Rampant wild garden

These are not pictures to sell real estate by. If you are looking for gardening blogs to make you ooh and ahhh and feel inspired, then you are not on the appropriate page. Nevertheless, a little story in pictures. Part of a story because blogger only likes me to upload five pictures at a time and the egg timer is nearly out on time spent away from my children. The photograph above is the current state of the area between the driveway and the garage. We first cleared it nearly three years ago. Before then the entire space you can see was so cluttered with overgrown trees and shrubs that nothing else grew for lack of light. Then a friend lent us her mulcher and chainsaw and Favourite Handyman chopped and cleared and mulched and generally worked wonders and I grew some pumpkins the following year. Last year I added globe artichokes and strawberries but the overgrowth and the poor season precluded more pumpkins. The experiment with letting the wild blackberry produce fruit for us did not work. The blackberry grew alright, but not the fruit.

Last month my Dad came down with his weed eater and cleared a good amount and it became much easier to walk out to the far side to empty the ash bucket.

Then the electrician came in the weekend and told us we had to clear a space around the cable box so Favourite Handyman spent all of Monday hacking and chopping and sawing and Fionn helped him pull down the rotten fence which bordered the driveway (and I cleared all the rotten wood and rusty iron which we had stored for some day and took it to the dump) and this is the result in photograph one. Lots of light and now I can plant pumpkins again. Today is (hopefully) the day to get rid of all the flax. Though it is raining again of course.
Above is the other end of the same area. The black hoops are over the strawberry patch. That flax to the right is coming out so I can dig up the surrounding grass and plant potatoes. Don't ask me when I will find the time. Somehow is my best answer.
This is the red hot poker, with the new growth coming up. Note the 'present' of oxalis which arrived with the red hot poker.
In the herb garden, a profusion of foliage is not a problem as the slugs seem not so keen on herbs. There are a few weeds at the front, but mostly this is lemon balm and tansy and at the back, snowdrops.
I took this photograph of my transplanted and now thriving again globe artichoke at 10am. I'm not sure why it appears as night time. Last year I never got around to trying to cook/eat the globe artichokes and left them to flower (which apparently bees and beneficial insects love) and I'm hoping that having them nearer the kitchen door will mean I make the globe artichoke culinary leap this year.

That's all. I'm hoping for fantastic achievements and amazing 'after' photographs which clearly I will never achieve by sitting around on the computer. Off to play Mrs Wishy Washy...

Comments

Heather said…
do you know that you can eat oxalis? I've become much more friendly towards it since I learned that. The leaves and stalks are really acidic and kind of lemony and taste yummy in salads in the spring when there aren't too many greens about. They even keep their tang in soups. The acid is the same acid that makes rhubarb leaves poisonous (oxalic) but I gather you'd have to eat something like 5kg of it to get a toxic dose. so just using it like a herb is fine. Johanna Knox has some stuff about it on her blog. She's even made those fancy teeny tiny pickled onions you get in delis by pickling the oxalis bulbs, but that seems too fiddly to me to try!
Sandra said…
Thanks for that Heather, it's interesting. To develop a taste for oxalis would indeed be a good thing if it meant I had fewer bulbs suffocating the garden. Spinach and silverbeet have oxalic acid in them also, from memory, but cooking them dentures it or reduces it in some way. The oxalic acid blocks calcium absorption which is why I've tended to cook my spinach and silverbeet since I first had rheumatoid arthritis.

Popular posts from this blog

McCalls 7288 & altered Style Arc Barb pants

Livingstone daisies

Heartburn & Paris Etc