Early Summer Garden Update

Stopping in for a quick garden update in between all the bustle of Christmas and New Year. Some of these photos were taken a month ago when it was still pouring rain nearly every day (yes, this is still Australia, I checked!), and some more recently when the rain finally subsided and Summer began in earnest.

I re-potted two of my cacti:

If you must know, their names are Big Red and Spiky Spud (I'll leave it to the reader to decide which is which). My views on 'Mutant Cacti' are ambiguous: I feel slightly disturbed whenever I see them, yet I feel sorry for them and want to take them home with me. I got Spiky Spud from the A Prickly Affair stall in the city. It came with a leaflet explaining how to keep your cactus nice and small (obviously designed for apartment dwellers). I had to laugh because it seems, even my cacti are bonsai!

Oh, and check this out! My fruit trees are growing fruit! All I did was give 'em a bit of water and fertiliser, and they're growing fruit! Nature never ceases to amaze me.

They're at the stage now where I can confidently say that we have 2 apricot trees, a plum, an orange, a fig and possibly another variety of plum or a nectarine. Husband and I put bird netting on them last weekend: that's a whole story in itself!

Then there are some things that are doing well without any intervention whatsoever, like the fuchsia:

And even more impressively, the roses:

Every time I look at this rose, I can't help but smile. Lavender was one of my favourite colours before, and even more so now! Unfortunately it's finished flowering now, but there's a gorgeous dusky pink rose right next to it just starting up, so I'm very pleased. (P.S. Don't things look so much better when it's raining?)

And finally, my Shimpaku bonsai is recovering well from the shocking treatment it was given at the workshop. I'm very pleased and amazed at how well plants will bounce back from being hacked into pieces, having half their roots cut off and jammed into a tiny pot. Pretty cool. I'm looking forward to doing it to more plants soon. ;)

I'll wait until next winter and have a good look to see which branches I might want to style and which I want to cull. Having subscribed to a list of bonsai blogs as long as my arm lately, I realise now more than ever how a 90-minute workshop does not a bonsai make! I don't have any pretensions that my little Shimpaku will ever win any prizes, but at the moment I'm just fascinated with how everything just, well... grows!