January and February 2013

In December, we had felt that things were more settled than usual and this was continued in January when we started one of the longest, hottest summers ever. We had 3 weeks away, as volunteers to a remote offshore island, so we missed the only rain (on Feb 4th - which caused local floods!) but fortunately our bore and watering system were up to the challenge under the guidance of our very kind neighbours.

Before we went, we took the opportunity to tidy up the shelter belt at the end of the orchard where we had left the self seeded tree lupins as extra protection but they had rather overstepped the mark and also allowed the gorse and blackberry to re-establish themselves.

 

We had held off thinning the pears on the tree in the vege patch until after the 'December drop', but the expected winds never came. So when we did this in January, I realised there were rather a lot of them and they were almost big enough to be edible raw. So they became some rather delicious pear jam.

As always, I had planted the tomatoes much too close together in the greenhouse and some of them looked rather sick. Never mind, I'm sure we will still have a huge crop.

And we actually managed to grow enough onions to store at last.

 

And then there was the Winter Garden. I had long wanted a conservatory or indoor area like the Begonia House in town. When we were designing the house and decided to turn the house more on an angle, we had considered making the extra bit of lounge into just that but decide against it. Anyway, on our way back from the island, we had a free morning with Alice and she suggested we check out her local Winter Garden which we did and were inspired to make our own. Dave was surprisingly keen on the idea and offered to design and make one when we got home. I was uncertain as it would push the deck off the top of the list once again (and just when I thought we had worked through all the other jobs that I considered were delaying tactics) - but he persuaded me that it was a good idea as it would be much quicker than the deck. So he went ahead and made one.

The frangipani, my wonderful frangipani, had rather taken over that end of the lounge and was always struggling with scale insects and thrips so I very reluctantly decided it had to go. (I subsequently thought better of this and converted it to 4 cuttings!) Anyway, that freed up a lot of space. And we converted this ...

... into this! There was the slight problem that I didn't have enough plants for it but one that I was happy to work on. Dave had the master stroke idea to put the palms on the top level - we had wanted to buy big palms but had to settle for small slow growing varieties. But this was perfect!

And the final great idea was to ask Kath the local green gardener to come and prune our fruit trees. The plan was to get her to teach us to prune them while she was doing it - I had been to one of her courses before and it all seemed straightforward, but when we came to attack ours they never seemed to have branches in the right places. And of course, Dave and I have such differing views of pruning - he wants to attack it with a chain saw and I am reluctant to cut anything off - that it is a recipe for disaster.

We also had our amazing apricot tree in the vege patch that was so vigorous that I was a bit afraid of ruining it.

Anyway, the exercise was a great success, we both had the same lesson on pruning AND we got our trees pruned.

They all looked much better and I'm sure we can keep them in good shape from now on. And much cheaper than both of us attended a pruning course, so yay!