Feijoa guns!

Another way to use feijoas... don't do this

Well let’s crack into it!

My daughter saw our pile of enormous feijoas on the table and was excited to see that it is feijoa season at our house again. “Other kids are bringing them to school, Mum. They all make Feijoa Guns.” Yay! Teenagers getting into fruit, right?

So it turns out that, and this is paraphrased from a teen, and I have not tried it, but if you '“get a feijoa really warm and roll it around and stuff” then you can squish it and “all the middle fires out from one spot.”

Oh. Wholesome.

I made sure that she cut her feijoas before putting them in her lunchbox… we will not be participating in Feijoa Guns. <Editor’s note: while fact checking this blog, my daughter insists they are not called feijoa guns and nobody has a name for this behaviour. I asked if I should still call it Feijoa Guns and she said I can do whatever I want. Yay!>

Unrelated photo of Feijoa Cat

Well, I am psyched myself because our new house comes with a feijoa tree which is pumping out these enormous feijoas. Check out these Feijoa Guns.

Managing your garden right in Mid Autumn

We are getting messier and messier- non-seeding, non invasive weeds are mostly being pulled out and left on top of the soil, leaves are being piled into garden beds to break dow, and dead/dying back plants are being ‘chopped and dropped’ (cut back, cut into pieces, and dropped onto the soil around the plant). This is because it is Autumn, and the leaves are all falling- often into the garden beds we are working on. There isn’t a great hope of having a nice, tidy garden bed at this time of year, so I see it as a vital time to put some good, free nutrition back into the soil.

Next month we will be inundated with leaves in most gardens, so those leaves will be bagged (stuffed down hard into those bags, too), and left to make leaf mould. If you want to have a go, it’s easy. Fill a bag with leaves and abandon it for 12 months or so. It will create dense, delightful black compost-like stuff that you can dig into your garden.

In July/August, we will be digging in sheep pellets, compost and leaf mould (from last year) into all of the gardens, and smothering them in much nicer looking mulch. This means that in Spring, when all of the weeds want to germinate, they won’t get exposure to light and will be substantially reduced. If you mulch with nice mulch now, all of the leaves will fall onto it and it’ll be a pain to manage… and the mulch will have degraded enough by Spring that when it is needed the most, it is letting all sorts of weeds pop up in your garden. Don’t worry too much about remembering all of this, I’ll remind you as it happens!

One thing that I find quite daunting? Hilarious? Impressive? Is how many leaves we deal with on a daily basis. On Thursday I moved two full uteloads of *just* leaves, mostly from our commercial sites, but one from a large property in Miramar. It takes an hour a fortnight to fully de-leaf the concrete areas. So, I suppose what I’m saying is if you want leaves, I’m your hookup!

Planting for Winter and Spring

We are also planting for Winter flowers, and early Spring, now. This is mostly bulbs, but if you would like some ideas for still-flowering plants in Winter, consider-

• Primulas (aka primroses)

• Hellebores

• Surprisingly, calendulas often flower right through winter

• Violas (although I don’t tend to use them outside pots- they self seed everywhere, which is great, but they’re so tiny that I find them a pain to manage)

• Forget me nots

Winter shrubs are among my favourites. Consider

• Wintersweet

• Witch hazel (my soul for a Witch hazel- a beautiful weird shrub that also keeps my acne clear)

• Michelias

And in the vege garden- hopefully I will get to plant some soon, but I find it is still a bit warm, and I haven’t pulled out my tomatoes yet, but you could try

• Parsnip

• Carrot- honestly, why not, it will just grow a lot slower over Winter

• All herbs except Basil

• Leeks

• Leafy greens

• Autumn/Winter lettuces, Drunken Lady is a good one as is Buttercrunch

It’s too warm for your brassicas yet- they will bolt (go to seed) in my experience.

Some happy things

The lovely Karen gave me some books, and they are both of such good quality and so interesting that they are legitimately coffee table books that I keep picking up-

I can’t tell you where to find these books, because they are so old. They are my books. Not yours.

Check this out- so much handier than wikipedia-

Types of cyclamen, anybody?

And I know this is getting very long, but we have a few clients who have cottage type gardens that are aiming at becoming more foody, so I called the lovely Minette from Meadowsweet Herbs and asked her to make me up some boxes of in-theme herbs for each of their gardens, and I was not disappointed! About $170 got me a box of a range of different rare herbs to tuck into their gardens, and some of them were so cool I struggled to part with them. This is getting long, so in the future I’ll post the lists of recommended plants Minette came up with for each situation.

I’ll have to ask her if she recommends this approach, because hopefully it was win-win for both of us- I wasn’t toooo fussy on which plants, because I just needed them to match the gardens (as opposed to passionately wanting every type of sage), so she was able to provide me with herbs that could do with being planted shortly before she shuts down for Winter. It was a real joy to plant the box below!

Have a most fantastic week, everyone. I hope you have found a better way to use up all of those feijoas (maybe just wait on

Lucy Corry

to let you know the best way to deal with ‘em).