In the garden - Winter 2025
It's Winter in the Gardiner garden. Some plants sleep through the colder months, but others are fruiting and flowering.
Looks like it has been 5 years since my last ‘In the garden’ post. Here’s an update for Winter 2025:
First up, this year marked Chookbacca’s tenth birthday. That’s a really good age for a bantam chicken. She had stopped laying a few years ago, but was still going pretty well until a few months ago. First I noticed she was having trouble keeping her rear end clean. I resorted to giving her a bath a few times to sort her out. Not her favourite thing to do! Sadly one morning as I let her and the other chooks out of their shed, I noticed she’d developed a bad limp. A trip to the vet and we decided the kindest thing was to put her to sleep. She’s been sorely missed by us and by the other chooks (who being a few years younger took quite a while to adjust to losing their boss).
I’ve been growing a Jaboticaba in a pot for 20 years. It is supposed to start flowering and fruiting after about 5-10 years, but our never had. It did suffer a setback around 10 years ago when I was away on a trip for a couple of weeks and forgot to make sure it was watered in my absence. Unfortunately it was quite hot while I was away. Part of the top of the plant died off, but the rest recovered.
I’ve not given up on it, and back in April I could hardly believe my eyes when I spied a few tiny flowers. They didn’t set fruit, but I’m hoping it’s a good sign for next season.
I figured it was overdue to be upgraded to a larger pot, with a bit of fresh potting mix. Hopefully that also helps.
Our Lemonade tree continues to be the standout citrus tree in our garden. Great crops of fruit. I need to give it a regular haircut otherwise it would grow too high and the fruit would be way beyond even my reach. Lemonade fruit looks like a Lemon, but it is sweeter - you can juice them and drink it straight from the tree.
Narelle was inspired by a recent episode of ABC TV’s Gardening Australia which showed how to build a frog ‘spa’. A few days later we now have one in our garden. Not sure if the frogs have discovered it yet, but I have heard a few croaking around the place so I hope they take advantage of it!
The mandarin had a real off season this year. It didn’t have many flowers, and so there were literally just 4 fruit. Usually the fruit is amazing - shop fruit tastes so bland in comparison. Hopefully it does better next season.
The Pink Lady apple had a really good crop of fruit this season. Today I picked the final two apples and removed the net from the tree. It is surprising how late the fruit ripens. I was quite attentive to keeping birds and rats away, and didn’t lose much at all to either of those.
The Tangelo citrus has probably had its best crop of fruit. The fruit has started dropping off by itself, and is not quite as sweet as I would hope. Some people add a bit of sugar to improve the taste. It’s doing well despite getting a bit of competition from a rather large pepper tree growing next door (you can see that in the background of the photo).
The nectarine and apricot are dormant over winter. The nectarine has lots of buds, so I’m hopeful of a good crop this summer. I’ve been applying a copper spray to try and mitigate leave curl. I know the year I forgot to do that the tree really struggled and lost lots of leaves. It is tricky as you want to apply it before the buds burst, but that’s now when it’s often wet and rainy. So as soon as there’s a dry day I try and get out and give it another spray.
The real lemon tree has a good crop. Some of the fruit went a bit funny after our really long hot dry summer, but most of it is now fine.
I planted some peas - some in a garden bed and some against a fence that keeps the chooks from wandering too far into the rest of the garden. I thought the chooks might attack them but surprisingly they’ve left them alone. The plants have grown really high and have pretty flowers. I’m waiting to see if they set.
The jonquils are out and flowering madly. We dug up heaps in spring as they were taking over the garden a bit, but there’s still plenty left.
And the first of the daffodils are starting to flower too.
The roses were all pruned quite hard a few months ago, and we’re now starting to get some new growth.
Winter is a busy time for weeds. Sour sobs (a kind of Oxalis) are a particular problem in Adelaide gardens, and ours is no exception. I’ve tried various things over the years with varying degrees of success.
Previously I tried herbicides like Roundup (Glyphosate), which kind of worked but there’s been increasing concern over its health risks. Hand pulling could be effective but is labour intensive - You never quite know when you pull out a plant if the bulbs will be attached or if they stay in the ground to grow again next year.
Dear old Chookbacaa also really enjoyed eating Sour Sobs - both the leaves of the plants and absolutely loved the bulbs if I dug them up for her. Sadly she’s no longer able to help with that (and the other chooks are less interested).
I’ve been attacking them this season with Slasher. The active ingredient is Nonanoic Acid (also known as pelargonic acid). The satisfying thing about using Slasher is you see results in minutes. Here’s some Sour Sob plants that I sprayed about 60 minutes earlier.
I’m hoping that will really make a dent in how many sour sobs are growing in our garden. I’ll watch with interest next year to see how effective it has been.