Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

A March garden report

Well that's the Labour Day long weekend out of the way - now it's time to get ready for Easter. I was going to say Pancake Tuesday, but I then realised I'd missed that by a month.

This morning it's what I'd call a perfect Autumn morning. Refreshingly cool and still. One can almost hear our new bit of grass growing. We know its been growing because the slabs of turf can no longer be lifted off the ground. The roots have grown where before there were none.

We had a phenomenal display of rooting elsewhere on the weekend. We bought a small specimen of Thai lemon grass from the herb section in Bunnings on Friday morning. My wife planted it that afternoon. On the Sunday morning we decided to move it to a better location. When we lifted it there was a mass of fresh roots a half inch long. We've never seen such rapid root growth on any plant. I reckon it must have been due to the surplus Dynamic Lifter we'd dug in to the garden after we planted the lawn area a few weeks ago. I'm thinking of buying another bag to do other areas.

I spent a couple of hours with some other plants yesterday. I was putting in wall fixings where we want to train them. One area has been with a grape vine above the double door of our garage. Last year I confessed to accidentally chopping off the existing branch which had taken several years to train. See 20 May 2007.

I'm really amazed that I've been able to coax the vine back to the way it was in less than one season. A new vine-leader now runs up and over the full width of the garage door and is still going strong. I've just run the tape measure over it - 6.5 metres of new growth. Such efforts need support. I've put brass hooks in the brickwork every 200 centimetres. See I can work in metric if I try.

Another plant needing support has been our stephenotis. It's located against a limestone wall in our Chinese warrior garden and has made a flush of new growth. It's going to be a winner too. I put Rawlplugs and brass screws into the wall at strategic locations to train it where we want it to go. I've put a picture of my handiwork in a folder called 'Our Garden' my Picasa website.

Another creeping plant which is going to do well is our 'Nelly Kelly' grafted passionfruit vine. It's doubled it size in a month. I put a pic of it in the same folder so it can be compared to later on.

Milly the pup was with me when I photographed the passion fruit vine. She discovered the remnants of some old withered tomato vines with a few shrivelled tomatoes on the ground. They're not there any more because she ate them. Yum! There's a pic of her at work.

Near the passion fruit vine are some grapevines growing on a trellis. They're still stacked with grapes. I put a picture of them in the folder too. I'll start giving a few bunches to the neighbours today.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!