So, after that post the other week, I ended up going out on the weekend and buying some plants (of course). They sat around in their pots for a week, then the following weekend we planted them, and this is the results! I’ll update next week with more recent pics 🙂
Behold, le garden space! Here we have backyard, and not pictured is the similarly sized strip of side yard. As you can see, there is Not Much Yard.
Here we have the silverbeet, also known as swiss chard, arranged around garlic chives. We repurposed this pot for this – a hot minute ago it held the lime tree, but the lime had definitely outgrown it and needed more space.
Excitingly, our leaf pile – literally a cages pile of leaves that we add to every autumn with the fallen leaves from the ornamental pears – had broken down enough at the bottom that we had enough good, black soil for both this silverbeet/chives pot, and also for the lettuce pot.
Repotted lime tree, with the short lemon tree in the terracotta pot in the background, with the last few lemons from last season on it.
Behold, the baby lettuces. Cos lettuces, so they won’t head. We planted them pretty deep in the pot a) so we didn’t waste as much soil filling the pot on lettuces, which have shallow roots, and b) to give the lettuces a bit of protection. On the right is a potted rosemary bush, about two years old and growing well. In the middle, upside down, is the fire pit drum. On the far right you can just glimpse the palette that will hopefully, one day, support cucumbers….
Behold, very sad cucumber plants. One has since died, and one has no leaves, but the one in the middle has grown a new leaf since this pic was taken, so maybe it will live. The plants weren’t the healthiest to begin with, but my daughter is obsessed with cucumbers and desperately wanted to buy them, and they were only $5 for the pot, so whatever. Fingers crossed one survives.
Rogue raspberry plant coming through next to the lettuces from next door. I wish we’d realised earlier (as in a few years ago) what this was, then we might have gotten some berries – they fruit on the prior year’s canes, so if we nurse this cane through, it might fruit for us next year. We’ll see.
That lil sprig of green on top of the wall is also a visitor from next door, this time common garden mint. Om nom.
To the left in the sugar cane mulch are a series of regular chives. The wire panels are all there to protect my baby plants from birds, btw. It’s a source of endless ironic amusement that my official patronus is a black bird, and lo, a family of blackbirds moved into the area about three or four years back and now rear their family here every spring, and sing in the middle of the night in early spring as, apparently, blackbirds do – and dig like nothing else in the leaf litter and mulch for lil buggies, scratching up my baby plants in the meantime.
Behold, the rest of the babies under fences. The front row is basil, and the back row is tomatoes. We’ve lost a few tomaties due to ???? who knows in the interim, but the others are going strong, and the basil is hanging in there so long as we keep babying it along with lots of water and worm juice.
At the close end of the tomato/basil row, we also have an apricot in a giant garden bag. She did super well last year, with over 40 fruit… And then it was extra hot, and they ripened early while we were away, and I came back to 36 fruit rotten on the ground D’: D’: Apricots are some of my FAVOURITES, but I can’t eat them from the store. They are just SO much better fresh off the tree. I hope the timing works out better this year, but it probably won’t. *sob*
And next to the apricot, behind the big bush at the left of the very first picture, is this planter box with lemon thyme I just planted on the left, common sage going crazy in the middle (which we’ve since cut back since it started getting attacked by bugs) and marjoram (I think? I usually prefer marjoram, but it might just be common oregano, who knows) arising from its winter dieback on the right.
Also, that leafy thing in the green bag on the ground is a volunteer potato that we failed to remove from its bag two, maybe three years ago. It’s thumb-sized and green as anything, but sending up this vigorous, leafy shoot. I’ve covered it all in mulch to see if it’ll grow some more potato-y tubers, but it’s probably too late now. Eh.
Okay, now the rest of the side yard.
The afore-pictured lemon tree, with an orange tree on the right, flowering profusely (and smelling DIVINE, let it be noted), and in the background on the left, a mandarin tree. The mandarin, as you can see, is not huge, but last year it gave us about twenty utterly delicious, very sweet and juicy mandarins. Such a sweetheart, she is, and very hard working.
Apparently I neglected to take photos, but there are two cumquats and another mandarin too, which is taller and leafier but hasn’t taken the move back to colder climes well – we got all our potted trees back only at the beginning of this year from the in-laws, who had been looking after them in a warm, humid-temperate climate, while we are a cold, dry-temperate climate with frosty winters.
The shift back to frostier climates has, however, been happy for the apples, which need XX (IDK, a decent amount) days of frost in order to set fruit well. The three in round pots are ballerina apples, designed to grow one main trunk with very short, stubby branches – also called pole apples because of how the tree grows. The one in the square pot is, I THINK, a gala apple tree?? I honestly can’t remember. It’s something like that, though. We’ve never managed to get the apples to ripen fully before falling off the tree, but I’m trying to baby them a bit more this year, so we’ll see.
Observe, baby apples:
Oh, hey, I did take a picture of the less-healthy mandarin!
Also, by the back door (see first picture) is the spiky, prickly finger lime, which is supposed to be a subtropical rainforest plant, so honestly the fact that it’s even ALIVE here is a miracle. The in-laws convinced it to bear fruit, which was amazing because finger lime fruit is INCREDIBLE (finger-sized, finger-shaped citrus fruit with citrus peel, filled with little juicy bubbles of sweet lime. Imagine sherbet-lime flavoured caviar growing inside lime skin, and you’re about right.), but the current crop hadn’t quite ripened when we brought the tree home and they withered as about a quarter of the tree died back due to climate shock.
SO it’s super exciting to see it coming back beautifully this spring after a good winter prune, yay! See all the glorious new growth:
Also, there’s a pear tree that flowered profusely and then didn’t fruit, which is positioned over by the palette with the cucumbers.
It was against the fence where the lettuce pot is, but something was clearly crawling up the fence and eating it, and now that we’ve pulled it away, the leaves are growing back beautifully at the back.
Ah, okay, and last of all, the seeds in the planter boxes you see in the middle of the paving in the first picture:
Some pumpkin seeds were coming through, but idk, they got a bit waterlogged this last week due to some rain we had, AND they’ve been out in full sun in 30+ degree days (that’s around about a hundred, for you Fahrenheiters), and I’m not sure if they’re salvageable now. Also, I don’t know where we’d plant them even if they do live??
Anyway! That’s it, that’s the garden. I’ll try to summon the courage to do a video update this weekend, because it’s so much quicker and easier, but it’s weirdly intimidating to be out in my yard where the neighbours can hear, randomly talking to my phone?? :’D