It’s a sunny Autumnal morn in Sydney, and Big Boy suggested that I take some photos of our fledgling garden to share with you.
There are just six small crabapples on a young tree that we planted a couple of months ago. I don’t think we’ll get any more this season, but it’s been very exciting to watch these grow…
Chillies seem to do particularly well in our garden, and apart from a large tree of birdseyes which seems to have gone completely mad, we also have this tiny bush of blazing hot habaneros, growing in a terracotta pot. I’m not sure what to do with them yet!
Our friend Maude will occasionally sneak into our backyard and plant something. It’s quite lovely – once I went out and found a whole bed of sage growing, and had no idea where it had come from.
The stick of lemongrass she stuck into an old laundry tub a few years ago had grown into an enormous clump, so we’ve divided it up. We’ll plant them in amongst the garden beds when they’re ready.
These little angels have been in our garden longer than the little angels in the house (Big Boy and Small Man). They’ve been watching the Great Garden Project unfold with interest.
Tell me…what’s growing in your garden at the moment? Anything wonderful?
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
Artichokes, we are swamped with them! I like to steam them then, removed the choke and finish them under the broiler with gorgonzola.
We also have lots of limes and lemons. The wonderhub just planted a lot of tomatoes and herbs.
Artichokes! Marilyn, would you believe I’ve never cooked one? But I think they would be delicious with gorgonzola (I’m a blue cheese fiend). Our baby lemon tree seems to be in suspended animation – I don’t think it’s put on a new leaf since it was planted. We’ll have to wait and see how it does in Spring…
Your garden puts mine to shame :D
I have ONE apple growing on a young tree, THREE oranges on an equally young orange tree and an not-so-healthy chili plant. My herbs garden/patch is doing okay though. I need some lemongrass, kafir lime and tomatoes to spice things up.
Wink, you’re in Sydney, right? So I’m going to cross fingers that all our apple trees fruit in this temperate clime! Lemongrass seems to grow vigorously, in a non-spreading clump (as in the clump gets bigger, but it doesn’t take over the whole bed), so it’s a nice thing to grow. I think we’re going to give kaffir lime a pass – it’s an ugly looking plant with big thorns and juiceless fruit. :)
Hey we are in autumn here in Chile as well……I only have a few lingering chiles and lots of rosemary, lemon verbena,chives and thyme. No lemons this year….tree too small, but I also have a ton of mandarin oranges on the tree…still green though!
Hi Judy! We’ve just been given a small lemon verbena plant from the Spice Girl – the leaves make a wonderful tea that helps with sleep apparently! Our rosemary, thyme, oregano still going strong, but the sage is starting to die back. Basil really didn’t establish this year – we put it in too late. I think we’re going to pull it out and plant some garlic in its place today…
Here in the UK, we’re just coming into a late spring after an unusually long hard winter. At the moment the daffodils are in full flower and the trees are just coming into leaf.
I’m in the process of sowing seeds and planting up the vegetable garden, but the rhubarb is growing well and is almost ready to start picking, and the gooseberry bushes look healthy. We also have three apple trees which are just bursting their buds, so it’s too early to tell if there will be a good harvest this year.
Suelle, rhubarb! That’s what I want in our garden, must have another discussion with Pete. He thinks they take too long to establish, but we do so love eating rhubarb, and it costs a fortune here, even at the markets. Is it easy to grow? Thanks, Celia
Rhubarb is very easy to grow here, but it’s always better after a cold winter, so I don’t know how well it would grow where you are.
The rhubarb we have was already here when we moved in 7 years ago, so I don’t know how old it is. We split the largest crown every year or so, and now have 6 crowns which give us more than enough fruit over about 5 months (May-September). Other than splitting up the crowns when they get too large we do nothing more than feed it occasionally.
Suelle, can I trade you some lemongrass for some rhubarb? Aaah, wouldn’t that be nice.. :)
My latest post is about the garden too – we’ve just planted an apple tree a few weeks ago, and spring has sprung so hope it settles in well, though I don’t know if we can expect fruit in it’s first year or not!
Kavey, you’re waaay ahead of us, your garden sounds wonderful! :)
I’ve been madly snapping things shooting up in the arrival of Spring here! I’ll post some pictures for you later. As Suelle says it’s all happening now….. Did I tell you about the family apple tree we have, it bears three different grafts so you get three sorts of apples on one tree! I think you can get other fruit trees like that too. I wish I had a fruiting crab apple too, mine is ornamental.
Zeb, I don’t know if my crabapple is going to continue to fruit – I’m pretty sure it set fruit before we put it into the ground, so not sure if it will do it again in the mild Sydney conditions. But we’ll wait and see – I would love to have crabapples for jelly! Your family apple tree sound fascinating – can’t wait to see the new post on it! :)
Anyone who’s reading this – my friend Zeb has a new blog – check it out! http://zebbakes.wordpress.com/
I’m seriously waiting for my Lemon melisse and mint to come back to life as they do each spring. I am planning on getting some Nastirtiums but…not sure yet. I miss lemon grass (in the garden). At home in Nigeria, we use the leaves a lot in stews and soups. Have a great weekend
Oz, we’ve put nasturtiums in around the base of the apple trees. You have a great weekend too! :)
I am soooo jealous! I am the world’s most pathetic gardener… every year I try so hard, but end up with ONE zucchini (in the end it’s the most expensive zucchini ever produced! :-) – huge tomato plants that are packed with flowers and no fruit, tiny lettuce plants that give me a couple of leaves then go dormant.
Honestly, this year I haven’t even planted anything, I’m too traumatized by my past failures.
gorgeous garden you have… I will live vicariously through it!
Nada, zilch, zero growing in my garden … but that will all change once we are permanently installed down in our new house. In the meantime I can enjoy the georgous photos of your garden :-)
Sally, Gillian, I’ll keep taking photos of things as they grow! :)
onions and chives are growing very well. carrots and turnips barely 1 cm out of the ground. my tomatoes are about 8 cm, still on the windowsill until june, as are bell peppers. these i’m very excited about because my mother send me the seeds from home. i can’t get those here at all. here the bell peppers are gigantic, very thick and pulpy and there’s no use to even try and stuff them. so, fingers crossed!! my oregano bush has come to life beautifully, and i have a bunch of lilies scattered about that are close to 12 cm now. i must get lemon verbena and lavender. i have a fierce craving for lavender biscuits. come may i’ll plant beans, corn and cucumbers. and i can’t wait to see if the gladioli i planted last month – 30, all red – have caught.
love the apple shot, and those angels.
Dana, your garden sounds wonderful! Ours is still in its infancy, and we’re heading into winter soon, so there won’t be much going in over the next few months. I look forward to seeing photos on your blog – hopefully of those bell peppers (we call them capsicums) when they ripen! Even though it’s getting cooler, our herb garden is still producing great oregano, thyme and rosemary – the sage is now a little thin, and the basil went in too late to establish, so I’m planning to pull it out and hopefully plant some garlic this week.
I don’t think the crab apple will give you more fruit till it blossoms again and those microbats and Aussie bees get to work doing their pollination bit. Do you know if it is self fertile? If your neighbours have apple trees that blossom at the same time that should do the trick if it’s not.
Going to do my garden post this morning just for you (well anyone else is more than welcome to come and have a look too!). I’ll be back with a link later x Zeb
Jo, it’s been planted with lots of other apple trees, so hopefully it will be ok. Look forward to your post! C xx
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My garden angels look suspiciously like yours! They must be a universal type of garden angel.
My herbs are coming up gangbusters, chives and garlic chives, caraway, fennel, and thyme, plus parsley, sage and of course all the wilds I leave some space for, dandelions, purslane and the Ostrich ferns for the fiddleheads! I haven’t planted anything yet- although I do have a container of leaves for my annual salad bowl started. Your garden loooks lovely.
Heidiannie, those herbs sound fantastic – I didn’t know you could grow caraway and fennel! Well, not fennel for its seeds – I only know it as the large salad plant often used in Italian cooking. Do you use the caraway foliage, or just harvest the seeds when they’re dry? We haven’t had much luck with garlic chives – I think ours crossed with onionweed, it ended up tasting terrible! :)
Caraway is a beautiful ferny green herb with clusters of tiny white starlike flowers that yield many, many seeds! The fennel I grow is also for seeds, although one year I miscalculated and planted bronze fennel which is ornamental and broadcast seeds all over my garden- I pull up twice as many as I keep every year.
Your lemon grass has me so jealous. It doesn’t winter over here, so I must keep going to the greenhouses and buying them. I love it for flavoring and potpouriis and wreaths!
I wish you were all closer – I’d do a roaring trade in lemongrass! :)
i love reading all the comments about the gardens in different parts of the world – the wonderful world of food bloggers! My herbs are still growning strong and we too have a huge clump of lemongrass that grows like a weed. I dispute your claim of kaffir lime being ugly – we have a beautiful (to me) large plant of it with lots of limes all year round (ok we never really use the limes, maybea handful a year…but we can appreciate them from a distance!). My lettuce does not seem to have taken off and this year my rhubarb and artichokes seem to have decided to stay dormant (or perhaps some creature ate them up).
Lovely photographs. I especially like the habanero with the drip of water just about to fall. I’ve not grown habaneros, so don’t know how fleshy they are. I’ve a recipe for a great chilli sauce over on my blog – you could maybe use yellow sweet peppers rather than red to get a nice yellow sauce.
It’s so exciting in the garden at the moment – after all the cold weather spring is suddenly here and everything is bursting out of the ground as fast as it can. We only have a very small garden, but we do have a plot in a friend’s field and when the sun is out, there are few places where it is better to be than pottering around down there.
Choclette, I’ve got your chilli sauce recipe bookmarked from ages ago! :) The habaneros are quite thin skinned, but just so stupidly hot. We only have it because Pete found the plant on sale for $1.35 at the local nursery! So far we’ve only got three from the shrub, but it does look very pretty in the garden.
I love how UKers often have a “plot” or an “allotment”. I hope we’ll be seeing photos of yours on your blog this Spring!
We’re trying to plant garlic this year – haven’t tried it before, and Sydney’s not ideal, as we’re too wet and temperate, but we’ll see how we go..
Celia
Celia – would so love to have a decent sized garden, but they are quite hard to come by. A lot of city and town housing in the UK were built in the 19th Century without gardens. More recently, people have been selling off their gardens for building and most new housing is again being built with either no gardens or tiny ones – all very short sighted.
Good luck with your garlic – that is one of the crops I’m particularly proud of as we’ve kept ours going for about 8 years now and get a really good crop – about 80 bulbs.
80 bulbs! That is a fantastic crop!
I’ve been watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Land Share project with interest – will be interesting to see how it works out in years to come.