from garden to dinner table

The mushroom is the size of my hand and it has taken two weeks to grow to that size, from a tiny button.  My mushroom box is still producing and I hope the warmer weather will hasten the growth of the tiny buttons on the top of the box.  I picked the few spears of asparagus and the snowpeas for a stir-fry and a beautiful, sweet and crunchy dish it turned out to be.

Ranunculus

The ranunculus is very showy, especially when you have a bed, or a big pot of them growing.  Each year in spring when the ranunculus show off their colours, from pale to brilliant hues, I tell myself I must plant more of them.  In autumn, when the seeds that look like the legs of a dead insects are planted, I am usually short of the dream I have of mass planting.  I plant them in well drained soil, about the depth of the length of my thumb and with enough distance to give each plant to grow and send up tall stalks of intended beauty.

I have no idea this pot of ranunculus would bear pink flowers, almost the same colour as the azaleas that has blossomed faithfully in the four years I have had this garden.  This spot receives plenty of sunshine and when the ranunculus is spent I shall put in its place a tomato.  Even a neighbour's cat seek out a bit of space here to sunbake in.

I find growing the ranunculus in pots more satisfying as those in the ground have to fight for space in my overcrowded garden.  An advantage of growing in pots is the ability to move them when the plants are no longer showy and need to be shoved to the working part of the garden while waiting to prepare the roots for next season planting.

spring vegetables

It is too cold to be out sowing seeds but the spring vegetables are doing well.  There are plenty of green leafy vegetables and the different coloured chards and silver beets, as well as curly kales are enough to create a variety of dishes from plain stir-fry to fillings for pies or curry puffs.

The asparagus are beginning to shoot up and three or four stems are enough for a meal when added to finely sliced chards and a sprinkling of chopped chives.  Both the garlic chives and the ordinary chives are thriving and my effort at splitting big clumps into many smaller clumps are giving me more to harvest from.  The snowpeas are quite prolific and I have to remember to pinch the shoots which will make a good addition to the salad green.

Spring garden

After being away for two weeks it was wonderful to return to a spring garden alive with flowers and blossoms that may bear fruit.  The sunshine and blue sky enhanced the greenness of the lawn and new leaves.  The ornamental pear, which was bare a month ago is covered in white blossoms, albeit not too thickly, because of the pruning in winter.

The cherry tree on the right is still bare but the blossoms of the flat peach were attracting bees so I hope we'll get some fruits in February.  I love the pink of the peach blossoms, see picture.

The big peach tree is also covered in blossoms and I will cover the fruits more carefully this season to protect them from the birds and possums.  This is my fourth year in this place and the flat peach was planted the week I moved in.

While I was away I was concerned about not seeing the daffodils in flower but they are still showing off and I have quite a few of them in different parts of the garden.  They are still upright even though the strong wind that has been blowing since this afternoon is threatening to slice through delicate plants and uproot trees.

I would have to go to my gardening books to name the different varieties of daffodil in the garden and this is my favourite.

The azaleas too are doing well.  I should have taken a picture of the best of the lot, a rounded mound of pink.  

cyclamen

Over the years In have been given potted cyclamens in bloom.  When the plants died down I had left the corms to look after themselves and that's what the cyclamens had done.  Not only have they reappeared to flower, they have been self sowing seeds in areas I did not expect to find them.  

Here are a few of them sprouting up through the mulch.  Some have appeared in pots alongside the mother corm.  I have planted the seedlings in pots and in the ground underneath the jacaranda tree, but with enough light to encourage flowering.  They are a beautiful sight in different shades of pink.

They brighten up the garden in winter, where they are the happiest, rather than smothered in the heat of the house.

violets

I have patches of violets in different parts of the garden.  At the moment the little gems are shining bright.  This patch is overrun by oxalis.  It is a case of pulling out the weed when I am crouching to pick a bunch of violets for the house.  They do well enough in shady areas but to flower well they need a good dose of sunshine.

This is another variety with thicker leaves and petals.  The flowers are usually larger too.  I feed the violets when I am feeding the other plants in autumn and that seem to help with the winter flowering.

Ornamental pear

The Pyrus calleryana Chanticleer or ornamental pear as seen in the picture is very popular these days, being used in gardens as well as on nature strips.  At the moment the trees are bare after dropping their beautifully coloured leaves in autumn.  Two main reasons for growing this ornamental pear are for the white blossoms in spring and the shades of orange and red leaves in autumn.  The tiny fruits, smaller than a marble are quite useless.  This picture is of the twigs I saved after my sons pruned my ornamental pear tree about a month ago.  I had the twigs in water in the house and in the past two weeks the buds have opened up to leaves and flowers.  The tree in the garden is still bare as seen in the picture below.

My tree will not be full of blossoms in spring but it was getting too tall and too cluttered in the middle and had to be pruned and tidied.  I won an ornamental pear in bare root, at my gardening club, this month and I planted it in my friend's garden yesterday, in a position to be viewed from her sitting room.  I hope she will be able to enjoy the tree all year round, but especially in spring and autumn.