Happy holidays!
Goooood morning! You will be pleased to know that right now, somewhere in Miramar, I am planting lemon trees. They have just been delivered (5:30pm Friday) and the team are all working an extra day and getting a pizza lunch on a Saturday to get this done. Then, the Wellington dream, lemons on a lemon tree in time for Christmas.
I hope that you are getting a little bit of sanity time in the garden over the next few weeks. I have a couple of ideas for you, as always! Have a go at-
Snipping off flowers, dead (to stimulate more flowers) or alive (to put into vases or give to people).
If you are snipping off flowers to put in a vase, put them in really deep water in the shade for as long as you can- hydrangeas are best soaked upside down (flowers in the water) for a couple of hours- this is to aid them in maintaining enough water in their stems. Also hydrangeas are sometimes full of earwigs, so there’s that. When I did flowers for my friend’s wedding last year, I had a bathtub full of hydrangeas soaking. The earwigs all climbed to safety. I then had to have a shower standing in the same bath, surrounded by earwigs leering down at me from the top of the shower curtain.
If you are going away, move your potted plants into the shade (assuming you do not have a pot-waterer).
Doing a little snip-snip of vines as they come up is always a nice activity.
Buying plants? Unless this is a capital C Central Plant of Importance (like a tree or potted plant), consider getting 3 or more of the same plant. This will ensure that you maintain some amount of patterning/tie in throughout your garden- jam the plants in a number of spots.
Hoes are great for this time of year. Use them to chop the plants off at the base, basically separating the top of the plant from the roots, and leave them sitting on top of the soil to wilt and compost down.
You are likely to have just discovered that your garden is full of this horrible vine with white flowers- convolvulous. Carefully, slowly, dig out all of the roots without damaging them. Any tiny piece of root will give you a whole new enormous plant in no time. Do not compost the roots. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Take up drinking or move house. (that’s a joke, but damn is it a lot of work!)
I got my soil test results back
This is for a central Wellington property that has a dead zone where nothing will grow. Here’s what I got.
Thanks, Hill Labs!
So some things are self explanatory- we have the level found, a normal/healthy enough range that it should be in, and a visual guide on the right. Here we can see that this soil is pretty crud- very little nitrogen or organic matter, heaps of sodium and quite compacted (volume weight). Most importantly, though- check out the Zinc and Copper levels! Eeek!
Where to? Well, there is no good solution here. The things that we have in this soil are elements- atoms in their smallest form- they aren’t like, say, bleach, or water, things that can be broken down into smaller things. What we have is similar to putting some drops of food colouring into a glass of water- it is extremely difficult to get said food colouring back out!
You can-
Flush it out, using chemicals, in which case the chemicals and elements go into stormwater/the ocean- not great;
Dig the soil out and put the soil in landfill- also not great. That soil basically just cannot be soil anymore;
Plant things which will tolerate the metals (depends a little on what the buildup is of) and generally, don’t plant things you or others in the environment will eat;
Plant things which will accumulate the metals in their plant tissue- then you can throw them into landfill and repeat, repeat, repeat.
The thing which stresses me out is that there is no careful reclaiming of the metal and putting it back into use somehow. At best it stays put, otherwise it is in landfill or in the ocean, poisoning somewhere else!
This sucks, and I am pretty down about it. But I am going to plant some new things there, and add some nitrogen, organic matter and gypsum (to aerate the soil a bit)… and hope for the best.
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That’s it from me this year folks! I am back on the 11th of Jan. My Substack is open for chats and hellos, and general questions- but I am turning off my work email. So from me and the whole team, I hope you have a nice end of year. I hope you remember to wear sunscreen, and do some ill-advised things, and generally get to unwind!
See you in Jan!