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?

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.

Raindrops keep falling on my head... and everywhere else

For your viewing pleasure, this is what the weather is like every day lately.

Actually these video's are mind deadening a bit boring but they give you an idea of what it is like to live in North Queensland during the wet season.

In the first video, I was trying to capture how full & slightly cloudy coloured the pool is. Hard to see through the window, but you can see the puddles in our gravel driveway & the big puddle in the gutter.

In the other videos, it is hard to see just how deep the water is in the yard, because the grass is so long because of the constant rain. You can also see the HUGE weeds that have invaded every single garden bed (we don't get a lot of time to garden, but our yard rarely looks like an overgrown vacant block as it does at the moment).

No Crocs in our pool yet, but given that we are starting to turn into the river of Townsville instead of the City of Townsville & croc's are beginning to end up as Road Kill, it probably won't be long. Then again, as they don't have opposable thumbs, they probably won't be able to get past the childsafe latch. Maybe they'll just take up residence in the puddles under our house!