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.

Existing Trees

Before I start thinking about fruit trees, I have to make sure I set aside some room for my existing trees.

That's right, the cheerful pot specimens I've been lugging around with me since my University days, when they wouldn't let me have my cat in the rental apartment...so I brought trees.

While this was a gift from a Canadian, I have a sneaking suspicion that my "Sugar maple" is in fact a liquidambar. I don't want it to be, because the liquidambar doesn't have the romantic appeal - nor the Canadian connection! - of the maple.

Nevertheless, I've enjoyed having it as my little companion; it turns yellow in Autumn when I'm living near the coast, and turns red when I'm further inland.

We had a week of Ludicrously Scorching Weather about six weeks ago which burnt all its leaves off, but to my relief it's come back from the Twiggy Dead, and hopefully I can get it into the ground soon and give it the reward it deserves for ten years of potplant service.

I'm pretty sure these two are real maples. On the far left, though you can't really tell from the photo, the coral maple has the most attractive pink bark and pale, frost-green leaves. I wish I had a dozen of these.

Next to it is the Japanese maple, which was a spectacular weeping specimen before the LSW burned all its leaves off, and killed everything above the graft.

Oh well. I'm not exactly horrified by the interesting regrowth that's happening below the graft. And I'm sort of from the "if it dies then it's not tough enough" gardening school, so I'll make the best of what's left and see if I can't train a new trunk out of that tangled mess.

The tree on the right is a lilly-pilly which I begged Action Man to buy me for Christmas one year (it was trimmed into a perfect cone, and worked wonders as an indoor Christmas Tree covered in fairy lights and blue baubles).

My argument at the time was that I'd use it as a Christmas Tree every year, and we'd save money by not buying pine trees.

HA HA, save money HA HA.

I've had to repot the thing ten times because nasty green ants keep taking up residence in its pot, and when the baby came along I totally neglected the topiary aspect, so it's not really conical any more.

Can't wait to put it in the ground. The little magenta fruits are yummy, and neglecting to prune seemed to encourage heavy fruiting.

Finally, my trusty blueberry. Also took a beating in the hot weather. Also has made something of a comeback. I can't remember what kind it is, which is a shame because it's always been a good provider and I'd like to get more. Unlike the strawberries, which were always getting devastated by slugs no matter how many pellets I put down, a meagre scattering in the base of the pot was always enough to keep the pests off my blueberries.

Growing a Food Garden Full of Useless Food

Now that I’ve decided to grow food, it’s time to be a bit more specific. After all, there’s no point in growing a garden full of food that nobody wants to eat.

Food No-one Wants That Everyone Always Grows (and is therefore always trying to palm off on me):

1. RADISHES

Yes, they are the easiest things to grow. Toddlers scatter seeds in gleeful abandon, dump half a watering-can over them, come back in a few weeks and voila! Radishes!

Who eats radishes? Besides old Italian men, who miraculously bite into them (and onions) without shedding a single tear? I may have flung them, in desperation, into a salad or two in my time, but I don’t recall ever deliberately purchasing any.

2. BEETS

Get away from me with the stinking beets already! If I want beetroot on my burger, I want it pickled, sterilised and canned. Not hairy and dirty and raw and crunchy!

3. PUMPKIN

I’ve got nothing against pumpkin. It’s yummy. It’s nutritious. I have been known to pay for half a butternut when I’m planning on making a roast.

But pumpkin vines don’t give you a specified number of pumpkins in accordance with roast dinner schedules. They give you TEN BILLION pumpkins all at once. Usually when it’s really hot and you wouldn’t cook a roast if someone paid you.

4. MACADAMIA NUTS

Any nuts that I have to a) pound open with a hammer and anvil OR b) roast before eating, I can’t be bothered with. Anyone who wants to give me shelled and chocolate-coated macadamias, however, be my guest.

5. OLIVES

So many people are planting olive trees, now, like the trendoids they truly are. But olives can’t be grazed from the tree like apricots or plums; salting and marinating all takes time, and if you do it wrong you end up with rotting buckets of olives. Erk.

To be on the safe side, I want my olives to come from the supermarket.

6. CHOKOS

The day I use these tasteless alien pods in my kitchen is the day the Japanese start lobbying the Danes to stop killing whales.