The last week of Autumn in my garden

 

It is the end of Autumn here in New Zealand. The weather has been glorious for the past few days, so I have been out in the garden with my camera. 

I took some photos to show you what is flowering and fruiting now, and also the beginnings of a new flower bed prepared by my dad.  

The tree in the photo above is Cassia corymbosa "John Ball" which is commonly known as the buttercup tree. Its flowers are a lovely buttercup yellow. The tree is unusual in that it folds its leaves up at night and when the weather is very dry. 

Our buttercup tree has been flowering all Autumn and should carry on flowering throughout Winter. Last year there weren't many flowers on the tree, so dad gave it a good pruning and feeding which resulted in the production of more lovely flowers.

The white camellia bushes in front of the house are in full bloom. 

Each flower lasts a few days then drops its petals like confetti all over the place. It looks like it has been snowing!

Some of the roses are still flowering, but I expect not for much longer as the weather is getting cooler.

The lavender has put on a lot of new growth since it was pruned back. There are lots of perfumed flowers for the bees to enjoy.

Some magnolia flowers are opening. This is an unusual tree to me because it flowers all year round, just a few flowers at a time.

I need to discover how to revive the red hibiscus. It hasn't got many leaves and has only got one flower so far. I suppose it is better than last year when it was only twigs!

The new flower bed in progress. 

This corner of the garden looks like it was a dumping ground for concrete rubble, large stones and sand. Dad took out all the rubble and stones and removed the quince tree which the arborist told us had died. Then we bought bags of compost to dig in.

The yellow abutillon bush is in place with supporting stakes. Its branches are very thin and brittle. Here's hoping that it can stand up to the windy Winter weather ahead.

I love the lantern-shaped flowers so much that we decided to buy more abutillon plants. One red and one orange.

The grevillia ground cover has been flowering for a few weeks now. It is a strange plant with very small flowers. It keeps getting covered over with falling Autumn leaves.

Foxglove and aqueligia plants have seeded themselves in the garden. I can't wait to see what colours the flowers will be.

We managed to harvest some delicious feijoas from our tree this year. 

After watering the tree well, pruning it and giving it a feed, we managed to get a couple of bowls full of fruit. 

The yellow cherry guava tree still has lots of fruit on it. The fruit has stopped ripening now that the weather is cooler. The blackbirds are happily eating what is left, which I don't mind. I harvested plenty this year.

And lastly here is a photo of our silverbeet (chard) that is growing in the veggie patch. We also have perpetual spinach and flat leaf parsley growing in the patch, but they aren't very photogenic at the moment 😁

I hope this post finds you well and enjoying the season in your part of the world. I'm looking forward to visiting your blogs to catch up on what has been happening.

Hugs, Rose x

My vegetable garden is coming along well

The first radishes are being picked and they are really delicious. These are French Breakfast radishes which are mild and juicy, not hot like other radishes can be. I like to eat them with a bit of butter and a sprinkle of salt. Yummy!

The Flanders poppies are taking over, much to my delight. We are planting vegetables around them under Otto's close supervision. 

In some places you could easily think that this is a flower bed with a few vegetables dotted around lol.

 

The courgettes are flowering too and there are a few baby courgettes, but for some reason they are rotting. I don't know what is going wrong. Maybe the weather has been too wet for them, or the flowers haven't been pollinated well enough? I will just have to wait it out and keep my fingers crossed. The plants themselves are looking really healthy.

The tomatoes are growing well. Dad started them off from seed and kept them under cloches until they were big enough to plant outside. Since taking this photo the tomatoes now have flowers on.                                                                                                                                    

I like the white daisy-like feverfew flowers growing beside the veggie garden fence. They are attracting plenty of beneficial insects to the garden.

The potatoes are now ready for harvesting. Their leaves are turning brown now. At first I thought there was something wrong with them, but dad dug a few up and we have lovely baby new potatoes 😊 Now we need to decide what to plant after the potatoes have been dug up.

The leeks are being harvested a few at a time and I am making leek and potato soup, chicken leek and ham pie and leek and bacon quiche with them. I suppose I could use the leeks in other recipes instead of onions...hmm that is an idea. 

Do you have any other ideas on recipes that use leeks?

The cavalo nero kale is flowering nicely. I am keeping them for seed to grow later as I love kale chips made with olive oil, garlic and salt roasted in the oven.

Dad turned over the compost heap and used some of the mature compost on the veggie patch to return nutrients back to the soil. 

The nasturtiums grew here, by themselves, not far from the vegetable garden. It is a good place for them because they attract pests away from the vegetables and also bring beneficial insects to the garden.

It is now evening and the heat of the day is passing. It has been very humid today. Otto is lying near the open window loving it. 

This morning Otto's friend Ginger brought a live mouse and presented it to Otto by dropping it at his feet. Luckily this happened outside. I have never heard of a cat giving food/playthings to other cats that they aren't related to lol.

Now it is time to water the veggie garden, it's getting dry and some of the seedlings aren't big enough to survive untended with this heat.

See you again soon. Have a great week.

Hugs, Rose x

Spring has arrived in my veggie patch

My vegetable patch is looking colourful with self-seeded cineraria coming into flower just now. The cineraria are so pretty that I am going to leave them growing in-amongst the silverbeet (Swiss chard). They will attract beneficial insects, which is always a good thing. 

I also discovered that some evening primroses have seeded themselves in this spot too, together with echiums. I can't wait until they are all flowering.

The edible sage has started to flower too. I am going to leave the flowers for the bees, then trim them down once the flowers have faded. Hopefully the sage will grow back, I think it is a perennial? This is the first time that my sage has survived through the Winter.

The oregano has put on a strong growth spurt after the flower stems were trimmed down to the ground a month ago.

All of the parsley has bolted in the warmer weather. However it can still be used as a cooking ingredient at this stage. I am going to leave it to flower and set seed, so we will have plenty more parsley later in the year. 

In this photo you can see the Winter vegetables which are now ready to harvest (swedes, red cabbages, broccoli and cavolo nero kale). 

The potatoes, planted a few weeks ago, now have leaves on and should be ready to harvest at Christmas. I love new potatoes 😊

I am hoping that the danger of frosts has passed by now. Although it is still possible for frosts to happen at this time of year, we had an exceptionally mild winter, so fingers crossed. We have cloches, made from large plastic water bottles, ready to use just in case.

Dad planted this garlic in May and it is looking really healthy. It should be ready to harvest 6 months from planting, as long as nothing goes wrong. There is no sign of the dreaded rust yet, touch wood. We are hoping that, having planted the garlic earlier this year, it will have a good chance of forming bulbs before the rust arrives.

Some of the vegetable seedlings are coming up well in the cloche on the deck. The courgettes are ready to be planted out and the tomatoes, capsicums, pumpkin and purple sprouting broccoli seedlings are looking good.

We sowed the Blue Lake runner beans and Goliath snow peas directly into the veggie patch where the soil has been rejuvenated with homemade compost.

The soil preparation for the rest of the new seedlings and seeds is almost complete, with the help of my cat Otto of course!  Otto loves to inspect anything new that is happening, especially in the veggie patch.

Silverbeet grows all through the year here in Auckland and I pick fresh leaves for dinner whenever it is needed. 

These plants self-seeded themselves here and now that the weather has warmed up, they are bolting. I will leave them to set seed again and let them grow wherever they want. 

The swedes are ready to dig up now. It is a new vegetable crop for us and we quite like it. We had one as a side-dish for dinner yesterday, boiled for 20 minutes in salted water, then drained and mashed with cream, butter and a large pinch of nutmeg. It was surprisingly tasty!

On the topic of food, I am now off to plan the meal menus for the week and the grocery list.

I hope that you are having a great week.

See you 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

My Autumn vegetable garden is growing well

We didn't grow any vegetables over Summer this year because the weather was so very hot and dry. The soil was as hard as concrete, impossible to dig. We hadn't intended on doing anything with the vegetable patch through Autumn either, due to the continuing drought.

Then lockdown occurred so suddenly. People started panicking over possible food shortages and a lot were bulk buying, leaving shelves in grocery stores empty. Dad was getting very worried, it reminded him of his experience of severe food shortages during World War 2. So we talked and decided to ressurect the veggie patch again.

Luckily we'd had some rain at this time which had softened the ground up a bit, enabling it to be cleared and dug over. Dad fixed the fences around the vegetable enclosure to stop (or try to stop) the cats from digging in the soil and also to stop the pukekoes from raiding the patch.

Buying vegetable seedlings was impossible for us because the garden centres were all closed. The only thing we had available to use were packets of seeds left over from previous years. Some of the seed was past its use-by date, but we decided to try using it anyway. We also had some potatoes in the pantry that had started sprouting.

We decided to grow mostly Winter vegetables:

- Silverbeet (Swiss chard)
- Kohlrabi
- Pak Choi
- Sprouting broccoli
- Snow peas
- Potatoes

As well as some quick growing vegetables:

- Radishes (German Giant, French Breakfast and White Icicle)
- Mesclun
- Dill

The mesclun grew very quickly and was ready to start harvesting after a month. I pick individual mesclun leaves from the plants as the plants will keep on growing. I love cut-and-come-again plants like this.

The snow peas are doing very well too, despite the seed being so old. I covered the snow pea seeds with wet paper towels overnight before sowing them. I think that that helped.

(If you look carefully at the bottom right of the snow pea photo, above, you will see my cat Abby trying to figure out a way into the veggie patch!)

The dill has grown prolifically this time. It is the best success we have ever had with dill germinating. The seeds used had been gathered and dried in previous years.

It is really too early to harvest any dill yet as the plants have only just started growing. But I needed 1/2 a cup for a recipe I was making. I took a couple of leaves from some of the plantlets, just enough for my meal, I think they will be okay. Fingers crossed.

Everything grew apart from the kohlrabi and silverbeet, which is a pity because I like these. I did find a perpetual silverbeet seedling in one of the old overgrown vegetable patches that I will transplant.

But first I need to do some more weeding. The weeds are growing as fast as the vegetables. I notice the weeds more in the photos than in the garden! Dad removed tonnes of oxalis, but didn't manage to get all of it out. We don't use any chemical sprays, so this means finding the oxalis bulbs and picking them out by hand. I wish the slugs would eat them instead of my vegetables.

Thanks for stopping by. See you again soon.

Hugs

Rose x