Sugar Cane Mulch

Sugar Cane Mulch

Today I decided to mulch the garden, both the flower bed and small vegetable patch. I have tried different types of mulch before such as pine but lately I have heard that Sugar Cane Mulch is very healthy for the garden.  Firstly it is  very good in retaining water in your garden beds, it stops the weeds growing and it has healthy micro-organisms that are fed back into your soil and not to mention it looks great.  My intention was to finish the entire job but I had such a busy day with my daughter's Christmas Concert at school that I only managed to complete the small vegetable patch.  

My small vegetable garden mulched today

My vege patch is a little bare, I just planted a new batch of mixed letters and the 2nd growth of strawberries are about to ripen, there is a little spinach and Chives struggling to grow, one lonely tomato vine and a whole heap of parsley which has been very handy to have. What I have found since I started my vegetable patch is that the bigger the better for me for example we love spinach but by the time you pick an entire basket full of leaves and then boil them up you are left with half a cup to eat!

Strawberry plant

Here is my strawberry plant, you can see I am holding the baby strawberries in my hand, I placed sugar can mulch under them as it prevents them from rotting in the dirt.  It is a nice bed of straw for them to grow and ripen on instead of dirt.  If you have any questions or have some tips please feel free to comment.

Garden I will mulch tomorrow

Garden I will mulch tomorrow

Tomorrow i will attempt to finish mulching and give you a close up look to see how sugar cane mulch looks when applied at a larger scale. The bag I bought it in said it fills 8m2.

Christmas decorations and my flowers

Hello Folks, 

Christmas is approaching fast, it really caught me by surprise but I must admit I had my decorations up in the last week of November, mostly for the kids.  I can't show you my Christmas tree as it is looking a little lop sided as my girls keep using the Christmas balls as bowling balls and then they are trying to put them back unsuccessfully making more of a mess....dear me! 

Well it is so humid here in Sydney today?  When I looked out this morning it was raining and I had so much wanted to pot up some flowers to add colour. When you have a small garden it is a good idea to plant some flowers in a pot as you can move them around to create instant colour without taking up much room. I had good intentions to start but I must admit the humidity and morning rain turned me off the idea.  Instead I decided to take a few photos to share with you!

The first photo is of a hydrangea in a vase which my mother in law cut for me from her own garden on the weekend, this hydrangea collection comes from a plant which is over 40 years old. I will take a photo of the actual plant on the weekend and post it soon.

Hydrangea flowers from a plant over 40 years old

Don't you just love the NSW Christmas bush tree, (I am not sure which variety this is I wonder if anyone out there can tell me)?  I don't think many people know about this wonderful Australian Native. At my place it is growing happily in clay soil which has been topped up here and there with some garden soil we have worked through the garden. It firstly gets white flowers in spring and then in November they start turning red and put on a beautiful display. I have heard that these have been popular with the good old Australian folk to use as Christmas cut flowers for Christmas day..I must try it myself.

 

NSW Christmas bush

I love the country look, particularly the French Country look or the little cottage gardens, I think of lavenders,  Beatrix Potter, (she had a lovely country garden) Cottage Fabrics, picket fences and natural flowing gardens. A little cottage with a picket fence would be so nice to live in but for now i have my home....Home Sweet Home!


Here is my hall table that my girls help me decorate every Christmas, I added a hydrangea single stem for a nice soft flower display.

Have a look at this blog I came across called Polka Dots for Tots selling personalised hand-made letters that would make a great Christmas idea.

How to stop the ants attacking the Lemon tree

G'day folks,

Please feel free to comment i would love to hear from you!

Ingredients:  Masking tape or any other strong sticky tape,

Method:         Cut a long length of tape in order to fit around the bottom of the lemon tree trunk. Fold the sticky tape so that both sides are sticky and then wrap around the bottom half of the tree. Make sure you remove and change it once its full of trapped ants.

Please read on and i will tell you more about the lemon tree in the pot.

                                      

Masking tape around my lemon tree to stop the ants

In the 1st year the lemon tree was so small but it still gave us a crop in winter and was healthy enough, it is a Dwarf Meyer Lemon with a mild juicy content. The following year the white perfumed flowers started growing and eventually when they fell off tiny lemon buds appeared but not for long.


Little to my knowledge my lemon tree was being attacked by ants who found a home in my large pot, (as they do).  I later found out from researching on the net and gardening magazines that the ants were not eating my lemon flowers and buds but were farming the aphids who also found the lemon tree tasty. (This is where my sister said 'why bother').  Aphids are the little bugs, usually green in my garden, that invade in large numbers and suck all the goodness out of your plants.  The ants chew of the aphids wings so they can't fly away and then eat the secretion from the aphids...yuck...I hear you say, its true I have seen it in action. So I had to first treat the aphid plague by either picking off or spraying with a high pressure hose or using a home remedy garlic spray, I shall put a link to this later.


Before I found out about the masking tape solution I tried drowning them in the pot, re-potting and sprinkling ant dust but this was not a permanent solution as they kept coming back. The masking tape has worked you just need to change it when it is full of trapped ants and you will see in the photos below that the lemons are growing.

The lemons starting to grow

My Dwarf Meyer Lemon tree, happily growing in a pot.

Summer Garden

Winter is well and truly over! The sun has started to shine the rain has eased off, well at least this week anyway, and the sunshine has re-energised my enthusiasm for 'my little flower garden'. Little you may ask, well this is because I have a small suburban garden and I constantly want to fill it up with colour. This is how some of  it looks like  now:

 This here is my Cosmos flowers  (hope you can see it ok) I planted these in late winter as seeds and they have just started flowering near the end of spring. They are still not in full bloom so will post a photo later.

 Mandevilla, Crimson Fantasy, I purchased this in late Autumn for $6.00 at Flower Power. It was half the size and full of flowers but I made the classic mistake of buying before I knew anything about it. I found out it hates the winter and people usually bring it indoors through winter. Now, the size of the pot made it a little difficult to bring indoors so I kept covering it with a blanket through our  frosty winter, thankfully it survived and has now grown and is trailing.

Lilly, this one is also known as Lilium Asiatic Toronto, I have always found these to be beautiful plants and because i have 2 daughters I decided to plant a pink one.  I did not know if it was easy to grow but it grew easily and is so far bug free. Should I remove the bulbs or leave them in the ground for next year? It would be great to hear from you for advice.

 

White Petunias, I have grown these by seed from last years flowers which I purchased at Fower Power. It took nearly 3 months for an abundance of flowers but it is worth the wait when you know you did it all your self, with a little help from nature of course and you didn't have to spend a thing. I will talk more about my experience on growing flowers from seeds on another post very soon.

White and Pink Begonias, I love these plants they seem to just grow so easily in my garden. My mother in law tried to grow them but she said that the snails just loved the juicy thick green leaves but for some reason in my garden the snails are staying away. I started of with just one pink and white begonia plant and have propagated by dividing the clumbs and just replanting with a little TLC. It is just the beginning of summer so I will show you later how well they have grown. I also have a huge space behind the Begonias to plant a tree, I was thinking of planting a Crape Myrtle, what do you think?