Mittagong Garden Gossip
Cheating
I don’t want to terrify you, but it’s nearly Christmas, and you may be expecting visitors. If you’re normal you probably don’t have the house and garden looking as gorgeous as you would like. Don’t panic, all you need to do is cheat. Cheating doesn’t need to be illegal or bad for your marriage. Cheating is simply working out where your guests will be walking and looking and making their track fabulous. Let’s face it; it’s a huge task to tackle the whole garden makeover bit. Cheating involves doing the bits which will be seen and ignoring the rest.
Ballitis
Phew! Survived another Christmas holidays. The kids are back at school, they have enough new stationery to last a century and life is rapidly getting back to normal. How’s your garden looking? Is it all ok, or are sections of it suffering from Ballitis?
Tasty or tasteless?
Home grown tomatoes taste amazing. They are sweet, tangy and full of flavour. They taste good on their own, tossed in a salad or cooked in your favourite dish. Why is it then that the shop bought tomato tastes so different? They have no flavour and are such a fizzer.
Buying your tomatoes from the supermarket is an interesting experience. They look great, smell terrific and are all blemish free and perfect. It’s convenient and quick but, when it comes to eating them they merely offer a sort of wet spongy addition to your food. There’s no sensational taste which is present in the home grown version. What’s going on? How can a tomato be so boring?
Lovely Lavender
Lavender is a great plant. It grows really fast, and is great for new gardens and quick makeovers. It also flowers a lot and smells divine. Most Lavenders grow to about 1 metre, although there are some varieties which only grow to 30 or 60 cm, and most form a lovely, rounded blob.
My favourites are the improved Italian varieties like Avonview and Violet Lace. These lavenders have lovely grey/green foliage and purple flowers with long “wings”. These are the colourful bits at the top of each flower which look a bit like rabbits ears, and give you so much colour. Each plant can produce 100’s of these delightful flowers, and they look stunning swaying in the breeze, or in a vase.
Those sucking aphids
Ah, spring is here, and the trees are covered in blossom and fresh new growth and, wait a minute, what are those funny green things? It’s probably a zillion aphids sucking the sap from your plants.
Aphids are soft bodied insects which are usually green, brown or black. They feast on the new growth of plants and make it look distorted and horrible. Your plant is unlikely to die because of aphids but they can spread disease and they certainly make your plants feel miserable. I suppose the closest equivalent is us being covered in mosquitoes, and it sucks.