Planting and Barking

The plants have been letting me know that Spring's almost upon us. The fig tree is about to explode into greenness and the dwarf Washington Navel Orange was starting to show signs of new growth. That meant but one thing: I had to get the trees planted tout suite!

So last weekend we got stuck in, and while Suyin was engaged in the therapeutic task of picking rocks out of the garden bed, I was digging holes for the citrus trees.

Here are some holes, and here are some trees. You can guess what comes next.

You may also have noticed in the above photo that the path is looking more path-like and less like a ditch. We decided to try some finely chopped pine bark as a fill but I was too chicken to buy more than one bag in case it looked bad. It didn't, so I've since bought some more to finish it off. Now, back to the citrus..

Final preparation before planting the lemon tree. Nice path, yes?

Still being paranoid about drainage after the untimely demise of the resident lychee tree from fungal root rot, I tested the holes by filling them with water and seeing how long it took for them to drain. The nursery we bought the trees from has a handy page on planting citrus where they suggest you should plant your tree elsewhere if it takes more than 30 minutes for the water to drain away. Mine took more like 5 minutes, so I was pretty comfortable with that.

Lime, lemon and orange trees ready for a good watering in.

After that it was pretty straightforward to plant the trees and water them in. With grafted trees you're always supposed to plant them with the graft above the ground, and in this case it was no problem as there was about 15cm to play with. Now it's just a matter of making sure they have enough water to get established (but not too much!) and looking out for any signs of distress or pestilence.

Girt by Dirt

Last weekend was a pretty productive one in the Front Yard Farm, although apart from the previously mentioned spuds, you'd be hard pressed to tell just by looking at it. I finally got the leftover bricks and rubble cleared away and the mounds of soil redistributed roughly to where it should be. The temporary brick recycling facility was decommissioned, and it's surrounding soil moved. It occurred to me that all the mortar that was pummeled to dust by the jackhammer as it was chipped off the old bricks would make the soil a bit too alkaline, since it contains lime. And of course I'd been doing this right where the citrus trees are going and they do not like alkaline soils. Fortunately, after several amusing hours separating out all the rocks, mortar and broken glass from the soil, it wasn't too much of a problem to redistribute it around the vegie beds. 

Starting to look like a proper garden again. A sort of dirt garden anyway..

As an aside, you always find unexpected stuff when digging in the garden, and the past few years have yielded some interesting finds, including:

- an assortment of gardening tools
- old coins I haven't yet cleaned up or identified
- a glass bottle stopper
- layers of plastic sheeting
- several ancient soft drink can ring pulls encased in cement
- a plastic army man
- a lump of coal

Anyway, my activities didn't go unnoticed by the neighbourhood, with quite a few people stopping for chat or commenting as they passed. I was digging out some nasty onion weed next to the chard when our Greek neighbour stopped by.

"This is very bad!" he said several times, pointing at where I was digging. I though he was criticising my chard.
"The chard?"
"No this!" (pointing at the weeds) "This weed! Very bad! You have one, you get ONE MILLION!!"

Ergh. Don't I know it...

Our Japanese next-door neighbour said the garden was beautiful as she was arriving home. A few minutes later her Indian husband said it looked very professional as he was rushing out. We live in a refreshingly multicultural area.

A passing jogger said "Keep up the good work". It is nice to receive a little random encouragement.

Another lady mentioned that there's a new community garden starting up just a few blocks away. I must remember to grow some extra seedlings to send their way in an attempt to get the whole neighbourhood growing weird purple vegetables..

 

An elderly Greek lady asked if she could have some chillies, so I gave her the last few half decent ones left. I warned her several times that they are REALLY hot ones. I do hope she understood.

Can't wait to plant stuff!

Citric Assets

Cruising our nearest garden centre a few weekends ago, we came across a Eureka lemon grafted on dwarfing root stock. This was one of the trees I was after for the front yard orchard we have planned. The rootstock "Flying Dragon" is supposed to make the tree productive earlier and only grow to around 2m tall, the perfect size for the available space. We also picked up a half metre diameter pot, with a pretty black crackle glaze, on sale for $30. Bargain! They also had some similar orange and lime trees but I decided to hold off until checking whether they were suitable varieties for our area. Anyway, once home I checked out the supplier of the lemon tree and found they had Washington Navel oranges and Tahitian lime trees and their nursery was open to the public. So, the next weekend we headed up to Dural to check it out. The nursery bloke had to have a hunt around to find some, they didn't have too many citrus left this late in Winter, but managed to track down some decent specimens. He apologised that they were a bit daggy-looking, but what citrus aren't at this time of year? Actually, I think they look fine.

Orange, lemon and lime trees in their pretty colour-coded containers.

Citrus are a pretty safe option in our climate, enjoying a hot Summer and mild Winter. In our North-East facing garden with the brick house behind them they should power along. Our next purchase though is pretty high risk..

Apples!

Crazy as it sounds, we're going to try and grow apples in a nearly coastal, not-very-cold-at-all climate. You see apples require a certain amount of chilling over Winter in order to fruit. Being only around 12km from the coast means we seldom get frosts, and being in a built-up area also does not help either. Knowing this I've selected varieties with about the lowest chilling requirement there is: Granny Smith and Pink Lady. Apples also need pollinating partners to fruit successfully, hence the pair of them. These are also grafted onto dwarfing root stock as we really don't need any 5m tall trees. If all else fails I'll dig them up again and give them to someone a little further inland. I'm still not sure whether to prune them into the traditional and pretty goblet shape, or to espallier them on some sort of wire or trellis to make them more productive.

So, our visit to the nursery was indeed fruitful. Sorry. The nursery guy told me they were "..selling a lot of fruit trees rather than boring ornamentals since the revolution started". Heh heh! There was also a really nice doggy there.