February 2014 Garden News

Firstly I would like to say thank you to the 100,000 plus readers from across the world (over 105 countries) for supporting this gardening blog.
Well, summer is over and what a summer it has been.

I have never known gardening times to be so bad, even worse than in the drought.

Summer is supposed to be our wet season where we get all our tanks filled so we can last the dry winter.

Not this year, it has only rained twice in the last three months and even then there was not enough moisture to soak through the mulch.

Our Grandchildren always like to help.

Since last July it rained twice in November, once in January and one spit in February.

All our seven tanks are empty and we are now using town water to keep our plants alive.

Whoever said gardening was a relaxing hobby?

My torch Gingers are looking shocking, someone said they had a borer but on inspection I cannot find any sign of borer, anyway I am spraying them with Crown 225 systemic spray to try and save them. Hopefully it will work.

I gave two gardening presentations during the month, one to ‘Indooroopilly Garden Club’ and one to the ‘Society for growing potted plants’.

With the latter club I was able to call into a fruit shop at New Farm and purchase some ‘Achachas ‘ which is a new fruit from North Queensland and tasted great.

WE have to dig all our Day Lily’s out as the soil we planted them in a couple of years ago was too organic and they have dried up and shrivelled, we have lost quite a few.

I am now in the process of removing the Day Lily’s putting them in temporary pots and digging a trench to replant them in good soil.

Talking about soil, I tested the last load of soil I had brought in and found it had a PH of 9 which is of course alkaline, mind you it looked really nice and smelt good also.

I then went to all the local Landscaping yards and took samples of their soils, they varied in PH from 4 to 9 and most of the employees had no idea of what PH was.

I finally found a soil and sand mix that had a ph of 5.5 so I am going to order that to plant the Day Lily’s in.

WE had a great crop of Mango’s and are picking Carambolas at the moment. Some fruit trees love the dry weather and some hate it especially Lychees and Longans.

No pecan Nuts this year as the few that were on the trees were eaten by the Cockatoos.