Best blog award

I just got this award from Jean http://jeansgarden.wordpress.com/ - wow, thank you! - now I have to figure out how to post links etc. I am honoured, and just love the fact that I can share my lovely garden with others who love gardening.

I especially enjoy the fact that this is gardening worldwide, where I can see the gardens that get completely engulfed in snow for months at a time and then emerge full of colour the following spring! Then I can also share with other tropical gardeners how to garden year round with extremes of water and heat. I love all gardens!

So I am passing this award on to other bloggers who I enjoy reading: I never completely follow instructions, so havnt listed 15, and if you dont want to participate, I quite understand :)

Post the award on your blog along with the name of the person who passed it on to you and link to their blog. Choose 15 blogs which you have recently discovered and you think are great and pass it on to them. Don’t forget to leave a comment on their blog to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

This is one blogger who I really feel everyone needs to have a look at: a lot of variety in this blog - but I especially enjoy her writing style. Not a lot of photographs, but I enjoy her stories. She gardens in a similar climate to me.

http://bloominthyme.wordpress.com/

This gardener is in a totally different climate to me, but I love her writing style and variety in her posts. The recipes are awesome!

http://gardentherapy.ca/



Rhonda at http://down---to---earth.blogspot.com/
is another Australian blogger and has lots of useful tips on living frugally and simply. Just reading her daily posts is refreshing and calming! Suddenly I am making pineapple vinegar and growing loofas so that I can make soap like she does!
I have been following this blog since I first discovered it. Every article is just chock a block full of information! I love the variation it brings, being a co-op.

http://simple-green-frugal-co-op.blogspot.com/

You can pass it on, or do whatever you want with this award, but I am pleased to be able to introduce these bloggers if you dont already "know" them!

Hello there, honeyeater

I love these little birds called honeyeaters, and we have plenty of them now - they are attracted to the passionfruit flower and the cats whiskers and the bottlebrush. All of which is flowering at the moment. I know they like to start their nests on hanging things, and I have tied a few bits of string at strategic places, but these have all been ignored. Yesterday after bringing in the washing we discoverd the start of a nest on the end of a piece of underwear! My hubby carefully disentangled it and attached it straight to the washing line which is under the eaves just outside our office window. Amazingly the bird has come back and is adding to the nest, how exciting and what a good vantage point we have. He keeps hopping back to gather bits and pieces from my compost pile. We just recently got a leaf mulcher and he seems to like the small pieces of leaves! The photos are all taken through glass so not the best quality, but just wanted to share!

Recycling to make a beautiful garden feature!

I have always loved chimneas, but in the hot humid tropics any extra form of heat seems superfluous and in fact downright silly.
We do however have mosquitoes, and at this time of the year always have mosquito coils burning....... along with a couple of citronella candles,....... along with personal insect repellent on really bad evenings.
So.. I was eying these palm fronds that just lie around the bases of palm trees and end up in the landfill. I nabbed this one from a friend and voila - a tropical chimnea :)

This is what it looked like in the raw...

I cut the bottom end straight and glued it to a pot base. My hubby very kindly spray painted it with a terracotta colour spray paint.

It puts out a lovely glowing light, the candle is protected from the wind and best of all the outlay was a can of spray paint!

Bottlebrush

Variegated leaves like this add some "depth" to the dark foresty area of the garden. they are also lovely in flower arrangements.

These ground orchids are lovely - they appreciate a shady moist spot and continue to multipy and happily bloom all through the year.

The ginger family is quite large - a lot of plants are in the ginger family, but most of them are grown for their flowers, as this one is. The flower forms on long leafed branches and eventually the flower will begin to grow new leaves. It can be pegged down onto the ground at that stage where it will form a new plant. I believe this form of propogation is called layering

In most areas of the world this is a houseplant, commonly called a cupboard lilly. I have one inside, but this one is very happy out in the shade fo the lychee tree amongst the bromeliads, orchids and other shady loving plants.

My weeping bottlebrush, otherwise known as calistemon is flowering at last. I dont know why it took so long. Maybe it needed more water as now we have been getting lots of rain. I had classed it as an australian native that preferred the dry weather. Who knows? I would love to find out more about pruning this plant - it has two main branches that are leaning the way I dont want the bush to go. I was thinking if I cut it back to one central leader it might put out more evenly spaced branches. Then again maybe a weeping type bush doesnt have just one central branch. Anyone have any advice on this?

Heleconia progression

A slice of hot pink in the garden alerts me to the fact that another heleconia is beginning.

This is such a striking flower and I love the fact that each flower is in my garden for more than a month!

Spicy weekend!

Are people who keep a gratitude journal more blessed or just more likely to notice their blessings?


















I am always amazed at how like a gratitude journal this blog is. Once I start peering around the garden looking for new things to photograph I discover so many things that might have just slid by without being noticed.
Driving in from work on Friday afternoon I glanced up to see LYCHEES! Admittedly there are only about two dozen on the whole forty foot tree, but there is a lovely pink bunch about twenty foot high! Now how do we get them down, and what will I do with them. I once had a lovely salad with soft butter lettuce, lychees, and avocado. Magic combination.



















Now on to the reason that I named this blog post spicy weekend:
It just took a little bit of rain for the turmeric to decide that the wet season has started. Lots of little green shoots coming up around last years rhizomes, which I got from a neighbour, and then toward the end of the wet they will start to form new turmeric rhizomes. This spice is great in curries and is very good for the digestion, especially in diabetics. I like to grate some into plain white rice, and it turns it a lovely golden colour. Then I throw in a couple of raisins and serve it with my bobotie, a traditional South African dish.

I find it best just to "store" it in the earth - when I need a little bit, I just go and break it off.


Eventually my ginger has come up again. I have tried many times to get my store ginger to send out long shoots so that I could plant it, but each time a little shoot would send out a pathetic little shoot and then the whole thing would shrivel up and die. It didn't matter if I kept them wet or dry. These I just buried into the ground and they seem to be doing OK, maybe they prefer to do their own thing and not be messed with....... give them warmth and water and they will grow. I will be so happy to be growing my own ginger, and I think once it is established I can leave it in the ground and keep harvesting from the same plant, the same as I do with the turmeric.










In other news around the garden - I took a few close-ups of the bromeliad flower. The thing I love about all the tropical flowers is that they stick around for so long and they just look so luscious and colourful.




















The red mandevilla vine is going crazy climbing up and twisting around the neighbours fence
I should ask if she minds, but I don't think she will.
She has some lovely hibiscus plants and will often poke a bud through the gaps in the fence so that I can also enjoy one of her flowers :) These gaps in the fence are quite useful for plants to hang onto instead of a flat close together fence, but I heard of another reason they put these gaps in the fence: During a cyclone the gaps in the fence will cause the wind to disperse and so often the gaps will save the fence being knocked right over. I hope we never have to try it out, but it sounds like the gaps might have more than one use.
























Just when I thought my weekend couldn't get any better I noticed a flash of lime green...... venturing round the side I saw this!
























These bromeliads were given to me by my neighbours on the other side. I cant say I liked the look of them, - I wasn't sure if the spots all over were a mineral deficiency, but they filled a gap in my little front garden. I had to keep propping them up as the bandicoots seemed sure there was buried treasure underneath them, so they really were falling around like drunken spotted aliens. Now I am going to
straighten them all up and carefully tend to them, and hopefully be rewarded with a dozen of these beautiful flowers!

These colours remind me of my daughters wedding last July - hot pink and lime green.

Here is the cake I made for her - isnt it an amazing likeness?

How grateful I am to God for my garden, my family, my friends, and of course my wonderfully supportive hubby who takes care of so much so that I have lots of time in the garden.

An orchid in flower!

I have had this orchid tied to the branch of my lychee tree, and occasionally remember to water it, and suddenly this morning I glanced at at it to find that it has a lovely spray of orchids. This is such a very delicate orchid in colour and in the fragility of the petals - they seem almost translucent.













My favourite heleconia the pink and orange one is flowering again - in fact two flowers now - one still a slender bud. It is a spreading one so I will have to be vigilant to stop them spreading all over the garden. You get clumping and spreading heleconias, and sometimes just have to put up with the spreading type in order to get one you like.


















At the end of my path into the center of the garden is a beehive ginger, and these are the developing flowers - they shoot up out of the ground next to the branches. They are very long lived, start out like this and slowly develop more unfolding petals. These are not actually the flowers - the flowers then eventually grow out of the pockets.














Here is a picture of a very hard to photograph asparagus - you supposedly get very slender stalks like this the first year and they start to get bigger and more prolific every year after that. So far the stalks have just been snacks for the gardener, not enough for a meal, besides which I am supposed to leave a percentage to form fronds to feed next years crop. All a learning experience, though, and others say that because they didn't harvest at all that their plant stopped bearing! I have spread seaweed around as mulch - supposedly they like that!






I do enjoy pottering around my little garden and growing what I can, but also enjoy tropical gardening on a grand scale from a visitors vantage point. See my other blog for a trip we took to the Cairns botanical gardens for some truly beautiful flowers.

http://explorethetropics.blogspot.com/

Path to nowhere

Well here it is -
the path into the centre of the garden.
It makes it easier to get in and weed and pick flowers. Obviously I like to the do the picking flowers way more than the weeding! My grandson likes to wander in there and hide away behind the plants, and that is just what I wanted to achieve - a sense of adventure --- mmm... what does that path leads to. :) There are some interesting flowers forming just at the end of the path - called beehive ginger. And of course my lovely anthiriums.
photos coming soon.

The path is made with crusher dust and a few flat stones from the local beach - still collecting stones everytime we go - I love the different colours they show, especially when wet.

In other news - the sweet potato vine is going gangbusters - I must really cut some of the shoots and stir fry them - they are supposed to taste delicious. Unlike white potato shoots which are poisonous!

My arch is as I predicted it would be - dripping with passionfruit! I think it looks as though all two hundred of the fruit will ripen at once - anyone have any ideas what to do with so much passionfruit?