Fired that arrow !

Am giddy with joy. I was sitting in the garden, admiring the way it has gone off, and reading a book on English Garden Design, when a large lightbulb went off over my head. I felt my chest expand outwards in a burst of happiness as I realised that what I really want to be is a garden designer.

It took me about an hour and a half to find the Landscape and Garden Design Course at Challenger TAFE's Murdoch Campus and I sent off an exploratory email to the course co-ordinator.

Well ! She called me back inside of 10 minutes to talk to me about the course and about further study in the area and her enthusiasm and knowledge were immediately obvious. And I signed on to study on wednesday nights and saturday mornings for the whole of next year !

I'm going to use a legacy my Grandmother gave me to pay for the course fees - I feel she would very much approve as she was one of the people who gave me my love of gardening and summer, to me, is the smell of her strawberries rioting over their patch, with bird netting festooned over the top to keep out sparrows and small grandchildren. (Fairly unsuccessfully).

I'm so thrilled !! I really felt as if my life had lost its direction. I enjoyed being a Librarian, but never really felt that it engaged my heart or creative side. Gardening to me can be more than a job, or a career, or a lifestyle or a way of life - it can be a religion - and an act of worship - and I look forward to beginning this path very much.

Before

Fell over quite a lot with the move, but am starting to feel more The Thing now. My Mum has been around every day helping me with NooNoo, which has made most of the difference to how I feel.

The garden is coming on - the plans to plant sunflowers, lettuce, beans, tomatoes, potatoes etc etc has been implemented and best of all - I cheekily asked our real estate agent if we could have chooks & she actually asked the owners..... who said "Yes" !!!!!!!! So we are allowed four chookies !!!! I am going to get that French breed that lays blue eggs & we're going to build a chook tractor to house them in out in the back patch, which is not reticulated (yet....)

These are some before photos of the back garden as it looks after about two months.

Unbijou Garden !

I shall have to change the name of this blog... The garden is now HUGE !! We have finally moved into a new house, with 3 bedrooms in Coolbinia. It's about five ks further out than we were last time ie: still inner-city to most, but the utmost burbs to us...It's a beautiful deco thirties house on a quarter acre block with bore reticulation, mature trees and shrubs, camellias, roses, pergolas (plural) and lawn.

I'm actually slightly overwhelmed by it. After dreaming of a big garden for so long, the damn thing terrifies me. Our back entertaining area is bigger than the Bijou Garden, let alone the rest of the garden, so I have contented myself with fertilizing everything and attacking a badly diseased tree with secatuers. Damien attacked the lavender and we both attacked the asparagus fern. I've also popped in lots of bits of geranium that got broken off during the move. I'm planning to put in vast quantities of giant sunflowers, and also salad veggies and herbs, but that's as far as my plans have got.

The pots and baskets have come across nicely and have immediately enlivened the front verandah and the pergola out the back. I have also hung sparklies everywhere, and they catch the light a lot more in this house than at the old place.

The house is opposite a reserve full of trees, and the whole suburb is full of huge, mature trees - fabulous specimen trees like a flame tree sixty feet high in full flower. The best thing is, that as a result of all this lush greenery, the whole place is alive with birds. The dawn chorus is deafening (and wakes Noo-Noo without fail, who has a tendency to join in), but even throughout the day there is the constant rustle of wings as swooping birds call and dive. We're moving into spring, so of course they're all frisky, and there seems to be some kind of unholy war happening between the honeyeaters and the magpies.....

It's all very new and interesting, and makes me realise the paucity of the very-inner-urban environment that I was in before. This whole suburb sounds like Hyde Park. Hah ! This whole suburb looks like Hyde Park. I think that I will enjoy living here very much.

And the reason for this post... two weeks, almost to the day after we have moved in, our first rose.....

Bijou Baby

Well, its been a while, but I am proud to announce something even better than the bucketloads of passionfruit bestowed upon us - our own little passionfruit William - who came into the world in a bang and a rush a month and a half early.

Pictures from the Bijou Garden

Actual photographs of the Bijou Garden...

In The Deep Mid Winter II

This time around its raining, or has been up until very recently. As if to mock perfection the sun has just come out and is glistening (or is that coruscating ?) through the raindrops beaded along the edges of the fig leaves....
Once again I'm ill and off work, although its not a snoozle this time, its morning sickness :)) We will be leaving the bijou garden soon. Our landlords have told us that they'd like to sell the house before our lease is up next May, and with a baby on the way we must move soon. With any luck we'll be able to rent my sister-in-law's place and I will be able to put in a REAL garden, hopefully in early spring so I have loads of time to plant summer veggies.
I just got the latest Diggers Club Seed catalogue which is full of old fashioned French varieties of melon like "Prescott Fond Blanc"and mini multi-coloured capsicums, and stripy "Listada de Gandia"eggplants and a million different types of oddly shaped or coloured tomatoes ranging from the aptly named bright yellow, pear shaped "Beam's Yellow Pear" to the black and red striped "Black Zebra". I want to buy ALL of them and have plants growing up the walls of the house and trying to eat unwary visitors (this is usually what happens when I get dirt - I overplant appallingly).
I love these heritage fruit and vegetables - I've had so much success with growing them and they are so interesting in their forms and colours. I am growing sugar snaps and snow peas from seeds I bought more than four years ago ! Not the original seeds but their great-great-great grandchildren as I have saved the biggest juciest pods each time to ripen on the vine and then I collect them when they are dry and keep 'em until its next time to plant them. I have been growing the same variety of lettuce - a virulent and feral buttercrunch - from seeds I bought six years ago. The damn stuff grows in cracks in the brick paving and self-seeds itself lavishly all over the back garden. I need to blog a post about the lettuce actually - the stuff has a personality.
I can't wait to get a bigger garden !! Almost more exicted about that than the bub, and it means that bub will have proper, organic, home grown, GM-free food when it starts eating solids.
AND CHOOKIES !! I'm going to get the French ones that lay blue and green eggs, and a couple of Isa Browns for production. And quail for stuffing with apricots and eating....
This is so exciting ! From my Bijou Garden to a proper patch of dirt !

Tomatoes In A Bag

Due to extreme lack of space and the fact that the Bottlebrushes are now nicely shading two thirds of the garden, I had a go at growing tomatoes in a bag of potting mix. I saw this being done on a Gardening program, and remembered that my grandparents in England used to grow plants like this, so I thought I'd give it a go. I bought a really cheap bag of potting mix, stood it up on one end, poked holes around the bottom end, slit the top end open and worked in about two handfuls of blood 'n bone. I then put in two stakes and half a packet of Tommy Toe seeds that The Diggers Club sent me as a freebie last year and watered the crap out of it.
The result, about eight weeks later, has been two very happy little plants (I pulled out all the weak looking seedlings) which are still producing more flowers and more fruit. They've made about a punnet of tomatoes, so I have just about earnt the cost of the potting mix back, but the mad things are still going. One of them is extremely fond of the lemon tree and is busily climbing up it. The other got snapped off at some point and so hasn't grown as high, but has produced more fruit than the other side.
There may be hard-core gardeners out there going "Duh!". I am vaguely aware that one is supposed to stake (did that !) and pinch out laterals to encourage fruiting. The problem is, I don't know what a lateral is, and am too soppy to hurt my happy little planties by pinching them anyway.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, even if you are NOT a hard-core gardener, but someone unfocused but enthusiastic, the tomatoes-ina-bag method does work, and so even people with just balconies could grow fresh tomatoes, and maybe a bit of basil to keep it company.
I've left the best bit till last - they taste AMAZING !!!! The Tommy Toe did win The Diggers Club taste test three years in a row and they explode in your mouth with a rich, warm, tomatoey taste, but any tomato variety just tastes so much more delicious picked fresh from the vine and bursting with sunlight.

The First of The Summer Passionfruit

Well we ate our first passionfruit today, warm from the sun and a deep purple. It was absolutely delicious. We ate half of it and threw the other half into a smoothy consisting of two very ripe bananas, a mango, greek yogurt, cinnamon, milk and honey and ice cubes. YUM !!!
This first little passionfruit popped out a good week or so before any others, and then suddenly there were millions of them, so we're going to have a serious passionfruit glut in about a week. Luckily this is just in time for Xmas, so I reckon its passionfruit biscuits and pavlova all round. Hmmm.... passionfruit dacquaries, passionfruit semifreddo, passionfruit cheesecake... yum yum yum. I can feel my bum getting bigger just thinking about it !
Have just downloaded Mozilla so I now have the fancy editing. Frankly I was having fun with the HTML, but I have to admit this is much easier - I'll have to learn all the bells and whistles...

Passionfruit and Jasmine - Their Care & Feeding

I don't know what their latin names are, but they are two of the most useful and beautiful climbers in the garden. I am growing them under very tricky circumstances in a very shady, yet exposed garden which drips with damp in the winter and is a scorched hellhole of hot bricks in the summer.
The passionfruit exploded out of the ground and up the wall almost as soon as it hit the dirt. This is classic Perth soil - light grey sand. I put some blood and bone in the soil, and also water with worm poo regularly, and applied a tiny bit of straw mulch. I read somewhere that mulch rots passion fruit stems really easily, so I didn't use much and kept it well away from the stem. I also read recently that you are supposed to chop them off ruthlessly when they go in the ground to make them nice and bushy. I didn't do this and have a passionfruit that has gone up a wall three meters and is now at least five metres up and over a vergola and fighting the jasmine, which I am growing up the other side.
Jasmine is not as bulletproof as passionfruit, and doesn't fruit, but the delicious smells lingering in the evening air from the fragrant flowers is well worth the effort of slaughtering the caterpillars which will otherwise strip it down to twigs. I use bacillus thuringiensis (caterpillar plague) mixed with worm poo and spray madly in the sping whenever the wind dies down.
Just in case this makes me sound like a brutal caterpillar murderer I should like to point out that I grow nasturtiums and lettuce solely for the purpose of feeding those hairy brown fellows that look like little teddybears. At least they seem to think so. I pick them off by hand and throw them over the fence, onto the car of the nob-end who parks behind our back door so that we can't get our bin in and out.
Oh the joys of a small inner-urban garden. I'll be growing my tomatoes in hanging baskets this year, to maximize space and sunlight.
I dream of having a garden where I can lay out a veggie patch in full sun, and put fruit trees round the sides; and kiwi fruit, passionfruit, jasmine, roses and wisteria all over the house.
I dream of Chooks......
I am determined to have some bantam frizzies, even if it is against the local council regulations. I will simply claim them as pets. Delicious pets... Mwuh hah haaa.
Sigh. Too much sunlight - its gone to my head. Usually I'm in the office at this time, so it's most unaccustomed (but rather pleasant).

In The Deep Mid-Winter

Snow lies on the ground.... Actually, it doesn't. One of the things that I adore about living here is that we have brilliant clear blue days and sunshine even in the middle of winter. The rainfall is a problem.... the dams are shockingly empty and the lack of rain indicates that we'll have water shortages again this year. The Government, in its infinite wisdom, is building a desalinisation plant which won't kick in for three years. The option of charging water at what its worth here doesn't seem to have occurred to them - either that or they are too gutless to make an unpopular decision. Most of the poeple I have talked to about it are of the opinion that they are quite happy to pay more for water in return for not having water restrictions. Other sensible solutions, like making rainwater tanks and greywater systems compulsory in new houses, seem to have fallen by the wayside too. In fact, Perth, on the edge of a desert, has local councils in which it is ILLEGAL to have a rainwater tank. Madness.
So, the sunshine is bad for the environment, but I am very pleased with the brilliant rays shafting down through the jasmine and passionfruit. The sun gets just high enough to set off my sparklies and to blind me at about 10 am.
I'm off work sick at the moment - like most Perthites I droop in the winter and I've been bravely fighting a snoozle for the last five days. I have attacked it with Vitamin C, garlic, horseradish and zinc, but it has finally got the upper hand and is lurking in my chest making bubbling sounds. It also hurts when I breathe - not a good sign ! I got bronchial pneumonia two years ago and it started like this - and just when I'm completely flat tack at work as well. Actually, its probably because I am flat tack at work that I have become ill. I will bundle myself up and go and sit in the garden this afternoon - I'll follow the sunlight around like the cats do.
The garden is going off so well that I have compounded the shade problem. The bottlebrushes have expoded, as has the jasmine and the passionfruit and while the shadw will be superb in the summer, it does make the little place very damp and shady in the winter. We worked out its because our little house is south facing (In the southern hemisphere that's a bad thing) and the only place that gets direct sunlight is the back wall of the bathroom. This is where I have put the geraniums and gerberas to overwinter, but when the passionfruit is fully grown up, that area won't get any sun either. We have HUGE gates on the back wall which completely blocks any other sun we might get in the winter - its not until the angle changes and the sun climbs higher in the sky that we get any more sun - the one exception is the back study window, but again, when the jasmine and passionfruit is fully grown, that area won't get any sun either. Then it will be time to move to a new house - and this time, we'll take a compass with us before we start !

Blogs and Machine Intelligence

Just had an interesting thought. One thoery of AI I have heard is that, if a true artificial intelligence were to come into being, it would be via the world telecommunications network achieving the number of links as there are synaptic junctions in the brain.

I was thinking about all those people out there like me, pecking their likes and dislikes, their poetry, their pictures, their hobbies and fears and fantasies directly into the web. I thought of the deep crannies of the human soul that the web reveals, and all the glories and splendours and the hatred and viciousness that we are capable of....

I think that we are building the web a subconcious....

I wonder what the divine spark that awakens it to full sentience will be ? A solar storm ? A particularly nasty new virus ? A critical mass of Bloggers ?

I wonder what its first word will be... Google ? Blog ?

I hope it likes chooks

Picture of A Native Blue Bee

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Cute little things aren't they ? We have a bush which has purple, trumpet shaped flowers on it, that we call "Old Man's Trousers" (which is almost certainly NOT it's real name)and in the summer, these little bees climb into the flowers and make the most tremendous buzzing noises. The first time I heard it I freaked as I thought I was being dive bombed by Hornets but no, it's just this happy little bee with pollen all over its nose.

In case you think I'm being a wimp about the hornets, I'm not ! We have really evil hornets in Australia, and here's a picture to prove it:
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They are famous for drinking in swimming pools, falling in and then stinging people who are trying to swim. They also fly really slowly with a loud, ominous buzzing, so its like being dive bombed by a B52....

The Eglu

The Eglu .

It's not just bees. I also have a problem with chickens as well. This is the coolest thing I have ever seen for the wannabe urban chook owner. The oddest thing is that people wannabe urban chook owners. Apparently this is one of the Next Big Things in the UK - and they even come delivered with chooks inside !

Mind you - at 325 pounds or AU$ 750, here you could get several thousand chooks and a small farm to run them on... just kidding, but almost

Aussie Bee & Australian Native Bee Research Centre

Aussie Bee & Australian Native Bee Research Centre Found this looking for my blue stripy bees. Excellent site - loads of info and pictures

Native Bees Factsheet - Gardening Australia - ABC

Native Bees Factsheet - Gardening Australia - ABC: "Native Bees"
A useful potted factsheet from my FAVOURITE TV show "Gardening Australia". I love the latin name for Bumble Bees - Bombus Terrestris. We have the cutest blue striped native bees here in WA - I'll hunt down some info on them and Blog that...

Australian Stingless Native Bees

Australian Stingless Native Bees: "

AUSTRALIAN STINGLESS NATIVE BEES"
These Australian Bees still make honey, but don't sting. The site is a bit loud, and has bees chasing your cursor, but the info is fascinating !

Honeybee Australis

Honeybee Australis: "HoneyBee Australis
Australian Beekeeping Information Web Page "
Australian Bee Stuff Hit One. I particularly like the pictures on this site...