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...

Once again I have not posted since the garden share collective.  This month is supposed to be about preserving.  The only thing I have preserved is the peppercorns that I preserved in brine.  Whenever I see a new stalk I pick it and pop them into the brine. Easy peasy. Certainly not going to keep us in pepper for a year though.  I read that the peppercorns only fruit on the lateral branches, and since the vine is sending shoots out, I thought it might be a good idea to put up a trellis.  Hopefully those will climb up and spread out and then it will be easy to harvest.  Only one aspargus plant has been really succesful - the purple asparagus, so I moved the other two onto that side of the trellis and will see if they do ok there.  I have harvested some of the asparagus already this year and it is the most amazing aspagus I have ever tasted.  Even if I let them get too long they are still tender all the way to the end.   The other side...

I feel so blessed to have a garden, with flowers and little dribbles of food (we certainly cannot live on what I grow!) ......... and butterflies ...... and a peaceful place to sit and enjoy it all.   There was some lovely soft seaweed on the beach yesterday afternoon, so we gathered a couple of bagfuls.  I laid it out as mulch on the asparagus bed, but clearly will have to get some more.  I am sure I can be talked into another walk on the beach some time soon.  This asparagus stalk was chopped up and divided between the two of us - tender all the way to the bottom.  The Mary Washington is skinny little stalks as you can see in the background.  I have decided I will go ahead and plant some more purple asparagus seeds.    Look!  I have some eggplant too :)  Purple basil - this is such awesome basil - leaves of this and also amaranth, parsley and lettuce were  added to the leafy mix of our salad.  I guess we are getting ...

There is nothing much exciting going on in the veggie garden at the moment other than weeding and cutting back.  I wanted to build up to a maintenance free garden and I guess I have done just that.  I put down a lot of hay mulch to keep the weeds at bay.  Once the wet season starts the weeds grow overnight. So other than the ongoing weeding, and cutting back of old growth to allow the new growth room to develop, gardening consists of sitting in the swing and admiring it all.  I also have some bigger tomatoes coming up. I think they are the tropic tomatoes that I got from  MrFothergills - I am trying to save the seeds - at the moment they are fermenting to remove the outer membrane and then they will be dried and stored.  I am always on a  quest to find wilt resistant tomatoes, and saving seeds that have built up a resistance in my own garden is a good way to start. Just a few weeks ago my lime tree was c...

I could say that my overgrown veggie garden looks rather permaculturish!   I do need to warn all those dear friends that I sent cosmos seeds to that if they don't harvest the seeds they might find themselves with more cosmos than they need! I let quite a few of mine die off in situ scattering seeds far and wide, and now I see the results.... - oh dear, now where was that path again?    I started to move the other path over a while back - to widen the bed next to the fence and make the central bed easier to reach into the middle from either side. The bed next to the fence is for the ginger and I plan to grow even more this year. We have been walking down this very narrow path for awhile now....  The chia seem to be doing well - the leaves are a bit prickly, but I have been adding a few of the young leaves to salads. I have no idea how high this plant grows, what season it should be grown in and when I can expect seeds.... here it is intersp...

One of the first things I did on returning home was clear some of the weeds in the vegetable garden.  The lemongrass had become monstrous, and so I chopped enough leaves away to clear the path.  Some went into the compost where  they are a great compost activator.  The others were just laid on the bare earth (now that the weeds are gone).  They are a sort of mulch, which I also hope act as a bit of an insect repellant, being lemony and all.  I had put up a small shadecloth before I left, and in my absence a pawpaw tree had grown right up under it and was beginning to bend sideways.  I couldnt remove it as the loofah has got all entwined with it, so just changed it to a different angle to allow the pawapaw tree grow up alongside it.  I do hope it is a female pawpaw.  I have quite a few new papwpaw trees shooting up at the back of this bed, and those should be the red pawpaw, so am holding thumbs.  Hubby didnt pick any asparagu...

I am slowly realising that the wet season in the tropics is a totally different season to anywhere else. I joined the Yates challenge and planted some bean seeds, but not one came up. Regular vegetable just do not do well here. I got my free packet of carrot seeds in the mail this week and will give them a try. I haven't tried them before but who knows, they might like all the rain. My gem squash was doing quite well, and then it seemed to take on a new lease of life and start running rampant in the vegetable garden - oh no!  wait a minute! this is a different vine and the gem squash has totally died off again.  Succumbed to powdery mildew yet again! I think this is a jap pumpkin vine.  Instead of the beans against the fence I have planted long tropical snake beans, jicama (yam bean) and ginger.  Right in the corner my sweet potatoes are starting up again.   So in a little while this fence will be covered in greenery, and I have learnt a lesso...

I have noticed that lately the asparagus stalks have been getting thicker and stronger.  I dont know if it is because we are heading into the wet season which is when we are supposed to harvest them.  In more temperate climates, the plant dies down in the winter, but here it has continued to grow and produce, but I have left the shoots which is supposed to build up more strength in the roots.  This weekend I cut back all the older shoots that were starting to collapse at the base. These were planted as two year crowns and at the same time I got a packet of seeds for a purple asparagus.  Out of the whole packet only one plant survived.   It looks very spindly, but I will leave it in the pot a while longer before I transplant it into the ground.   The asparagus tops are full of little seeds - I wonder if they will grow?  I put some into a  couple of pots.  They are very slow growing, but since mine are doing so well I...

OH I do love to order new plants! I found out that asparagus grows well in this area, so went online and ordered 4 two year corms which should start bearing this year and then got some seeds for some "black" asparagus which will take a couple of years. I have to now make a bed for them since it is going to be a permanent perennial bed. I will pick up some chicken manure pellets on the way home, hubby is not keen on eating vegetables that have been near any other kind of manure. Since he is going to be eating half the vegetables..... he said chicken manure is OK. I also do have some lovely compost. The other seeds I ordered are for angled luffa . This plant, you can eat the young vegetables like zucchini , but if you leave them to dry on the vine will make loofahs ! How cool! Both of these should go into the ground before the wet, so I only have about a month until that starts to happen. I wanted to grow something in the wet - most gardeners here just stop growing anything f...