for water and nutrients. I really need to keep an eye out for fruit fly too. Growing up in Victoria, I'm not really that familiar with fruit fly, but I think I may need to buy some organic traps....or get Googling, at the very least. 

Real sized peaches on my espaliered tree!

It is nearly time to head inside for dinner. Just as I am surveying the garden, admiring the day's achievements and I start thinking how things will be looking great again after the rain.... 

My deco path around the parterre doubles as a race track.

I hear galloping. Rhythmic, loud, hooves. (Actually, it was paws.) I look up. Special K appears on the path, pounding out full zoomies, and circumnavigating the parterre garden like a  race track!! 

Damn it!  He leaves big paw prints, disrupting  my newly weeded pathway. 

I sigh. Oh well, I guess it is the Caufield Cup today, after all!!

Apparently it's too hot for dogs to garden..... but not too hot for sex!

This morning I look despondently outside. It's hot and dry, again. Actually it's been relentless, and the lack of rain is becoming a serious problem. Of course the lawns are brown and dead, and riddled with weeds... not that I really care about them. Lawns can't feed you, after all. But it's all my plants that I'm worried about. I've been catching water in a bucket in the shower, and in the kitchen sink too, as well as watering with town water from the garden hose. (No, I'm not looking forward to the water bill!)

It's actually a bit hard to know what to do for the best at the moment. Weeding is tough as the ground is so dry, but I do still persist. And it's not a great time for planting new things as the drying air is hardly the best start for any new plants.

 A step ladder and the bucket of boiling water at the ready.

So today I decided to re-tackle the Bronze stink bug issue on my lemon tree. Seeing as I've been picking off any young ones from where I can reach, it seems there are now hundreds of adults in the high up branches. This does not bode well. Not only are they hard to reach, but now they freak me out with the possibility of their stinky, stingy chemical being squirted down into my eye or onto my head. I don a wide brimmed hat, a long sleeved shirt, gloves and sunnies. I seem to have misplaced my biohazard suit, otherwise I probably would have gone for that. ;-)

I grab all the ones I can reach, but it seems even with the step ladder they are nearly too high. I look up higher - the branches are riddled with the black bodies, all end to end, having what seems to be a massive bug orgy! It's skin crawling material.  And then I spot two locusts on the job, you know, also rooting. (Well, unless it's mother and daughter, but frankly, I'm suspicious.)  Honestly I wonder where they get the energy in this heat. Aren't they bothered by the fact there's no water?!

Sorry about the bad photo.
You can just see the black bodies between the leaves, having a massive bug orgy.

Shagging locusts in my lemon tree

As I muse, that the lemon tree must be quite the romantic place for bugs, I can hear Special K consistently asking to go inside. He's at the back door, banging on it, for me to let him in. (Earlier he tried digging a cooling hole under the coffee trees, until I stopped him for fear of damaging the roots.) Apparently it's far too hot for gardening today, and he'd much rather be inside under the fan. Quite frankly, I was thinking it wasn't that bad, in my wide brimmed hat with my steely resolve. But now it's clear that I'm wrong.

Under the fan is the place to be. It's just too hot for gardening at the moment.

 So I've taken my direction, and we're inside, out of the sun. Lord Kairos continues to rest on the couch, and I thought I would take this opportunity to make some home made tomato sauce from the huge amount of tomatoes I picked last weekend. I think I will slow roast some for salads too. They are so very red and delicious looking. I reckon they'll make a great sauce.

My inside job of making tomato sauce

I actually had quite a lot of unripe, grass green ones too, that I had from pulling out a tomato plant. I left them on the bench outside, and miraculously they've ripened in the week,  going from looking like they belonged in the compost, to  tantalisingly red. As in many organic gardens, it turns out they are tantalising for the insects too, and a mosquito-ey looking thing has been hanging around, and I suspect laying eggs inside. I noticed that one of the tomatoes had squiggly larvae inside it when I cut one the other day. Not a big fan of larvae in my salad sandwiches, nor in my sauce, although onion and garlic and fresh herbs make everything taste good don't they?!! Just kidding, I'll definitely be cutting them in half for larvae inspection before they make the sauce grade!

Any ideas on my tomato loving insects?

So the kitchen is smelling good, I'm not getting sunburnt, Special K is conserving energy and the bugs are being given some private time (!)  before I head out again, after 4pm, when it's a bit cooler. 

Cumquats, bugs and blogging.

Let's face it, I'm pretty hopeless at blogging.

And by that I mean, I just don't do it.

So from now on I'm going to try to blog more. They'll be short, sharp and not perfect blogs. It's going to be a more of a 'I've-just- come-in-from-the-garden-take-me-how-I-am' kind of blog.

And this is why I am going to tell you about bugs. Stink bugs, or bronze orange bug -Musgraveia sulciventris to be exact.

This afternoon I was wandering around the garden when I spied several orange cumquats ready for picking on my little tree. Very exciting. I do love a good cumquat marmalade. Tangy, zesty..... but I digress.

A few cumquats ready for picking

As I went to pick the cumquat, something moved. I knew what it was before I saw it, or rather them, properly. The chemically, awful smell is unmistakable. Bronze orange (stink) bugs!!

Bloody disgusting, evil, creepy critters. Green when they are young so you can barely notice them against the foliage. But they are still all the while sucking the sap out of the tree's foliage and damaging the young shoots and fruit.  Then they turn orangey and get stinkier.  The adult looks a bit more like a spiny cockroach. Apparently the chemical they emit can burn your eyes if they manage to squirt it in there. In this instance, nature is truly, wondrously, revolting. (I do say that in awe.)

Stink bug nymph in action. You can even see the dead shoots .

Last season they had inundated my lemon tree so I read up on them. Had me pretty much terrified by the time I had to deal with them. I donned gloves and goggles and had to hold my breath as I picked the suckers (literally) off the tree and put them in a container of hot water. Worked like a charm apart from the fact I had to actually touch the little bastards.

I'm sure I read month or so ago on a horticulturalist's Facebook page, about just using pyrethrum spray (organic spray) to kill them. But you actually have to hit each bug with the spray. It's sounding more trouble than it's worth, and by that time I could have them pulled off by hand and drowning in my plastic container of death :-) And here's a little picture to illustrate my point.

The water container of death. (Excuse the old paint on the bottom.)

Sadly, we don't have smell-a-net or smell-a-blogs or I could also share with you the foul stench they have left on my garden gloves. Probably lucky, really. It is indeed, disgusting.

On the plus side, these evil sap suckers got me inspecting all my citrus trees closely, and I noticed that my baby lemonade tree
was flowering and growing much better than before. My Tahitian lime has heaps of fruit coming, and apparently it loved its recent pruning and fertilising with Organic Xtra fertiliser pellets. If you want to know more about this  click here, but suffice to say I love the stuff, as do my plants. It is easy and convenient to apply, it's organic and made in Queensland.What's not to love? It's a match made in heaven really. And not at all like me and stink bugs.

My little lemonade tree with flowers and new growth.

Tahitian lime with baby fruit after a good prune and fertilising.

And the cumquats? Well, these days I am being very clever. I used to pick six or so and keep them in the fridge, where they would eventually go rotten before I had enough to make marmalade. So now I am cutting them up ready and freezing them until I have enough. Today I added four to my cumquat stash. Genius gardening I reckon.

Ready for the freezer

The freezer stash of cumquats.

Pleasure or pain?

Recently a friend of mine remarked on a photo of one of my very weedy vegie patches, saying how much work it must be to maintain my garden. It started me thinking.

My neglected, weedy, vegie patch.

Currently I do have a lot to do to return the Bountiful Backyard to its former glory of being both productive and aesthetically pleasing. Still, I can’t actually remember when I last made a significant effort in the garden, apart from mowing lawns and trimming edges.  

It’s been nearly three months I think, as evidenced by the über long break between my blogs. That's really quite a long time. If I left my housework for three months you can imagine the state the house would be in! Probably much worse than the current state of my garden. And let's face it, doing housework doesn't actually produce or create anything. At least working in the Bountiful Backyard means food; cheaper, tastier food, as well as an additional 'living area' that makes my incredibly small house bearable.

Thankfully, the weather has really cooled down, and the humidity has also backed off. With four days over the Easter long weekend, it's time to recover the Bountiful Backyard. 

My strategy is pretty well always the same:  focus on one area, clear it or weed it, save what's good, replant and mulch immediately.

I'm working on this overgrown bed today.

Today I'm focusing on a bed that is over run with lemon mint or lemon bee balm. Although it can be a hardy and pretty ground cover with purple flowers, and used in meat stuffings or salads, it is now really out of control and choking other plants that are more desirable. 

First, I remove all the leafy vegetation on the top of the bed, pulling some of the stringy, spaghetti like roots out with it if I can. It's reasonably easy but there are many intertwined roots sitting close to the surface, that will grow again if not removed. 

I remove the surface vegetation.

Intertwined roots that will grow again.

As I pull away the vegetation I am delighted to find plants I had long forgotten about! Some struggling blueberry plants and some strawberries that were reasonably productive last year. How wonderful!  I promise them silently I will give them some TLC , which includes a good dose of Seasol, some new mulch and access to more light. Maybe then I will get some more blueberries this year.

I stand back to check out my progress, and as I do so I spy an odd red shape, like a fat chilli amongst the weeds against the fence. Could it be? I shriek with delight, as I realise, that yes, yes, it really is my first ever finger lime!!  I can’t wait. I run inside and cut it open and squeeze the little caviar-like, citrus pearls into my mouth. They’re hard, and then they pop, like miniature juicy, lemony explosions. Seriously yum.

My first finger lime.

I get back to forking over the ground where the lemon mint roots lie, picking out any curl grubs and roots as I go. It's only a small patch I've done, but I'm following some advice I got at an emotional energy seminar last year. Instead of forcing myself to finish digging over the whole lot, I'm moving to what I feel like doing, which is of course to planting up! 

I fork the ground to remove hidden roots.

I rescue my blueberries and transplant some strawberry runners. Hell, the freshly dug soil looks so good I throw in some flower seeds of cosmos and poppies. I feel reckless. I am the Thelma, or maybe the Louise, of gardening, whichever. It's exhilarating! I water everything in with seaweed solution, throw some sugar cane mulch around and hey presto, look at that! 

Strawberries and blueberries and flower seeds planted in weeded bed.

This bed's not finished of course but I'm feeling a sense of achievement regardless. A pretty good start I reckon, and an enjoyable and rewarding day. It's definitely time for a cup of Earl Grey tea and to sit back and admire my handiwork some more.  Perhaps I should grow tea, I muse. Hmmmm. Can I grow tea here in south east  Queensland?? Surely I could try? "C’mon Special K, let’s go inside… I need to google if we can grow tea in our backyard…"