Garden news from April 2009

April has been a very busy month.

Have been prawing just about every week, see photo of 'Charlie' above.

In the first couple of weeks of this month we had 225 mills of rain, all tanks are overflowing and the garden is smiling.

I put up shelving in Judy’s Bromeliad house and removed all the pine bark from ground; hopefully this will stop rot disease and let in a lot more air circulation.

I have started to use Scott’s Crown 225 as an insect spray and so far I am very pleased with the results. I am also trying out ‘Amigrow’ fertilizer mixed with ‘Natra kelp’.

Judy and I have joined the Wynnum Garden Club; we have found it to be a very friendly club who have always supported our ‘Open garden’.

We have done a big garden clean up done to prepare for our visitors from Bundaberg.

My SMART gardening course has finished and we graduated with a certificate and polo shirt, where this will take us in the future I am not sure what sort of volunteer work I want to do.

We went to the ABC garden Expo and were very disappointed as it was very small and not a lot really to see.

The International Tropical Foliage and Garden Society from Bundaberg visited our garden, they came and went quite quickly, we were the last place they were visiting and they were all tired and just about gardened out by the time they reached us.

I have been invited to join the ‘open garden’ committee but not sure if I will accept as I HATE committees and have never enjoyed the few that I have been on in the past.

As well as having a ‘smart garden’ we now have a ‘smart home’ having just installed an eight-panel solar power system, which generates 1.3 kilowatts of electricity; hopefully this will ease the pressure on our electricity bills.

I continue to make small changes to the garden and will continue to do so as it will never be finished. We are looking forward to being grandparents for the first time in mid May.

Garden News from March 2009

I was invited by the Bayside Garden Club at Wynnum to give a talk on sub tropical gardening in Brisbane, which I did and was well received. I took along a selection of plants and flowers; about 60 people were in attendance. Judy and I have decided to join this club, as they are a nice lot of people.

I am still attending the ‘Smart’ gardening course and learning a bit but sometimes it gets a bit too much technical and stuff like natives plants I must admit I do not have a lot of interest in.

I was sitting down on the back patio looking at our waterfall/pond area and realised that I could really improve it, so I started to remove the front pool fence then re- install it at he back of the waterfall of course one job always leads to another so it was more bush rocks, soil and fencing material. The fence also needed to be ‘CANE TOAD’ proofed.

I also had to buy a new pond filter and pump, so this time I bought a filter with a UV light and a 6000 litre per hour pump.

The pond area looks really great now I am very pleased with the end result.

It’s the Prawning season so I am trying to get out on Tingalpa Creek as much as possible.

Looking forward to visit from the ‘International Tropical Foliage and Garden Society’ members on 19^th April 2009, they are on a bus tour from Bundaberg.

I attended an all day Native bee (sting-less) workshop and really enjoyed it. I was glad I went.

 I have planted a couple of dozen more ‘cordylines’ In the garden but it’s hard to see where they have gone. We had a garden visit last year and I was asked, “where were the cordylines”? I replied “there’s about 200 plus if you look”.

Last but not least RAIN, it only rained once in March 20 mills only.