Africanaussie

The lady slipper orchid is beginning to flower again!  I have a few dichondra in a hanging basket, and like the way this is becoming the "hanging garden"!  I never tire of these beautiful flowers, and the fact that they are growing in my garden fills me with such pleasure.  The vine needs to be cut back so that it doesn't take over the entire garden.  I want light to be able to get in, and it also strains the branches of the weeping tea tree it scrambles over. In other orchid news I cut back the plants around the back fence, letting in more light and neatening it up a bit more.  Often when one does such a thing though it can still look a little messy for  a while until new shoots start to fill in the bare areas.   All my orchids need a bit of TLC, but they have survived the neglect pretty well. My phalanopsis has two flower spikes!  yeah!  They all got a good dunking in some seaweed solution.   This little...

Time to share our gardens again! -  here is the link .  Our wrap up will now be at the end of the month, although I will be a little late for the end of August as I will have family from overseas visiting.. July has been a good month in my little tropical garden.  I have been working really hard to make sure that we have something to harvest. Cucumbers: We had tons of rain which some of the garden liked, but the cucumbers which had been doing well got downy mildew, so they had to be ripped out before it spread to the other new cucumbers I had planted.  I am not sure if they will have fruit by the time August 18th rolls around. Tomatoes: The two tropic tomato bushes that a friend gifted me have been overloaded with fruit and the cherry tomatoes are also doing well, so I think this month will be all about the tomatoes.  Eggplant:  The eggplant went through a bit of a slow phase, but then when I cut back the barbados cherry and they got more light they...

For quite a few years now I have participated in the World Vison 40 hour famine. I am doing the 40 hr famine again this year. If I raise 100.00 I will give up food for 40 hours If I raise 200.00 I will give up TV as well for 40 hours If I raise 300.00 I will give up Facebook as well for 40 hours. A few facts:  This year is the 40th anniversary of the 40 hour famine.  In the past 7 years alone more than 2 million people have benefitted from food assistance through 40  hour famine funds.  This year you will be supporting World Vision projects in Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Laos,  Malawi, Nepal, Swaziland and Uganda.  The funds will go towards solutions like nutrition training for  parents, child health services and better agricultural practices. If you would to donate or find out more please visit my fundraising page here: Gillians 40 hour famine fundraising page I will start after dinner on Friday the 14th and will put up a blog po...

As I was doing my update on my in ground worm buckets last week I began to mull over how my gardening has changed since I started blogging.... Worms ;  I had never even heard of worm composting when I first started gardening.  In fact I thought they were talking about earthworms.  I didnt have room for a worm bin, so discounted the idea of having compost worms in my small garden.  Then I read about worm tubes, but wanted to be able to harvest the castings, so with a little bit of inspiration from here and there my worm buckets were born. worm buckets Permaculture :  This is something that still does elude me a little.  I have such a small garden that I really only have zone 1/2 or 1.  Permaculture can spill out into other areas though and so I see those principles popping up in different areas of my life.  Nice to know that we dont have to own a huge farm to become permaculturists. Food forest :  I have lately been seeing more and m...

I suppose like all gardeners I do a few strange things.  One is that I cannot bear to throw away (or even recycle) cardboard.  We were very blessed recently to be able to purchase some new items for our home.  These all came wrapped in a huge amount of packaging.  What couldnt be immediately torn up into the worm buckets and compost heap or used as mulch was laid in the veggie garden paths.  This keeps it out of the way for now.  It soaks up the rain and watering runoff, so that when the compost has room again for more browns I simply rip up the floor!  Worms  (earthworms and red wrigglers) simply love cardboard, so even laying it down on a patch of dirt will do wonders to your garden.  You can cover it with mulch if you dont like the look of it. I was burying a pile of prawn shells under one such pice of cardboard last night and the worms were big and fat and juicy.  I wonder if they eat the prawn shells? - I know someone does, ...

I always look forward to this season, it is cooler, the humidity is gone, and I can grow "normal" vegetables in my tropical garden.  We have had an usual amount of rain this year - it seems as though the wet season is starting later in the year and then continuing on later.  Of course that means it is cloudy a lot of the time, and things need sunshine to grow.  I suppose we cant have it all ways. My cucumbers were the first crop of this season and they are still going strong. I made some pickles last night, and realized I dont have  a pot high enough to water bath them, so they are in the fridge.  How long can you keep them in the fridge unopened? I have noticed a little bit of mildew on the lower leaves, so I might give it a bit of a spray with some milky water.  These are growing on the edge of the asparagus bed.  One thing I add to the asparagus bed that I dont put on the rest of the garden is fresh seaweed, and now I am wondering if that...

Once again another month has rolled by and it is time to link up with  Lizzie at Strayed from the Table  our monthly collective where we share what has happened in our gardens for the last month and what we hope to be working on for the next month.  Wrapping up June and heading into July. Last month I wanted to work on: harvesting some food from the garden.  How did I do with that?  Not so great.... since we have had so much rain and not much sunshine there has not been much going on in the garden veggie wise. The salad greens and cherry tomatoes are the mainstays in the garden    A couple of pawpaws, some bok choy, lettuce leaves and cherry tomatoes.   A few cucumbers before the vine succumbed to powdery mildew.  The same story with the squash. Certainly not much of a harvest for all the work I put into the garden.  :( Soooo.... I live in the tropics, and when you go walking in the bush there are trees, and undergrowth...

My white orchid is the most prolific flowerer, but the last time it flowered the ants climbed up the stem and ate the flowers!   I was devastated, and made sure it didnt happen again.  As soon as I saw the buds forming this time I brought the plant inside. The grubby outside pot doesn't look so good, and it didn't fit into any of my other containers.  I just wrapped it in a piece of cellophane and jammed it in halfway.  I like the idea of bringing in the flowering orchids, so will have to either pot them up into pots that fit into my containers or purchase other containers. This is one of my most succesful orchids, flowers every six months, and this time has two flowering stalks, and at the top of one of the "branches?" there are a few leaves with some roots that I presume I can re-pot and start another plant. I have a selection of mismatched hanging pots and one of them doesn't even work anymore and hangs at a tipsy angle. One of the pots is marked 4.00,...

Last week I saw an ad for a garden competition, judging on August 12th and thought, "oh I could enter that!".  After popping my entry in the mail I reflected that I have in fact been very slack in the garden lately.  So this weekend I made time  for a couple of hours gardening.  The veggie garden has been the most neglected. A couple of weeks ago I threw a bunch of lettuce seeds into a well composted area.  Well yes I know it was well composted because in between the lettuces were tonnes of  tomato and passionfruit seedlings.  It is so hard not to dislodge the fragile lettuces, and some of them needed to be thinned as well.  A little bit more spread out, weeded and well watered, we will see how they go now..... The poly box with the eggplant was moved into the corner to get more sun, and I discovered that some sort of squash seedlings are coming up - I wonder if they are gemsquash?.  The paths in the veggie garden are old bits of weed ma...

Hibiscus is the backbone of my tropical garden.   The poodle hibiscus is a special one that I love.  I bought one years ago with my daughter, and now we are separated by many miles of ocean, so it brings  a happy skip to my heart whenever I see these flowers.  This is such a gentle salmon pink colour.  The red hibiscus slowly unfurls, and then the flower only lasts a day or two, but there are always lots of flowers in bloom at any one time. they like lots of sun, I just love how the sunlight is filtering through the delicate petals here. they are certainly hardier than they look here.  perhaps my favourite is the variegated hibiscus - the red flowers stand out so magnificently against the snowy white leaves. They don't require any special care in my garden, other than a good pruning every now and then so that they don't get leggy.  Thank heavens for plants like hibiscus as I haven't been doing much gardening lately and yet they carry on...