Whenever I head into the front garden with a watering can at the moment, little Shadow the blue-tongue lizard is usually around. I think we might have an understanding as today he/she drank a few drips of water and regarded each other. What seemed to pass was something like this: “If you keep a little water around when I’m thirsty in the late afternoon, I’ll stay and discourage snakes”. Deal little blue-tongue! Your secret hidey gentle presence is more than welcome.
A welcome garden critter
Shield bug eggs?
I found these beautiful little silver metallic eggs on the underside of a leaf. I think they belong to a shield bug (or stink bug) and there are definitely plenty of those around from time to time. I love the gradient pattern of colours, which I’m guessing are the result of the eggs being at different stages of development? Looks like a design.
As most shield bugs are plant pests, and like to suck sap, I have to say they aren’t exactly welcome to set up big colonies in my garden – unless they are the good guys (and I don’t know how to work that out yet). I’m going to keep an eye out for the bugs and see if I can learn something about who they are over summer.
Even if they are the pest variety, I can definitely still appreciate their spot in the ecosystem and admire the beauty of their eggs. Respect your enemies.
Faced with two bushes full of lovely green tomatoes and shortening days, we’ve used our usual strategy of using up a glut of green tomatoes – making chutney, and picking some to ripen inside. Ripening inside is ok, but sometimes they aren’t quite as tasty and seem to be a bit watery. I decided to see if there were any other methods for ripening tomatoes and found this article suggesting that you can pull up the bushes and hang them upside down to ripen the green ones.
I’ve heard of planting tomatoes to grow upside down, but had never considered you could ripen them this way too. The advantage is that all the nutrient in the branches and leaves is apparently put into the tomato fruit and you get the same juicy fruits as you would have, had you been the middle of the sunny blue-skied growing season.Add to this that Richard had to pull my tomatoes out to make way for a wood store, and I decided that trying out the hanging method made lots of sense this year.
Just-hung tomatoes
We just hung them against the fence, in a position of fuller sun than they had been when in the ground. You could put them somewhere more sheltered out of the rain.
Half of the daily harvest (Fionna ate 5 before I could take the photo)
And…it works! In the one week that ours have been hanging, they are ripening daily and there’s a steady daily supply.
After a week, I pruned back some of the dying branches today to let more sun in and help the plant put it’s energy into the remaining tomatoes.
I’m actually really impressed with the concept of doing this because it seems such a waste of a plant’s energy, to just rip up tomatoes bushes at the end of the season. Sometimes you have to do to make space for your winter crops, or in our case, a wood store. If we hadn’t moved them into the sun the unripened ones would have just rotted on the vine as the winter came in. This will definitely be an end-of-summer routine task from now on.
We have two beautiful trees in our front garden and I’ve managed to find out that they are native frangipani’s. There is nothing to me, more exciting that finding out what grows in the garden when you move house.
Hymenosporum flavum - Native frangipani seeds
They are such beautiful trees with fragrant flowers, so I took the opportunity of some seed saving, particular after reading that the plants can be hard to find. The seeds are a thing of beauty in themselves.
A very welcome garden resident at the new house, that Fionna decided to call, Shadow.
Work on the secret garden has progressed.
As well as an archway, planted with native lilac that should cover it, we have made a small paved area and added 1 secret (otherwise known as the spirit of the secret garden).
I will add photographs as soon as the weather is sunnier.
“One day things weren’t there and another they were. I had never watched things before and it made me feel very curious. Scientific people are always curious and I am going to be scientific. I keep saying to myself, `What is it? What is it?’ It’s something. It can’t be nothing! I don’t know its name so I call it Magic…Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something were pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden–in all the places.”
from The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1888
One of my long time dreams is to have a secret garden. Actually, my dream was to adopt one. An unkempt one that longed to be rediscovered – full of botanical gems and a history of memories – a keyed gate, an overgrown path etc…
Shortly after we moved in, I found it. Not an existing secret garden (my holy grail) but the gate that led nowhere. The gate that didn’t open. This is it. My chance to reopen a portal to my own secret garden from the edge of my backyard to the fields beyond. The site has been chosen, shady, secluded, a place to ponder in a neglected yet beautiful area.
There are many practical steps to creating a secret garden, so although my project is shrounded in whimsy and day dreaming, I have a plan regarding things to acquire:
These are, as I see it at first imagined glance, the bare essentials for a secret garden. Only my research will uncover if there are more elements.
The project began with the a careful pruning of the plants surrounding the gate and an attempted opening. The gate yielded to opening after some years, but is very stiff as though trying hard to resist my will to open it. Hopefully it will settle into it’s new purpose with a bit of wishful thinking and a bit of magic spray (WD40).
