Woo! Summer!

It is Friday, which means I don’t know if it will be raining tomorrow, or freezing cold, or blowing a gale..

I hope you are all having some sort of good break from your usual routine! We started back at work on Monday and I am a little relieved that I am working during the gross weather, if it was beautiful all week I would get a bit of FOMO.

What I’ve been obsessing over this week

Should I bother staking anything? Won’t the wind tear it to pieces? If it lies nice and flat hopefully it can avoid the wind? All of my tomatoes look like this- they have been growing with the wind- and in the end I put little pots underneath the tomatoes to keep them off the ground where they were touching the dirt-

And then I scuttled inside and waited for the weather to stop. This weekend I was thinking of re-staking them, actually, getting those tomato cages (I love a tomato cage) but just because it is not windy at 6:53am on Friday does not mean it will remain still at any other minute of this week so hmmm… Also, I am extremely bothered that tomato cages and the cute plant trainers never seem to last longer than a season. I nearly bought 6 $50 ones the other day, but figured they would also probably just curl up and die on me so I am still using bamboo..

These things. Maybe I spray the heck out of them with rust-stopping black spraypaint and hope they don’t get all bent up this time?

What are my staff up to?

I’ve been thinking, because the team is all getting quite experienced, that we are going to set up a few gardens at home base and our weekly focuses will be actively practiced on here. The only real gardening they do here is when we do trimming focuses and we attack the ivy which my neighbour keeps politely mentioning, hoping I will have time to actually remove it (we have a doer upper house- I do not have a spare day to pull it all out- it is wedged between a fence and a garage, so we just keep hacking it whenever it pokes through the fence). So I have been setting that up, and the poor fools have no idea.

Sometimes it is hard to illustrate just how big a mow some lawns are. This one was so high when we started that we couldn’t feel where the dirt was underneath. I had some suspicions- just in this middle of this picture where the mower had just passed over…

Behold the whole-ass mattock I found under the grass! Yeah, with jobs like this and crazy weather on the first week back I was right to give staff a week off of the usual weekly focuses..

The Māhoe are seeding

This is always a special time for me, because they are in the Violet family, which is really obvious once you know that, because look at their seeds-

There is nothing I like better in Summer, than to stick my head into one of these trees and look up to see all of the purple. Plus, in Wellington, Māhoe self seed everywhere, and we are all constantly hacking them back- isn’t it nice to appreciate one of our natives for once!

Gardening tasks for the week

This week I am paying special attention to whether the stems or branches of plants were damaged in the winds. You can often tie them back together, wrap them tightly with something, and a stake if needed, if not then cut them off below the break.

It is also a good time for successional planting, if you want plants to keep growing into Winter- most of what you see at the shops at the moment is either in its largest form or won’t finish growing before Winter (don’t bother planting tomatoes, for instance). But there is often a good range of coreopsis, lavenders, alyssum and other tiny plants that if planted now will be well loved and in great form either this Autumn or early Spring next year.

I have been pinching cuttings of plants from friends, and passing others around, because things are starting to get big and unmanageable- we cut some daisies back the other day and I have a bagful of daisy cuttings to jam into soil- if you do this, cut them to where the wood colour is changing (not really thick, hard shoots, and not the still-green ones, the smaller but browning off shoots), and most perennials (plants that live for longer than one season) will take root if you put them in pots or the soil and keep them a bit damp.

This is also the time of year that I stop putting leaves and all sorts onto the garden beds directly and instead put them in my compost heap, this is because leaves are going to start falling soon, and if they are all left on the garden bed they will consume my plants! So now is a good time to start up the compost heap, reduce the fly population by reducing the proportionate amount of food in there, and if you put enough in, it will break down a bit quickly and you can spread it in Winter.

Have a great week everyone, it’s good to be back!