Today's gardening achievements

I only had half a day to get into the garden this weekend, but I did my best not to waste a minute of it.

I pruned these fruit trees:

• Columnar Crimson Rocket peach
• Dwarf Anzac peach
• Dwarf Fantasia nectarine
• Dwarf Flavourtop nectarine
• Super-dwarf Sunset nectarine
• Super-dwarf Sunset peachh
• Trixie Pyvert pear

I swear it felt like there were more of them. My dwarf apple trees haven't quite lost all their leaves, so I'm going to wait another few weeks before pruning them.

 I've also got a handful of new trees but I'll be putting them in bigger pots before pruning them.

Yes, all my fruit trees are in pots at the moment as I don't currently have the infrastructure to plant them in the ground. I may have mentioned before that I have horrible rocky clay soil, so I need to work some organic matter in even before I build a raised bed to put the trees in. That's going to take a year or so, because my soil really is that awful. 

As fruit trees take a couple of years to begin fruiting anyway, I'd rather spend those waiting years getting the position ready than to ready the soil and then have to wait extra time for the tree to be ready for fruiting.

Then I planted out some spinach and kale seedlings that had been languishing in the pots  I planted the original seeds in a couple of months ago. They won't be harvestable until spring, but I figure better late than never as I want some extra spinach to freeze. 

I'm giving up on the caterpillar-eaten cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli seedlings. Though they're recovering from their ordeal, they'll only be in the way when I need to plant spring/summer vegetables.

For the rest of this afternoon, I was weeding in the front garden. I'm not even close to getting rid of all the weeds, but I did get most of the biggest ones out. 

I can't wait for the front garden to be an actual garden bed with mulch and annual plants in. At the moment it's still the same clay and rocks as when I first got my keys, albeit with a dwindled pile of vegie mix soil on one part. Oh, and a pile of concrete and building rubble to one side that was gathered from all the other parts around the outside of my house. 

Winter solstice 2016

Clearly being sick for four days messed with my sense of time. It wasn't until I heard the radio point out that it was the shortest day of the year that I realised that the winter solstice was upon us and that today was my last chance to plant my recent purchase of three Giant Russian garlic cloves.

Ordinarily I don't follow the rule of 'plant on the shortest day, harvest on the longest' for garlic, mostly because my experience has been this results in a measly garlic bulb in return. Not to mention, many expert Aussie gardeners say that it's actually better for us to plant anywhere from March until May in order to grow a decent sized bulb. But I tend to use the solstice as a rough 'guide' for the latest date I should plant garlic.

Fingers crossed my earlier plantings do well and that these late additions aren't too bad either so that I get a decent amount to replant next year at a better time.

Winter sanity measures

I'm sure many gardeners find it particularly frustrating to be stuck indoors during winter for weather-related reasons. It's been steadily raining for a week or so, which means my list of gardening tasks remained untouched. 

Then I received a discount code for one of my favourite seed suppliers, Boondie Seeds. (I'm in no way affiliated with Boondie Seeds, just she has a good range of heirloom seeds for good prices).

This of course was all the incentive I needed to put in an order to expand my seed collection. :)

Having read Bek's Backyard blog, I know that there's at least one other gardener who gets through the winter lack of gardening by buying seeds and planning for spring plantings. 

Anyone else have some winter gardening sanity tips? 

Today's gardening achievements

I had only a few hours of daylight in which to get things done in my garden (I spent most of the day helping my brother and his fiancee out).

Planting:

• Kale seedling (bought)
• 3 x Spinach 'Winter Giant' seedlings
• 5 x Lettuce 'Tennis Ball' seedlings
• 2 x Lettuce 'Amish Deer Tongue' seedlings
• Last of my golden shallots after finally deciding on the best spot to put them

Maintenance:

• Put the old tomato vines in the green council bin (I believe they had a disease or fungus, so better be safe than sorry rather than risk putting it in my compost bin)
• Begun putting the powdery mildewed pumpkin-less vine in the green council bin as well
• Re-staked the dwarf eureka lemon and dwarf afourer mandarin trees, replacing the thin bamboo stakes with plastic coated metal stakes so the two trees are now properly supported
• Began creating a potted worm farm to test if it can work (more on this in a later post)

Still to do:

• Plant more beetroot seeds (I've had some soaking in water for a couple of days to help improve their germination rate)
• Plant onion seeds
• Finish removing the fruitless pumpkin vine from the east garden bed
• Complete the potted worm farm
• Pull up weeds
• Lay down cardboard over weeded paths to prevent more coming up, place stones on the cardboard to keep them in place until I can put down mulch

Not quite a clean slate...

I moved into my newly built first home in March 2015. Before I could start creating my very own garden, I first needed fences installed. Then concrete around the house, as per my building contract because the area is full of rock and reactive clay. That means it shrinks and cracks in summer time, and then swells and expands in winter time. 

Anyone with clay soil can testify that any amount of moisture all tends to make the clay sticky. This in turn means you get 1-2 inches of the stuff stuck to the bottom of your shoe every time you put a foot down.

Mix this dense sticky clay-mud with building rubble and concrete slush, then throw in some overgrown weeds, and you get a good understanding of why I decided to focus on setting up the inside of my house first, and why I didn't often venture outside much that first winter. I had my ever-growing collection of potted plants set up on my alfresco which was the only shelter I could afford them from the unusually bitter cold Melbourne winter (coldest on record, we learnt later), and it stayed that way until September.

I do remember spending an entire day weeding once the weather produced a decent day of sunshine, yet not managing to clear even half my property of weeds. I did end of horribly sore all over from the muscle effort involved.

But it wasn't until late September that I put out a call to friends willing to help me to ask for their time and assistance that things really got moving. I'd hoped to get my side fences up to prevent anyone just walking into my backyard. By the end of the long weekend, I had three garden beds ready for planting.

My garden of wellbeing truly began with that weekend.