Fungus

Rainbow Season

The strawberries have gone,
Asparagus is done.

The night is almost cold,
The leaves are turning gold. 

 

Gardens have few flowers,

Sunshine comes with showers. 

The season of rainbows.

Well-watered

We came home from our holidays to a bountiful harvest so we're fairly sure the newly installed irrigation system worked effectively in our absence. 

The celery and spring onions were so large that I needed a bucket to bring them upstairs. 

And I've got so much curly kale and silver beet that I'm going to swap with a neighbour for eggs (our chickens are laying elsewhere again). 

There's a basket of limes too, ready for juicing and to add flavour to a fish curry - our new Good Friday tradition? 

Beginner's luck

We've been eating curly kale and silverbeet for weeks and now we've had a huge haul of green beans and one of the largest spring onions ever seen. 

To be fair, that is an excessively small apple. 

I picked 1.2kg of green beans and froze them, densely packed into ziplock bags without blanching. The first batch came out again for an Irish stew. They were a touch squeaky but still nice and crunchy. 

Choko

I had been confused by the lack of flowers on my choko vine given how healthy it was looking. 

I'd been expecting big yellow flowers like a pumpkin or courgette and hadn't noticed the subtle pale ones. You can see a cluster of them on the left of this photo. 

And look at that big fat fruit! I'm not sure when they're ripe so I'll leave it on the vine for now.. 

Garden Envy

I visited a subtropical terraced garden with our local garden group last week and was amazed at what would grow under a canopy of pines and ponga. 

  

There was lots of garden art scattered amongst the plants and pots of succulents placed around the house, which gave me lots of ideas for adding interest in our garden. 

I was very taken with this water feature made from glass insulators from a decommissioned pylon. 

I solved yet another plant mystery too. This deep purple flower is on a tibouchina shrub. We have one at the back near our camellia and above our pink carpet rose (another new identification). 

The gardener's friend recommended a New Zealand book on subtropical plants which I've added to my shopping list so that I can identify a few more of our plants and learn about them. 

I'll miss the next trip to a community orchard as we'll be in Australia but I'm sure there'll be plenty of interesting plants there too... 

Witch hazel