Spring

The enchanted orchard sees its first spring!

The Australian Finger Lime has unusual yet quite beautiful blossoms:



Petite native bees are constantly busy over it, tempted away from the tea trees (the only plants put in by the original owners that we left untouched).

One of the apple trees (the Daleys one, in case you wondered) flowered, but none of the others did, so my hopes of pollination are very slim:



And the weeping crab apple is just a font of joy. I can't wait til it gets bigger and even more gorgeous.

The cost of all these trees was fairly standard, I think. The Australian Finger Limes I've already added to the total. The other citrus (2 tahitian limes, 1 honey murcott mandarin) were $35 each. The maples and one of the blueberries, I already had. The weeping crab apple was $150 and the second blueberry bush was $12. Add another $150 worth of potting mix and clay breaker, plus a new shovel for $65 (the old one finally got too bent by me forcing it into clay), brings the grand running total to a scary $1291.

Planting

If you check the date of the last post, you'll see it was made five minutes ago, but in actual fact the logs were put in by the end of August, and the plants were put in shortly after that.

For each little tree, I dug out as much clay soil as my back could take and filled the gap with potting mix. There was one type for the citrus and another type for the maple trees.

I watered each one with seasol at day 1 and day 14.

The trees that I planted:

Tahitian Lime x 2
Honey Murcott Mandarin x 1
Tropical Apple (2 each of Dwarf Anna, Dwarf Dorsett Golden) x 4
Liquidambar x 1
Japanese maple x 1
The remaining Australian Finger Lime
Weeping Crab Apple x 1
Blueberry x 2

I'll be interested to see if there really is a difference in the healthiness of trees purchased from a nursery (for twice the price) and those purchased by mail order.

One of the Anna apple trees is from a nursery (where they told me mail order trees were dodgy) and one is from Daleys. Admittedly, the nursery-bought one has a straighter trunk, but they both seem quite vigorous.

Logs

As promised, I have used logs as a main future of the one-day-enchanted-orchard. They arrived on a truck.

First, the layout had to be marked out in lawn paint. At which point we discovered the house does not lie parallel to the kerb. More's the pity.

I planned a paved walkway with a well (or other feature) in the centre, running from the street to the front door. The gateposts were the two taller logs; the fences are to be living fences of tahitian lime (they will go where the two piles of clay soil are in the photo).




Action Man dedicated a whole day to digging holes. Hooray!





Yes, there's still LOTS of lawn, but it's still early days!

Espalier and Logs

Inspired by this post at Jamie's Amateur Gardener blog:

http://gardenamateur.blogspot.com/2008/11/squeezing-lime.html

...I've decided to espalier the tahitian lime trees and apple trees in my Enchanted Orchard. It will make the best use of the north-facing aspect and look tidy to boot. For supports, I could use just any old timber, but to complement the theme, I'm going to use logs.

HEEEEERE LOGGY LOGGY LOGGY...

Ideally, they would be gnarly old logs with the bark still on, but in light of the Evil Termite Threat, it has to be treated pine. Which is cool. They come in 20cm diameter thicknesses and a range of lengths. Hopefully they will weather nicely and add to the atmosphere of haunty goodness. I'll even put some ent-like faces on them.

The Wizard of Oz meets Lord of the Rings.

Cost: To have the logs delivered ($70 delivery charge) from the big landscape supplier in the next town 50km away, it will be close to $480. Additionally, we took a trip to Bunnings on Thursday night and purched such items as a new stainless steel shovel ($40), more gypsum clay-breaker ($10), wire and turnbuckles to connect the logs ($80), yellow grass marking paint ($12) and a 200mm diameter auger (hole-diggy thingie) ($65).

That gives a whopping $687 spent on the garden this weekend. Yikes! I budgeted two grand overall for the setup, and at $809 already, we're getting perilously close to half way.

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.