life, upside down: Gardening, summer to autumn

Summer gardening.

It's been a busy four months in our garden. I started writing this blog post sometime around January/February but wasn't able to get myself to finish and post it—just too much going on! We had our hands full with the garden, working on the house and it's been a busy few months at work as well. We might have been a bit ambitious with our plantings on top of all the other projects, but we survived the summer!

Before everything became massive. It started out a (relatively)
tidy garden..

Dragonfly on the clematis

Broccoli bouquet

Sea of green in the backyard.

It was an unusual summer for this area in that it was hot, hot hot. Not just days but weeks of temperatures consistently above 30C (86F, a nice round benchmark around here for, 'oh, it's hot!') To put it in perspective, the mean maximum temperatures for Armidale from December through February hover around 25C (77F). Last year's hot summer day (and there was only one of them) reached 32, whereas this year's hottest day (one of many) was 37-38C (98-100F). While we did have a dry spell over the summer with three weeks without any rain, overall it was a very wet summer with some substantial rain.

Evolution of a pumpkin patch

(Sprawling out of control.) (And I still haven't cleaned that pallet of bricks..)

Overall, the heat meant more time spent in the garden: watering every day without rain and irrigating twice a week, the grass growing out of control (couch and kikuyu grass have been my greatest nemesis ever since we first moved in and this summer was a losing battle), fruit flies becoming a problem as the weather got hotter, powdery mildew coming up in the zucchini and pumpkins. It was a steep learning curve for our first in-ground garden and first garden in Australia, but I feel pretty good about it looking back. (Hindsight is often rose-colored.) It was a definite plus to have more produce over the summer than we ever expected (also we will have enough pumpkin/squash to eat two pumpkins a week until next January.)

Pumpkin family portrait 29/4/2017 (not pictured: half the family)

Some plants did exceedingly well in our vegetable garden (volunteer tomatoes, green beans, cucurbits of all varieties) while our ornamental plants struggled. We sowed so many native indigo seeds but only got a few to germinate and of those only two made it through the summer. Unfortunately the hydrangea I was so looking forward to was decimated by the sun (the shady spot we picked for it was not quite as shady as we'd anticipated and the heat was brutal) and snails, and a week after our hottest February weather when the weather turned mild our camelia sinensis turned brown and died within a day. Such is the life of a gardener, I suppose. You win some, you lose some.

Last days of a cucumber

The garden as it stands in autumn

Tomato mountain

Flourishing burdock (except where it's been eaten by snails.)

Blueberry, citrus, figs and a peach.

The Queensland Blue-style pumpkin which has
taken over the back corner of the lot.

Never-ending work in progress, although we did get
a lot done over the summer

Now that autumn is upon us the weather has settled down and gone back to normal. March 1st hit (the official start of autumn in Australia, no waiting for the equinox for folk down here) and our 30 degree summer days were over. We've had some 4mm of rain this month and it's been sunny, but cool, for the past three weeks. The days are getting shorter and night arrives much quicker at the end of the day, and with the smell of wood smoke in the air it's really beginning to feel like autumn. (Except perhaps all the spring blossoms from the northern hemisphere that populate my Instagram feed as of late..)

Volunteer phlox

Broccoli blooms

Quinoa nearly ready to harvest.

This week, the last week of April we had our first real cold (maybe a light frost over the week and we've lit our fire a couple times now) and things are slowing down a little. The tomatoes are still going strong but the green beans are at their end, cucumbers are long gone and just yesterday pulled up the spent broccoli stalks and moved the tender plants into the sunroom. That said, after a relatively cool week yesterday was actually quite hot and felt like a return to summer, but only for the day.

The sun may be warm during the day but there's no denying the changing of the seasons. Shorter days and the chia is flowering beautifully. We dug three burdock plants yesterday, which when we cook will feel even more like autumn! Somehow we still have strawberries and our autumn raspberries are coming on, one handful at a time. In a few weekends we'll have to harvest the quinoa and amaranth seeds and our winter crops of cabbage, radishes, turnips and greens are coming along nicely. Not to mention all the tomatoes still out there. It seems our gardening adventures haven't finished for the season quite yet!