Goooood morning!
Oh dear, I do hope you have a nice weekend. The weather around the country has been awful- and I am so sad to hear about the landslide up north too.
Can we please all acknowledge the literal everpresent looming dark cloud of climate change now, please?
What I’m obsessing over this week
Cheeky one but I have finally bought a pole chainsaw. I have rarely seen these used properly, I still have flashbacks of watching two guys standing directly underneath the boughs they were cutting off! Deathtraps, I called them.
Well I am eating my own words and looking forward to using my pole chainsaw this weekend (thanks Husqvarna and Aladdins Lower Hutt). There were a few final pushes in the right direction- Cabbage trees often end up with dead bits, but are impossible to climb; I am tired of climbing too-small trees to lop off a single branch. So let’s see how this goes!
What staff learnt about this week
I am actually using this section this week! Staff are learning about how to manage areas like this, where clients have spread a combination of wildflower seeds and/or compost. These areas inevitably result in some enormous weeds, people too anxious to pull them (what if the black nightshade is actually a sunflower?) and a bit of a ‘mare.
At the end of the day, fully weeding areas like this often ends up in weird empty patches and desireable plants struggling to stand up because they were leaning on weeds.
In this case we are evaluating carefully. In the best case scenario we weed everything we can address, leave things that would result in damage to desireable plants, and densely spread more wildflower seed.
If you want to keep an area of your garden as wildflowers, I would suggest either mowing it all down every year and reseeding every Spring from a blank slate, or quitting your day job in order to keep it weeded.
Wildflower gardens come from a part of the world where barely anything grows. They rely on plants that enjoy the dry, less fertile soil and a lot of harsh sun. In areas like this wildflowers have very little competition! In NZ’s moist, fertile soil, the wildflowers will always be battling the weeds, and the weeds will inevitably win.
I would also suggest embracing the ‘weedy’ plants if you want a wildflower garden- nice flowering plants that do well in your garden to an aggressive degree (like purple toadflax, below)
Some garden tasks for this week
Chop everything unneeded back. A good rule is to cut back to the flowers or fruit or where you want it to shoot from- whatever comes first.
A few properties that I have seen the past few weeks look pretty bleak- partly they would benefit from a load of fertiliser to get them through this high growth, high moisture time. Top dressing with compost is a good idea.
We have a few absolutely destroyed plants at our properties lately- a combination of weird summer storms and salt- we will be washing all of the salt off their leaves, giving them a large amount of gypsum (watered in of course), top dressing with good compost, forking in some sheep pellets and then giving them a foliar feed with a really boring fertiliser- a store bought liquid fertiliser that won’t have any oils, salts or unbalanced NPK. This is because I am a bit worried about introducing anything that will further mess with the balance of microbes in the soil. I know these plants are used to things being a certain way, whatever happened in Dec/Jan shocked them HARD, and they need the same sort of care you would provide someone recovering from the stomach flu- nothing exotic, nothing spicy or disorienting, just the opportunity to recover. I recommend this tactic if you have any plants affected by the inconsistent weather.
That’s it from me! I hope to see you at the Waikanae Lions Garden Trail, an event that I will forever insist was set up for my birthday (always on my birthday weekend- what a treat). Have a great week everyone!