A place to rest

Remember my asparagus? How I said it was a long-term commitment? And that you had to leave it in the ground for several years before you could start to harvest it? Also, how I dug the poor things up from my previous house and brought them with me to give them a permanent place to rest in my new home. Well... I have a confession to make. I had to dig them up AGAIN. Yes, I've just added another year on to my harvest time frame, right there. The problem was, you may remember, that I only had a matter of hours to dig them up and plant them at my new house and that was well before I had designed the layout of my food garden. It turned out they couldn't have been in a more inconvenient spot. Even after the landscapers went to so much trouble to rope them off with fluorescent orange construction webbing so they didn't disturb them, I came along and disturbed them all. They were right at the top of the stairs. Oops.

 

So today's job was to prepare a new patch of soil and plant the crowns out (again) and hope for the best. That's me in the photo with a margarita, toasting their future success. Now I might mention the limes in the Margarita are not from our lime trees. (Thank you Laina for supplying them). We had a potting disaster with the lime tree recently, and while it's coming back with a vengeance, it did lose most of its fruit in the process. I went to re pot it because the potting mix had become hydrophobic and worn out, but when my husband pulled the tree out of the half wine barrel, the whole bottom of the barrel came out too! There was a mercy dash to the nearest garden centre to get a new wine barrel, some caster wheels from the hardware store and some gravel for the bottom of the barrel, to go with the new potting mix and compost that was waiting! Now that you've all waded through that tedious story, I think you deserve a drink too! So here's a recipe, perfected after many, many trials...

 

Nat's best margarita recipe

 

To a cocktail shaker add:

 half a dozen ice cubes

2 parts gold tequila

1 part Triple Sec

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice.

- Shake and serve in a salt-rimmed glass.

Tomorrow is a big day in the garden too... a big load of pine bark for the verge. This begins the transformation of the verge from highly compacted sand and scruffy patches of lawn, to an attractive (I hope) native strip! Stay tuned.

A long-term commitment

When we decided to sell up and move house a few months ago, I lost a lot of years of my garden. The  enormous passionfruit vine that had just started producing the most delicious fruit, an avocado tree that will probably start fruiting this year... as well as four dwarf apple trees, a nectarine, peach, two plums, a fig... the list goes on.

One thing I was not going to leave was my asparagus. Asparagus is a long-term investment. You plant it and watch it grow and have to resist the temptation to eat the spears for several years! I'm not joking. So the real estate agent was given strict instructions to tell any prospective buyers that the asparagus (I had to show him the ferny growth in the corner of the yard) was not part of the deal.

When we moved, I used the only spare hours I had to go back to our old house, carefully dig up the asparagus crowns, lug them back to my new house and plant them in quickly prepared rows.

The good news is, it survived!



Yesterday, I saw the first spears sticking out of the ground! My investment is paying off! Now my dilemma is whether I should harvest this year... Or leave it another season to settle in and regain its energy!