Budding Lavendar

My Lavendar Bee Pretty has put on new buds! For now, I am not going to fuss around this plant and will leave it as it is. I think the more I fuss about lavendar, the more it suffers. :P

I bought this small pot of common mint from a nursery. Just could not resist the smell of mint and I love putting some of its leaves into teas. The pot has been standing at the kitchen window ledge. I have prepared 3 cuttings out of the larger ones and waiting for them to root, one is already doing so after 5 days in water. Just needs to do a plastic cloche to house it once I re-pot it as mint is very susceptible to white flies and caterpillar attack (the previous pot I got from IKEA not only had white flies and caterpillars but also rust). This time I am more prepared about this subject on transplanting.

The Purple King has indeed survived the burning heat (http://organic-is-better.blogspot.com/2009/02/damage-in-heat-wave.html ) is producing new leaves and shoots! I am looking forward to collecting some beans. Hopefully by mid-autumn, it will produce some. At the moment, I am just giving it lots of tender loving care. :)

Remember the cayenne pepper which had leaves like the above? Yellowing spots along the veins...(http://organic-is-better.blogspot.com/2009/02/long-long-entry.html). Well, I have worked out that it was not over-fertilising. It is some kind of nutrient deficiency. I gave it some quick soluble plant food 'Aquasol' on 10 Feb and it seems to be getting better. Aquasol contains trace elements and probably the cayenne pepper is lacking in one or two of them. Lack of several elements can cause yellowing like this, though there may be different specific yellowing patterns for each lacking element. The yellow spotting is going off and the plant is putting on new shoots at the side of the main stem. Leaves are also greener now. :) See below :

The tomato bush is almost reaching its end. Remaining tomatoes are ripening constantly and I harvest on a daily basis. Up to date, I have harvested about 40 tomatoes :

A new chilli which I bought...really spicy one...gives some kick to the food we eat :) Will be potting it on once it is ready.

Finally! I lay my hands on this pot of curry plant from Bunnings. A new addition much coveted. Smells like curry definitely and I thought a little like a bitter chinese herb called Tung Kway too. Looks a little like Lavendar but has silvery felty leaves. This little pot needs potting-on soon.

A Smoky Day...Some Work and Some Harvest...

Today is a smoky day due to the bush fires in some parts of Victoria which left hundreds dead. This morning as I opened the door to the backyard I could smell smoke and I was astonished for a moment, wondering if the reserve behind us was on fire! I told Hubby and he said today would be a smoky day. The tomato sucker which rooted in water and planted into a potting mix with coir fibre, cow manure and seasol as below has been out in the sun. Hope this one takes off and show me some growth as the previous one was stunted due to reasons which I do not know of. Well, I doubt I have much time to see any fruiting anyway since it is already mid Feb/late summer. Gardening is pretty much experimental for me at this stage but I would like to ensure the plants do grow well. Thyme was harvested again today and this is how it looks like thereafter :

The rooted vietnamese mint cuttings were in their green planter. Could there be any other herbs that is as easy to grow as this? They just thrive with nothing much except sun and lots of water and an occasional amount of seasol :

The red skin potato plant is growing well in the pot from a tiny bud :

As I was watering all my herbs, I found a broken vietnamese mint stem in the pot. Not sure how it broke but it was all soft and limp. I quickly put it in a container of water and it was absorbing water so well. Now it is turgid again. I know I need not wait very long before roots appear and it can be planted into the green planter with the other two.

This is how the buk choy look like a few days after harvesting. New leaves are growing already. Buk choy is a cut and come again vegetable. Great to have!

This is the harvest for my kitchen - some tomatoes to ripen as usual and a bunch of fresh buk choy. Also harvested a bunch of thyme, a few sprigs of rosemary and 5 cayenne pepper.

Over these few days, I was pleasantly surprised to see little shoots coming out of the sun-fried purple king bean plant. I thought it was a gone case. Fortunately for it, I hadnt pulled it out of the ground. It seems to be resurreting with new green growth of shoots. Here's a peek at it before the heat wave, after and now :

I do hope it will grow again even though its older leaves were toasted by the scorching heat and have turned as crispy as potato chips.

So In Love with Herbs & Spices!

One of my greatest desires is to grow a lot of herbs and spices in my garden, whether in pots or on the ground. Herbs are such wonderful things to have - good to throw some into dishes, really beneficial for health, nice to just smell them or rub them with my finger tips and give such a glorious view. I can spend a lot of time just admiring my herbs. Currently, I have about ten pots of herbs/spices in my garden - thyme, rosemary, lavendar, vietnamese mint, oregano, thai basil, mixed basil (including lemon, thai and purple basil), bay, mint and chilli. I would love to add the following to my list - coriander, curry plant, curry tree, lemon grass, aloe vera, more types of chillies - some time soon. My revived Lavendar Bee Pretty sitting so prettily. Some flower buds are developing again. Hope that I will be able to see them flower a second time within six months.

Mint producing a few little plants at the base - slowly - I guess being confined in a pot does that to the mint.

Bay tree growing slowly as it is. More leaves but same height, I th ink.

Oregano is producing little shoots from below after the trimming.

Rosemary sprigs harvested one week back see them growing new ones again! :) A little pot like this is actually sufficient for my family's usage.

Thyme was given a boost by cutting back and here they go, shooting up new soft wood stems again. There is so much to harvest and give away.

My Mixed Basil from seeds...Purple Basil, Lemon Basil, Thai Basil...rubbing the different leaves with finger tips and smelling it is refreshing! Even my boy wants to have a sniff at them.

Vietnamese Mint leafing more and more after harvesting one big handful to be dried.

The shallot flowers have opened...

Damage in the Heat Wave.

This week's weather is going to be really cool, hovering around 20 deg cel only! Last Saturday, we just had the heat wave that went up to 46! It was horrendous and I was shuffling around doing damage control like an ant on hot bricks. It was certainly hot and scorching early in the morning. This was what I did : 1. Moving my pots of herbs to the side of the house. 2.Shading as many vegetables I could with 4 umbrellas (that's all I had and I am going to buy more cheap ones!) 3. Watering all of them including the lemon and peach trees to give them a good start in their fight against the sun. 4. Tying some to stakes so that they can resist the wind. The wind was so strong (45-50km/h). I resorted to using bricks to hold them to the ground over the vegetables. For those which I had no means of shading, one can imagine what happened. Here are some pics of those which cooked and almost cooked under the sun. All the sunflowers could not be shaded since they were so tall. All were exposed to the mercy of the scorching heat and strong wind. The petals and leaves were kind of burnt.

Some of the leaves of the tomato were scorched even though I tried covering the bush with black plastic sheets made from clean garbage bags, which was battered by the strong winds.

My lovely purple king before the heat wave. It actually survived the other week's heat wave reaching 43 deg for 3 days.

My purple king thereafter. I could not shade it properly due to the stake and it got fried.

Part of the melon plants were scorched as the umbrella was blown off. However, most survived and looked fine the next day. I am almost giving up hope on them as there were dozens of flowers but only two fruits so far. One actually turned yellow and dropped off. The other is left but I am not very hopeful it is going to develop further. The melon plants are just trailing everywhere and taking up the vege space.

Propagating Rosemary and Can-o-worms.

My little gardener with Marco and Smokey.

My Can-o-worm farm parked in the garage is doing well. This a peek at it. Not looking forward to Saturday, where temperature may soar to a 43 deg again. :(

This lemon tree was suddenly in a bad shape. Not sure if it was due to the extreme heat last week or a nutrient deficiency (as I have not done a thing for it before). A lot of leaves yellowed and dropped, as did the lemons, both large and small. I have tried to water it around the dripline and fertilised with less than a handful of citrus fertiliser. Hope that helps!

A strawberry? It is a deformed tomato, due to either too hot or too cold temperature during pollination, and will produce poor quality fruits.

Tip : Misting flowering plants in the early morning provides humidity and this favors pollination from bees.

This surviving Purple King is growing its way up the support without much help on my part. :)

The Rosemary Propagation Mid-Summer Experiment :

5 stalks of rosemary soft wood cuttings in jar of normal tap water.

5 stalks of rosermary hard wood cuttings with soft wood on top in jar of normal tap water.

Some water was poured away after a few days, retaining a little and fresh tap water topped up. Jars are placed near indirect sunlight as window sill. No rooting hormone used.

Result : It took 20 days before I could see roots appearing on any stem.

5 hard wood cuttings rooted. 1 soft wood cutting rooted. Rooting zone : nodes.

Conclusion : Hardwood cuttings have the highest chance of rooting. Contrary to some books which say that hardwood cuttings should be taken in autumn and softwood cuttings to be taken in summer, the hardwood cuttings in my experiment all rooted in mid-summer where else the only one softwood cutting rooted pathetically.

Tip : It is useful to wrap the cuttings and jar in a clear plastic bag to reduce transpiration (water loss through evaporation) from the leaves. In my case, I did not do so but it still worked in this hot summer climate.