Garden Porn: Ornamental Cabbage

I've been seeing a lot of these beautiful flowers in florists everywhere recently. The flowers are large with beautiful rosettes but they are in fact, ornamental cabbages. Apparently these are edible but I have a feeling they don't taste that good - doesn't matter, they're far too pretty to eat anyway! Ornamental cabbages are definitely a statement flower and will brighten up any garden during the stark winter period. 

 Vibrant colours...

Lovely Strawberries

With so much chaos around the whiteflies, I'm pleased that my strawberry plant seems to be doing quite well. The strawberry plant I bought from Bunnings was the Strawberry Tempation variety. I chose this because it seemed fairly hardy, it was ever bearing and was ideal for pots and hanging baskets. In the future I would love to have my strawberries cascading down some hanging baskets, all bright red and glossy and scrumptious.

Something like this, so gorgeous:

Fixing the Whiteflies problem

Today I woke up bright and early so I could run into Bunnings as soon as they opened and find a solution for my whiteflies infestation. It has taken me a grand total of a week to do something about this extremely serious problem, which is very bad gardening behaviour. Things like this needs to be nipped in the bud quickly, do not wait!

And the Lemon Balm culprit is....

So last night I went on a couple of gardening forums and asked for help as I still had no idea what those pesky white bugs were and how much damage they were doing to my lemon balm plant.

I got my answer through the ever helpful GardenWeb Forums and the culprit is...

Whiteflies!

Here is a better picture of them:

Lemon Balm under attack!

This morning I woke up quite early, so made myself a cup of coffee and went for a wander outside to inspect my plants.

And I had a nasty shock.

My lemon balm plant was in a very sorry state.

I'd always thought of the lemon balm plant as super duper hardy. Yet, it was under attack by some mystery white bugs.

See how the leaves are discoloured?

What to plant?

Being new to the whole gardening business, I spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of plants I want in my garden. My wishlist consists of items such as an avocado tree, a custard apple tree and a blueberry bush. The problem is, these items take a really long time to grow (apparently a blueberry bush takes up to 6 years to produce a decent amount of fruit?!), are relatively tricky to grow and it's the wrong season to start planting any of these things.

The Spinach Experiment

For a really long time we had a bunch of seed packets lying around the house; my mum had bought them and done not much else with them. So when I decided that I wanted to plant a few things, the first thing I did was to go through those packets.

There were some edible goodies in there such as spinach, broccoli, carrots, spring onions as well as flowers such as nasturtiums and pansies. I decided to start with the spinach because according to The Internet, it's an easy and quick winter vegie to grow. I ripped open the packet, had a look inside and thought yup, this will do.

The problem with Coriander

About a month ago I bought a little coriander plant. It was happy enough, small and green and quite cute. However, pretty soon after it moved into its new home a strange thing happened. The leaves started to change from green to... red. A weird, browny-red colour. It doesn’t look right and is bugging me to no end.

And here I go...

About two months ago, I developed a new found interest in gardening. I don’t know how it came about or what triggered, especially since I don’t live in a household or have friends that have any interest in it. However, I’ve been consumed by thoughts about growing a few vegies and maybe a few berries so I’ve decided to do something about it. I’ve decided to grow stuff. Easy, right? Not really.