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.