Need More Muscles!

Yeah. So, about that palm tree stump. I wasn't kidding when I said it was encased in solid clay. Another hour of chipping at it:




...and I still can't get the horrible thing out of my garden.



Need more muscles!

More Stumpy Success

Action Man ignored his doctor's advice and took the oleander stump out today. That big steel bar? Apparently it's a fencing bar. Yeah, he just used that, like he was uprooting a turnip.

Meanwhile, I carted away 6 wheelbarrows full of rocks from around the stump of the spiny palm tree and patiently began digging my encircling trench. When it was about a foot deep, the heavens opened. I abandoned the job. The stump will still be there next week! Maybe wet clay will be easier to chip through than dry clay.

Shopping: Spent some more cash. Jute twine. Garden wire. 4L of Seasol. A watering can. Total: $31. That brings our running total to $122.

I seasol-ed the finger lime and the mandarin trees. Someone remind me to do it again in a fortnight, OK?

Maybe I need a gardening calendar. Would that make me a total garden nerd, then?

Honey Murcott Mandarin

Yesterday, I managed to get the stump of the pencil pine out of the ground.

It was TOUGH. The soil was compacted clay; I felt like I was chipping away at a glacier with an ice pick as I tunnelled my trench around it. Then, the roots were too thick to just cut them with the blade of the mattock. I isolated each one and washed the clay off it. Then, in the absence of functional pruning saw, Action Man unpacked a perfectly good wood saw for me to use. Once seperated from the tentacles that snaked under the house foundations, I was able to work Pointy, Heavy Metal Bar (Action Man: Does it have a real name?) under the stump and use all my weight to lever it out.

I cackled in an evil hag type way when I finally kicked it over.

Anyway, the search for HM Mandarin came to a happy conclusion about forty kilometres from the local nursery ("we don't have any...are you sure you don't want Imperial?"), and the very helpful lady there also gave me a bag of gypsum with which to try and break up the clay soil.

If I'm keeping score of the cost of setting up this garden versus the value of the (distant, eventual) produce, I might as well mention now that it was $26 for the tree, plus another $25 odd for gypsum, citrus planting compost and a bag of pine bark. Adding the $40 spent on the two finger limes, total out of pocket so far is $91.

bLimey!

I'm not exactly a model of patience.

When I took my plan for the Enchanted Orchard to Action Man, he agreed to help on the condition that I be PATIENT and not go planting things willy-nilly without the proper preparations.

What he meant was, not planting trees until the beds were prepared.

Not planting them until the drip watering systems were installed.

Not planting them until the paths and other infrastructure were in place.

That's all well and good, but I happened to opportunistically snap up a couple of pink-fleshed Australian Finger Limes, and they happened to be in very small containers, and there's no way they could wait a few months with their root balls all strangled like that...

...so I cheated.

The big skeleton of a dead frangipani that hunched evilly in the existing garden bed nearest the house? I decided it was time for it to go.

This did not involve an insignificant amount of work. First I had to remove all the stupid rocks, which were alive with spiders and cockroaches (but, thankfully, no green ants). Then, I had to pull up the cloth weed matting underneath.

I think the weed matting may have been responsible for the death of the frangipani. Despite two days of rain, the soil underneath the matting was bone dry. It's a good lesson in the Evils Of Weed Matting.

Forging onward, I used the excellent instructions of Michael McGroarty, found here: http://www.freeplants.com/tree-stump-removal-instructions.htm

Lo and behold, the tree came down, even in the absence of a sharp pruning saw.

Once down, I discovered it was too heavy for me to lift out of the way. Yeah. Really should have gone and bought that saw. Anyway, when Action Man came home, he helped me roll the frangipani's corpse down the front lawn, and I was able to plant the Finger Lime:

It was either return the rocks to the Place From Which They Had Come, or, in a sort of frenzied Rock Apocalypse, take them all away and replace them with pine bark, which is what I plan to use in the rest of the front garden. But I was all worn out by the effort of moving just one wheelbarrow full of rocks, and I didn't think my back would appreciate any more shovelling at that point.

So I have sneaked in a tree without doing any of that other stuff. Just one. But it gives me great pleasure to have put something in the ground. Even if it was rather heavy, horrible, clay ground that required much breaking up and mixing in sandier stuff from elsewhere.

Mysterious Groundcover

In the tradition of Spying Gardeners everywhere, I saw this attractive groundcover while I was out walking:

...and now I need to know what it is! I want to grow some, and I don't feel right sneaking over there with a shovel in the middle of the night.

Can anyone help?

Blunt Tool Put to Poisonous Use

No, I'm not talking about Cheney. I'm talking about the blunt pruning saw that I tried to use to hack off the multi-armed medusa that was the oleander (now, officially mine to destroy as I please! Muahaha!)

Most of my gardening tools were still in transit or packed in boxes. And I could only find one gardening glove. But I couldn't wait any longer.

Boy, do I wish I'd at least gone out and bought a new saw.

By the end, I was just cutting through the bark and then snapping the branches off with brute force.

Action Man asked me to leave a mtre or so to help with the stump removal later on.

And...voila!

Who knew there was a letterbox behind there?

Waiting...

I've been twiddling my green thumbs the last couple of weeks as certain...difficulties...have arisen with the house sale.

Although I am sorely tempted to take a saw to that oleander, I don't TECHNICALLY own it yet, so it's best to be patient for a little while longer.

Meanwhile, the days and nights are getting colder. The crepe myrtles are turning all shades of crimson and orange. I wanted my citrus plants to have a chance to consolidate a little before winter, but it looks like it isn't going to happen.

Oh well. Time to read up on planting bare-rooted trees.