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Showing posts with the label limes

Just coasting along in the edible garden

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There is nothing much exciting going on in the veggie garden at the moment other than weeding and cutting back.  I wanted to build up to a maintenance free garden and I guess I have done just that.  I put down a lot of hay mulch to keep the weeds at bay.  Once the wet season starts the weeds grow overnight. So other than the ongoing weeding, and cutting back of old growth to allow the new growth room to develop, gardening consists of sitting in the swing and admiring it all.  I also have some bigger tomatoes coming up. I think they are the tropic tomatoes that I got from  MrFothergills - I am trying to save the seeds - at the moment they are fermenting to remove the outer membrane and then they will be dried and stored.  I am always on a  quest to find wilt resistant tomatoes, and saving seeds that have built up a resistance in my own garden is a good way to start. Just a few weeks ago my lime tree was c...

Rising from dormancy

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Lots of things spring to life in my garden once the wet season starts.  My ginger bed is erupting with little green spikes and I know under the ground lovely juicy ginger tubers are forming.  The sweet potato bed is doing the same, and  turmeric  is popping up in a couple of places, where I knew I had planted them.  The torch ginger and this lovely beehive ginger is flowering, although the leaves never totally die back during the dry season.  My neighbor gave me a plant with a beautiful flower at the end of the last wet season.  She said it had died and I tried to tell her it was ok but just going dormant.  No, she wanted me to have it, insisting I was the one with the green thumb.  Here it is rising up in all its glory six months later.  Behind it is kampheria, another plant that completely disappears during the dry season.  This one I know is...

Fruit trees

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Seeing how tiny my garden is you would think I would not be venturing into fruit trees, but things happen, you get a cutting, or you see something you really would like to try, and pretty soon you have  a collection of fruit trees.   Of course our very large tree is a lychee tree but we are on the fringes of lychee growing, and really I dont mind if we dont get fruit as the tree is too big to net, and if we get too much fruit we will have to put up with flying foxes (bats) which doesnt really appeal to me.   We do get birds with huge heavy beaks which seem to find the few fruit that does appear. So onto the back vegetable garden....  where I have pawpaw trees on either side - one male on the right and one female on the left. The female has been bearing nonstop for about 2 years, but now is getting quite high and I really must lop the top off it. Stay tuned for a post devoted to this process. Here you can see how high they are, and how many I am going...

Tropical fruit trees

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I have been hankering after a lime tree forever.  For my birthday everyone chipped in and I went off to go and spend the money at the garden center in Bunnings.  Owing to the small spcae we have, it has to be a dwarf variety, and probably in a pot, although I  do prefer trees in the ground - somehow it seems a bit alien to be putting a tree into a pot.  I never get the watering right either.  Whoa there, we dont want to jepordize this before it starts!  They have dwarf meyer lemon or dwarf lime - I chose the lime as a lot of my neighbours have troubles with their lemons.  I think limes are more apt to grow without problems in this climate. So here is my new little addition- I chose one that already had buds - a sign of good things to come! Marketing gets me every time - I loved the lime green pot, the name "sublime", and even free recipes on the back of the label! Dont those limes on the label look delicious! So in my small garden I now ha...