A Springtime ramble in my garden

The rain has finally stopped, for the moment, so I jumped at the chance of going for a stroll in my garden with Otto and my camera. I love being outside during Spring, seeing the new flowers opening and the leaves on the trees unfurling. 

The purple Babiana flowers are abundant in my garden this year. They grow from corms which I spread about each year to form new clumps. The flowers also form seeds which I collect and sprinkle around wherever I want them to grow.

Once established, the Babiana clumps grow quite quickly. I love the contrast between the purple of the Babiana with the gold of the Arctotis.

We spread the golden Arctotis by taking cuttings, at any time during the year, and planting them directly into the ground. We tried growing different colours of Arctotis, but for some reason gold is the only colour that will survive in our gaden. I have no idea why.

If the Arctotis flowers are regularly deadheaded, they are supposed to flower from Spring right through to Autumn. But it is backbreaking work, we have so many of them. I tried one year and had to give up. There were too many flowers and each flower only lasts 2 days. Maybe this year I will try deadheading just one clump and see what happens.

Below is a view across the Ixia wild flower bed towards the native New Zealand Ponga trees (tree ferns). The Pongas grew themselves there, we didn't need to plant them. 😊                                                                                                                            

And another view, in the opposite direction, of the Ixia. The wind was blowing quite strongly so the flowers were bobbing around making it hard to take a clear photo.  

                                     

This is my favourite garden seat, overlooking the Ixias to the pond. Behind the seat are Kniphofia, Agapanthus and Clivia plants. The Clivia didn't flower this year. It tried to, but snails ate all the flower buds off them 😕

I still haven't managed to find the name of our frothy, pink-flowered succulents. Please let me know, in the comments, if you have the name for them. It has been puzzling me for years.

Here is Otto, walking alongside the orange Sparaxis. This clump has been growing steadily in size over many years. You can see how big they are compared to Otto!

The Sparaxis have also naturalised into the wildflower bed near the Ixias. 

This year the pheasants have left the Sparaxis alone. Usually they peck all the flowers off. I don't know if they actually eat them, or just like picking at them. Hopefully they will form large clumps like in the photo above. But it will take many years.  

               

I feel refreshed after walking outside. I find the garden calming and soothing, and Otto is quite hilarious as he follows me around, then runs up trees all excited that I am outside with him.

Now I am back inside trying to sort out some technical problems. My mum's iPad has stopped being able to download library books. I phoned the library to see if it was an internet/library problem, only to be told that their eBook application had been updated and that many people are having the same problem. The libraries are all closed to the public in Auckland, due to lockdown, so there is no other way for mum to borrow books.

It turns out that the operating system on the iPad is too outdated, even after doing an update for it. Sigh. Mum was beside herself with despair. I phoned my brother for help and he said there is nothing we can do apart from by a new iPad....But shortly after, he phoned back and said to expect a new iPad mini in the post! Thanks big brother, mum is now over the moon with delight.

My next technical glitch happened after I downloaded the latest update for my Android cellphone. Included in the update was a change to how the phone's camera operated, to speed up the time it takes to take a photo. My photos now are not as clear. I will have to investigate the settings and see if I can do anything about it. Plus there are other changes that I haven't tried yet...a job for this afternoon.

My last technical problem was with this blog post. Not being able to align my photos and text properly. Not sure why it is happening, but please excuse the messy bits.

They do say horrible things come in threes, so fingers crossed that that is all, for a while at least! I am off now to have a play with the camera function on my cellphone, while the weather is still fine.

Looking forward to seeing you here again soon.

Hugs, Rose x

7 simple pleasures this week

1. The scent of a rose

My Wedding Bells carpet rose is my favourite rose. It's scent is gorgeous and it has decided to start flowering for the 3rd time this year! We have had an unbelievably warm Autumn, which has confused a lot of my plants, and Winter starts tomorrow! I spent ages looking at the rose, smelling it and then taking photos.

The scent of this rose reminds me of my childhood in England where we had abundant roses growing in our garden. My best friend wanted to show me how to make perfume out of rose petals. So we picked every single rose in the garden and mashed the petals to a pulp with water. The smell was divine while we were preparing the perfume. But not so heavenly after a week in a bottle. My father didn't say a word, amazing.

2. A stroll around our land

We had a few days without rain despite the weatherman forecasting rain all week. So I made the most of it by going for some leisurely walks around our land with my cats Abby and Otto. My cats always come with me wherever I walk on the land. They get all excited and run up and down the trees.

3. Discovering the umbrella grass

I found that the umbrella grass patch has sprouted up again with beautiful green leaves. It has even started to flower. The seasons really are mixed up.

4. My nephew's nature collection

A few years ago I encouraged my young nephew to start a nature collection. I gave him a large shoe box with a lid and we went hunting on the land for little treasures. Now at age 10 my nephew still has his collection and still adds to it. I help him also by keeping my eyes open on my walks, for natural things to add.

On my latest walk I found a monarch butterfly which had died and was lying amongst the dried brown fallen sycamore leaves. It was just by fluke that I spotted it as it was quite camouflaged. My sister-in-law is very squeamish when it comes to insects, so she won't be happy with this find.

I also found 2 feathers, one from a magpie and the other from a pheasant, chestnuts in their prickly cases and a pine cone. I can't wait until I see my nephew again. I haven't seen him since lockdown started.

5. The first snow pea flowers

This afternoon I went to have a look at the vegetable patch and found that the snow peas had started to flower. I was really surprised as it doesn't seem so long ago that I sowed the seeds. Fingers crossed that the bees and other insects will still be around to pollinate them as the weather cools.

6. Planting more vegetables

Dad finished clearing and digging the remaining half of our enclosed vegetable patch this week, then he bought some seedlings to plant. The garden centres are now open with plenty of stock and luckily weren't too busy. We felt that it was too late in the season, with the colder weather coming, to try to grow these from seed.

We planted; celery, lettuce, curly kale, more kohlrabi and sprouting broccoli. Then protected against slugs with slug pellets the next day because the slugs had had a feast in the night on our new veggies, grrr.

7. An afternoon tea treat

I bought a box of Mr Kipling's French Fancies as a treat this week. They are imported from England and I found them when I was doing our grocery shopping online. They are little petit fours made of light sponge and icing. They went perfectly with my Twinings English Breakfast tea. Yum!

What things have you enjoyed this week?

Looking forward to hearing from you :)

Rose x

Edit: Post linked to "My Corner of the World" at the Photographing New Zealand blog

A bumper crop of radishes

Dad came in this afternoon with a huge bunch of radishes that he picked from our veggie garden. This harvest is only a tenth of what is growing!

This type of radish is called German Giant. They are very big, crunchy and juicy. Lovely eaten with lots of butter.

It looks like we will be eating radishes for a long time, as well as having plenty to give away to friends and family.

The veggie garden is doing really well. We usually start planting it during the last week of October, after all the frosts have finished. But it was such a mild Spring that we decided to start the veggie patch a month early. We have been lucky with plenty of showers of rain followed by days of blue skies and sunshine. Just what the plants need.

This is what the veggie garden looks like today.

The cavalo nero is looking good. It is the first time that we have grown it and I have never cooked it before. I will have to go online and look for some recipes. There is plenty of time to search, as the cavalo nero won't be ready to harvest until after the first frost next year to sweeten it up!

The kohlrabi stems have just started to fatten up. Hopefully the rains will continue for a long time to save me from needing to water them.

To the right of the kohlrabi is silverbeet and to the left are lettuces and tomato plants :)

Lots of smiles.

Hugs.

Rose x

Preparing the wildflower garden

Finally we managed to find another contractor, who could come quickly, to rotavate the land in preparation for my next wildflower bed. The original contractor ended up being very busy with big jobs and was finding it hard to fit our small 150 metres squared area into his schedule.

The area was rotavated on Monday, the soil was just the right wetness and has turned out well.

Dad has been helping me by raking over the soil to level it. He also worked on tidying up the edges and removing large clumps of grass. I wasn't able to do it myself as I am not very fit at the moment.

Tomorrow dad will be using our small rotavator to turn over and bury the grass clumps and to loosen where the tractor wheels had compacted the soil.

In the meantime I have been deciding on how to sow the wildflower seeds. I think I will mix all of the seed together, weigh it and then divide it into 10 lots. Then mix each lot of seed individually with 2 litres of gardeners sand. This will help to evenly distribute the seed. The idea is to sow 1 gram of seed per square metre.

I plan to sow half the seed along each long length of the wildflower bed as I won't be able to sow it from one side easily. Then I will need to very lightly rake the seeds over with soil.

I am hoping that the weather will remain good until I have sown all of the seed. Then I hope we will get a few weeks of rain. It is a pity that we can't order the sort of weather we need. All I can do is cross my fingers :)

See you again soon with more news. Thanks for stopping by.

Hugs.

Rose x

A photo tour of my Spring garden in New Zealand

I had a lovely time walking in the garden today, taking lots of photos of my Spring flowers. The weather was just perfect, not too cold and not too hot with clear blue skies. I hope you enjoy looking at my photos as much as I did taking them.

See you again soon.

Hugs

Rose x