A wee bit of a quiet week

It has been a little bit of a quiet week here with Rick away, a perfect time I thought to really tackle the garden.  The ground is still soft from the recent down pours and with the temperatures in the gentle teens, very dooable if you were rugged up and out of the chilly southerly Antarctic winds.

The garden is flourishing and everything has benefited from the rain, TLC and general feeding it's been given over the last few months. The lemon tree is covered in its star like white flowers, we'll have an abundance of lemons if they are all still attached after the threatened storms.  I think I may well have waxed lyrical already about the roses before...  but they are beautiful and just starting to bloom.  Their leaves are glossy there is no sign of blackspot or mildew and hardly any aphids.  All helped it turns out by the banana skins we've been putting around them.  As the skins break down they add Potassium to the soil this chemical is essential for plant health and is a great nitrogen fixer.  Very good for crops too.

The few native plants we've got in are mainly doing very well and the weeds are doing best of all, they are enormous and all spare space is covered. How we ended up with such a huge crop is beyond me.  No matter, I convinced myself that if I made a start and managed not to get distracted I could, very quickly make a difference.

Is it me or do other people have similar problems with weeds?  Why is it that they pop up the moment you think you have cleared an area.... do garden gremlins follow us around and planting them when we're not looking?  Well it turned out the difference wasn't very quick in the making, infact four dustbin loads later it still didn't look much different.

Slightly disheartened I thought perhaps a trip to the local nursery to select another herb for our collection would lift my spirits.  Four plants (3 natives) and a couple of packets of seeds later, job done, I returned home spirits lifted.

I sat in the back garden having a well deserved cuppa and listened to the various bird calls.  There were the beautiful Rainbow Lorikeets crying out as the chased each other in a spectacular multi coloured fly past. Peewees singing out with their haunting call and then the familiar sound of a blackbird in full song.  It was beautiful and reminded me so much of the UK.  When I finally found him he was sitting on a forlorn almost dead tree in our neighbours garden by this time he looked like he was sporting a very wild and bushy mustache.  Not realising I was watching he disappeared into the neighbours laurel and I spotted him on a nest feeding his very silent young.

A couple of days later and the youngsters had fledged the nest and the blackbirds have done what they always do and parked the 'learners' in various gardens.  Giving them more chance of survival, they are so quiet and patient waiting in the under growth for the parents to arrive and feed them they are very hard to detect.