Crack Plant

Crack plants amuse me.

 

I have vincas in my garden that get watered over summer and get some manure and slow release fertiliser. They don't look half as happy as this crack plant growing by my front door:

 

    

 

This plant gets swept over, the dogs walk over it and catch their leads around it. The neighbours son pulled all the flowers off it for fun once. It certainly doesn't get watered and yet, all summer it has thrived in a crack. Maybe I should pay less attention to my plants in the garden.

A pocket full of seeds

Some of my herbs are just going to seed now, and I’ve come up with a very cute idea!

I bought these seed pockets, made up a quick label on the computer and now I have sweet little gift envelopes to fill with seeds for my friends.

My basil, Thai basil and garlic chives are going to seed now. I like to let them flower to attract the bees and then I will collect the seeds and make up some more of these Garden Beagle envelopes!

Mycophobia?! I can't believe it has a name...

I have a fear of fungus. There, I've said it. As a gardener a fear of fungus is fraught with issues.

I can't say exactly where my fear came from. One incident I remember all too clearly from my childhood is that back on the farm each year around this time, my aunts, uncles, cousins and my Nan and Pop would come over and we'd pack some food for a barbecue and all head out to Stone Henge. That was the name of a particularly rocky paddock, one that was so covered in rocks and boulders it never got cropped. The upshot to this is that mushrooms were free to grow. So we'd take buckets and small knives and set off in different directions picking mushrooms. It was always a wonderfully fun day... I liked to stay within sight of my Nan and then just bend down and pretend I was picking loads of mushrooms. She was oddly competitive. And didn't like the idea of someone picking more 'shrooms than her. She was much the same about fishing, but that's another story! At lunchtime, an old plough disk on a circle of rocks became our barbecue and we lit a fire and cooked up a storm.

Anyway, one year I happened across a mound of mushrooms, ran over and went to pick them, but as I turned them over, it was a pile of toadstools, white underneath instead of mushroom pink. Worse than that, they were crawling with maggots. And I had just touched them. I have goosebumps all over me just typing this, I'm not joking.

Needless to say I never ate any of the mushrooms we picked. Nan got all of those, so I don't know why she was so worried that I'd pick more than her!

My fungus experiences weren't just limited to the annual mushroom harvest. Each year when Dad was out ploughing the paddocks, he'd come home with some mushroom specimens... enough to make the hair stand on the back of your neck. They were HUGE. The size of a large dinner plate (there, I've got goosebumps again). Mum would put them aside for us to look at when we got home from school. Sometimes we'd put them on a dinner plate and take them to school for show and tell. Mum would get out a big sheet of clean, white paper and we'd rest the giant mushroom on it overnight, then by the morning, it would leave its imprint on the paper. Gross. Spores.

My husband and friends once forced me to go to a whole fungus exhibition while travelling in Bormio. I wasn't very thrilled. They seemed to think my goosebumps were as fun to look at as the fungus itself.

Anyway, now as a gardener I'm convinced fungus is haunting me. I have discovered fungi so diverse and creepy and fascinating it astounds me... and gives me the heebie jeebies. Just this week I discovered these two horrendous outbreaks:

 

The one on the left looks like dog vomit. It may actually be dog vomit fungus. Yes, that is a real thing. One day it just appears like a froth. Then I made the mistake of watering it. As the outside crust disintegrated and the water hit the inside, it exploded into a dust cloud of black spores. That is the stuff of nightmares.

The one on the right are the field mushrooms of my youth. Here they have entirely lifted up a layer of mulch like some beast bursting out of the ground. Tell me that's not creepy!

Once, I even emailled an expert at the Department of Agriculture about various fungi in my garden. I didn't know whether to pull them out, whether they are good for the soil or harmful to me, especially when one started climbing my spinach plants. That's the one below top left:

 

 

The one on the bottom left looked like an egg... before it exploded into the monstrosities on the right. The expert said not to worry about any of them, just don't eat it. Even he didn't know what the one was that climbed my plant, though.

Down at our dog park, there are giant "fairy rings" of mushrooms and the lawn is always greener, more healthy and faster growing in those rings, so it must be good for the soil. As the fungus mycelium grows in the soil, it must make the nutients more easily available to plant roots.

I once read that the biggest living organism on our planet was a mycelium, the white hair-like roots of a fungus that grow underground, it covers an entire forest floor in Canada. I can tell you I won't be travelling there any time soon!

Garden Week inspiration

Perth's Garden Week is in its 42nd year and runs for another few days. Organisers say the event fell away for a while and there wasn't much interest, but in the past three years they've had more and more exhibitors and now the crowds are coming back.

 

 Here's a peek of what's there:

 

 

 

Don't forget you can sign up to follow this blog, by entering your email address in the field on the right. You'll get an email notification whenever a new post is published!

 

 

 

 

 

At the opening, the mayor of the Town of Cambridge, Simon Withers, spoke about how town planning is responsible, in part, for the amount of green space in the city. He said decreasing block sizes and councils that allow people to build massive houses on them, leaving no space for a lawn or a tree or two have created a 'heat island' in the city.

 

His council has banned synthetic lawn on verges and even stipulates what percentage of the space out the front of a house must be vegetated. He believes residents and councils must demand more green space and gardens in the planning process.

 

Mr Withers seemed very passionate about planting more street trees to create an air conditioning effect in the suburbs. After his talk we had a great conversation about town planning. We discussed the merits of not having walls at the front of your house, so it allows you to interact with your neighbours and bring the community feel back to your neighbourhood. I feel that by having my food garden out the front with no walls, it has allowed me to meet and strike up friendships with all my neighbours. That's something to think about for anyone planning or designing their front gardens. Maybe walling yourself away isn't the best idea. Oh, and go and plant a tree!

My garden is on the telly!

The episode went to air this weekend, I was very nervous about seeing it! I was happy to see my wonderful neighbour made the final cut, as well as Chilli and Mustard, the beagles.

 

I've had some requests from readers who want to follow The Garden Beagle... so I figured out how to add the follow function. Just enter your email address in the "FOLLOW BY EMAIL" on the right of your screen.

 

And if you missed the show, watch it here:

I met an inspiring woman... and you can too!

Yesterday, Garden Week opened in Perth. I got to meet a wonderful Australian - Stephanie Alexander:

Stephanie (I like to think we're on a first name basis now) is a keen kitchen gardener herself as well as being the author of a lot of cookbooks. But what I find most inspiring is her not-for-profit organisation that is teaching children the value of growing your own food and how to eat it. The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Project was launched in 2004 and now involves 296 primary schools across Australia. In Western Australia 24 schools have joined the program and Stephanie said about 70 more in have put their hand up to take part.

 

Stephanie said her favourite place to be was in the garden. She had a bit of a poke about the Garden Week displays in between her engagements and she said what had caught her eye was the CSIRO limes. She was going to try to track some down in her home state of Victoria. I felt pretty chuffed that I have one of those limes. It is covered with fruit this year and I'm pretty excited to experiment with it in the kitchen when they ripen!

At Garden Week, the organisers set up this beautiful vege patch for Stephanie to use (below) and she'll be holding workshops with kids today.

Apart from my photo of Stephanie, I also took home some more native plants for my verge from the Carnaby's cockatoo display. I'm going to add couple of prostrate banksias, pimlea and more grevillia to the verge this afternoon.

I'll be back later with some more photos from garden week!



Did the camera man make my garden look good...?

As someone who works in television, I'm used to cameras. And I'm very good at interviews. The problem is I'm used to being the one who asks the questions. So when the Garden Gurus came around to interview me about my garden, I was not prepared for how strange it would be answering questions!

 

The Gurus have filmed my meagre kitchen garden. I can confidently say I've never spent so much time in the garden trying not to get dirty or let my makeup sweat off.

 

No sooner was I telling the lovely presenter Susannah Wilson about what a beautiful neighbourhood we live in, the neighbourhood turned out to see what all the fuss was about. I guess not every one has a whole film crew in the front yard every day.

 

I'm hoping my wonderful Italian neighbour makes the final cut, I mentioned what a wonderful guide she'd been to me in the garden and then she turned up, so they roped her in to being filmed.

 

Here are Susannah and I hard at work, discussing gardening:

 

The poor garden was so bare, despite my best efforts to cheat and I swear that in the days since the segment was filmed, my garden actually decided to grow. It now looks quite abundant, the tomatoes are tall, and covered in flowers, we're eating the salad greens that just look like weeds in the picture above!

 

Like I said, it was very strange being the interviewee, so I expect I will look very, very uncomfortable when the show airs... but you can judge for yourself! Wherever you are in Australia, tune in to the Garden Gurus THIS weekend! And for those readers living overseas, don't feel left out, you can go online and watch the show.

I feel a little bit out of my league after seeing the Guru's latest show, where Susannah interviewed a couple living in a beautiful multi-million dollar house with a garden that would have cost just as much. How can I follow that sort of luxury in my little vege patch?! ...but that couple did say "The gardeners say they really love working in our garden."

At least I do my own gardening!