Posts

Showing posts with the label tumeric

Sweet smelling flowers hiding in my veggie patch!

Image
While I was away there was plenty of rain and so things grew, .............and grew, but luckily all the mulch I had laid arrested the weed development to some extent.  The pigeon peas are going wild - I might cut some branches back to allow better access and also to release nitrogen into the soil.  The one to the left has the winged bean entangled in it so that wont be cut back for now.  Why do climbing vines insist of climbing where you don't want them to?  I also thought I might have some beans on that by now......mmm.  I have a suspicion that I have plenty of nitrogen - hence the green growth.  What I need is phosphorous to promote flowering and fruiting.  I can see some smelly chook poo in my future.  The perennial bed is also very full and lush The turmeric is flowering - I am so glad that I moved it out here into this bed where I can enjoy the flowers and then my nose twitched...

Bright Summer Flowers

Image
I just love all the tropical colour in my garden at the moment the heleconia then this orange bud opens into this flower - doest it seem to be stretching its arms out to reach every ray of sunshine? The tumeric flower on the other hand hides deep within the fronds It doesnt need to hide away - look how beautiful the flower is! Everything about the tropical summer is intense - colour, rain, humidity, heat, - not for the fainthearted!

Going Troppo

Image
A tumeric leaf unfurls A ground orchid flowers: Sweet potatoes start to poke their way above the soggy ground The start of a new year, and I have been looking back on the last year and how much my garden has changed.  I begin to wonder.  What new projects can I come up with?  I wanted my garden to be self-sustaining, and not require constant money effort or time, I achieved that, but what next?  I enjoyed the creativity of pulling everything together, and now I feel a bit of a sense of deflation. Maybe too this is a little bit of what we call here "going troppo".  The constant heat and humidity is very draining, and anything you do outside has to be interspersed by bouts of re-hydrating and cooling off in the pool or the air-conditioning.  I did about an hour of weeding and pruning yesterday, and that was all I could handle.  True, I shouldnt have done that in the middle of the day, but I was in the shade.  All the pla...

Spicy weekend!

Image
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 turmeri...