Over the past ten to twelve years, the climate in Melbourne, where I live, has been slowly changing. During this time, it has become drier and we are considered to be in a drought. It is much hotter in Summer, our Winters are sometimes milder, but we don’t actually get much rainfall, especially in Spring, [...]

Yesterday, while browsing around the hardware store plant section, we came across an Acmena smithii, otherwise known as a lillipilli. This is an Australian native plant, with edible berries. This is a plant we’ve been looking for over the past couple of months, so we picked out a good strong looking young one, and took [...]

For the past couple of days, we’ve been having some very strong winds here in Melbourne, and quite a bit of damage has been caused. I’ve been lucky, because my house and garden haven’t suffered very much, only one branch on a bottlebrush in the front garden. Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that a branch was [...]

Yesterday, I did a little weeding in the veggie patch. There were some very tiny onions, silver beet seedlings, and the broad beans were just coming through the topsoil. Good to see. Looks as if I’ll have some Spring crops now. Since it was a really nice day, I also planted corn and beans again, [...]

Looks as if I planted my beans and corn too early in the season, because they are all blackened and dead, due to frost. The strange thing is, the peas survived and are already setting fruit……. Must be tougher than beans and corn. Shall have to buy some more seeds now, as that was all [...]

In a recent post, I mentioned that although it was still Winter, the plum tree was sure it was Spring. Last night we had the warmest August night on record – 14C; not bad for what is usually the coldest Winter month! Anyway, here’s a shot of a section of the plum tree against the [...]

Someone has requested a better picture of my chickens. Fine, but it’s not that easy to get the birds to pose – they’re not models, you know! Anyway, they were wandering about in the garden yesterday, and this is what I came up with

A couple of other little garden jobs we did last weekend, which added to the pile of branches, etc., waiting to be mulched, were to prune the plum and olive trees. The olive is now looking good, and is a nice shape. It will hopefully produce very well this year – last year the fruit [...]

Last weekend we decided it was time to catch up on some tree trimming in the front garden. First to get the chop, so to speak, was a tea-tree, which was getting a little too big and was threatening the telephone cable. That was cropped about a metre, so it should grow back nice and [...]