Nearly! Nearly!
Yeay! It's nearly spring - nearly spring! And how do I know it's nearly spring? Spring weeds! The first morning walk with Winnie the dog takes us ages. I keep lunging into the dirt to remove pretty parachute weeds, while she waits patiently for her ball to be thrown. She understands!
Winnie in the Driveway
I've had my first patio pot clearing and organising session - this is where I have the best success with salad vegetables. I now have large pots of spinach, lettuce, silver beet, and spring onion seedlings planted. They're all snuggled in near the eaves of the house, in case of over-night frost.
Wednesday 30th August
OK. I've had a couple of serious garden maintenance burning days, with much raking of hedge trimmings (yes, they still aren't completely cleaned up) and lashings of white billowing smoke. To keep my bonfire sweet I've been adding gum leaves raked up in the Wattle Woods, and assorted dried mess from underneath the hedge (like dried Gunnera stalks).
Bags of Horse Manure
Mean mulching...
I've also done some pretty mean mulching along the edge of the Welcome Garden and behind the big blue container. I'm trying to keep next-door's weeds from spreading. Naturally every weed I find on my side of the boundary can be blamed on next-door. So handy!
And the wormy rotted horse manure! Poor Non-Gardening Partner, who is sent down the road at all hours to man-handle more bags into the trailer - first thing in the morning, at dusk when he comes home from work... Spreading it around keeps me pretty busy, and I feel sooooooo virtuous. I rather like watching the worms - within minutes of the spreading they've burrowed down into my garden to take cover.
Friday 1st September
Of course it's nearly spring - it's September! We have our first lambs (a set of twins), the Trillium leaves have popped up from underground, and I've spied the first little blue Muscari flowers. Spring lends itself to short, sharp phrases with exclamation marks, doesn't it! Wow! Yeay! It feels as if every thought is brand new and exciting, and every new sight is a huge surprise. New colours in the garden - the violets (so tricky to photograph, the spiky red Camellia, more and more yellow daffodils...
Today isn't quite so spring-like, though, but we won't let that dampen the mood. Winnie and I haven't gone for our usual Friday morning walk in the forest. But I have done the vacuuming (eek) and lit the wood-burner (nice). I've sorted out my latest spring photographs (enjoy the Camellias before they turn brown).
And I've been to my research club MEFTA (= Mind Expansion for the Ages, or Aged, depending on how brutally honest one is feeling). Three topics, all so interesting - Boudicca (the ancient British queen) and the newly proposed theory of secret slavery messages being sewn into USA quilting patterns, and the 'history' of the Little Red Riding Hood story, complete with Freudian, Marxist, and Feminist analysis, hee hee. But this is supposed to be a gardening journal, so I'll say no more...