February 2009 Garden News

I have now been off work for six months and have been very busy all the time; I have not been bored once. There seems so much to do all the time. I keep on asking myself “how did I do it all when I worked five days a week”. The garden takes up most of my time and I must say it is looking really good. As usual my main complaint for the month is the lack of rain, we did have a few showers in mid February but as usual Birkdale missed most/all of the heavy falls. Victoria Point, which is, only a few kilometres away had over 230 mills, whereas we had about 35 mills over a few days. Anyway we are still keeping our garden alive by watering from the rainwater tanks. I find standing watering to be much the same as watching grass grow. We had a trip up to Maryborough to see our friends there who have just started a small nursery business, as usual when we go on a trip we come home with a car full of plants, this trip was no exception. I have planted quite a few nice plants this month and they should be fairly well established by Novembers ‘Open Garden’. I have started to go prawning in our local creek, I cast net and came home with my limit of 10 kilos the other day. I had hoped that I would have the creek virtually to myself when I retired but alas not the case, I counted 11 boats all prawning last week, seems the word has spread. At least they are not the yellow raincoat brigade (Viet) who take everything that they catch legal or not. Summer is now over and I really look forward to the cooler weather. I have been attending the ‘Smart Gardener’ training course during February, it’s called master gardener elsewhere but Queensland Horticulturalists objected to that, I could call them a name which started with w and ended with s but I will be polite and not do that, it’s a bit like the article I wrote and was paid 30c per word whereas a professional would have been paid $1 a word. Ah well that’s life.