Gardening in the wet season

This is what our entire garden looked like a couple of weeks ago.

That fence is 6 feet high. Notice how there are weeds are taller than the fence?

It only took 1-2 months to get like this. (All that rain we had about a month ago really made it take off).

In the last fortnight, I have been spending my weekends weeding, laying weedmat & mulching.

Here are some progress photo's...

(Those are Heliconia's or Bird of Paradise plants at the camera side of the photo & not sure what the plant behind them is. Eventually they will probably all go but at the moment, it is the only place in the garden where the weeds don't grow because these plants are too dense)

The pool area was a big effort, partly because it is hard to get the stuff out without dropping any in the pool & also because it was full of a plant called wandering jew which I am allergic to.

Remember this post?

Well here is the meter (which I had to uncover again beacuse the plants had all regrown over it).

It's hard to see in this photo, but the height of the water meter is a good 15-20cm below the level of the mulch in the rest of the garden. We'll just have to be a bit more careful about keeping it clear in future.

This garden is about 12 meters long in total, and that large section is about 4x9m. It looked worse than the first photo in this post before I started weeding. We ran out of mulch here, so haven't quite finished yet.

This was a nice little surprise... A gardenia that I planted quite a while ago. I planted 6. One survived. I thought they had all died because the weeds had smothered them.

It's less than 20cm tall, but I swear it has grown about 2 cm since I pulled all the weeds out. It is also loving the mulch.

And lastly, this is the only garden bed so far where I have started planting. This is where our outdoor setting usually sits. There used to be some sort of large leafed plant here which was OK, but not one of my favourites. I have planted Coleus here, because I wanted something colourful, easy to look after, that would bush out to fill the space, and that would be easy to keep trimmed to the edge of the garden bed. This is because when our outdoor setting is in place there is not much room to walk between it & the garden (it's currently packed away because we are on Cyclone watch here).

The weeds in the pavers here are very annoying. They are hard to pull up by hand, the appear in force every time it rains & we haven't had enough dry days lately to make it worth trying to poison them.

Between the two coleus plants on the right, is a weed that I cut off about 2 or 3 weeks ago. I think it might be the Crested Wattle (which is not really a wattle). It is almost impossible to kill & the only semi-satisfactory way I have found to keep it manageable is to keep pruning it back to ground level every few weeks (I have found it impossible to pull out because the roots go too deep). It can grow branches several feet long in the space of just a couple of months. It is also growing exactly along the fence line (it is a large problem but only along about a 12 meter section of this fence line). That makes it even more difficult to pull.

So this post shows you why I have been absent from the bloggy world lately. I have been very very VERY busy!!!

And now we have Tropical Cyclone Ului on our doorstep, I thought I had better get photo's up before the Cyclone blows all my efforts away.

Now I am going to go attack the weeds you see in the top photo.

Did I mention that I'm allergic to grass?

Child Labour

Today Little Bear was sick so I had to stay home.

It was also the day that the Qld Teachers took strike action. Therefore I had Cheetah at home with me too.

I was tired as I have been under the weather myself & dealing with a sick Little Bear was about as much as I could handle, so early in the day I devised my devious plan to keep Cheetah out of the way thought up an interesting activity that would keep develop my child's co-ordination, physical ability & problem solving skills.

We have had a large palm of some sort in our pool area that attracted locusts & green ants like you wouldn't believe. Knowing how much my child loves to play with heavy artillery big boy toys, I told him that he could use my secateurs and his fathers saw to cut as much of this tree down as he wanted too. (the fronds shoot off from just above ground level so the secateurs can do most of the work at cutting it back).

I expected this might keep him busy for half an hour, maybe an hour if I was lucky.

He stayed outside ALL day. Breaking only for a quick bike ride, lunch & a couple of snacks.

Here he is almost finished.



And this gives you some idea of how busy he had been. The pile of palm fronds to the left is all his work.




Behind this tree was a fig tree growing that I only found out about a couple of weeks ago when the neighbours told me about it (as they didn't want a fig tree growing next to their new carport & were pretty sure I didn't want one in my garden either). I went to cut it down on Sunday & was very surprised to find out that it was an established fig tree that had 2 trunks 3-4 meters tall & I hadn't been able to see it at all behind the palm tree Cheetah removed without actually crawling into the back corner of this garden bed. I got most of it out, but there is still a fair bit of stalk remaining so I will have to find a way to remove the whole thing.

I was very proud of my Cheetah today.

You can read another post about his love of gardening tools here.

No more

Today Little Bear attended kindy for the first time on a Friday.

Today was the only day I will get with my husband at work & the two kids in care.

Today I worked like a madman in our garden to try & tidy up the garden beds which became manically overcrowded by all the weeds over the wet season. (Which is now pretty much over) until Christmas time next year.

Today I filled up the trailer & a garden waste bin full of weeds & there is another trailer load of weeds lying on the lawn for their chance to go to the dump.

Today I received an invitation to a Diva party that one of our neighbours is holding for our neighbour who'se house burned down. All the profits will be donated to that neighbour (although she doesn't know it yet). Normally I don't like going to these types of things where there's a heap of people I don't know. This time though it will be mostly neighbours & since I am too shy to meet them any other way this will be a great opportunity to meet & greet while supporting a very worthy cause.

Tonight marks the end of today & a very tired mummy is going to drag herself off to bed. I will take photo's of some of my handiwork in the next couple of days (nothing flash, but very neat & tidy again). I know you can hardly wait.