1. Hang your freshly-washed sheets under the wattle trees. You want to sleep in two layers of pollen? Wattle pollen doesn’t travel far
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2. Cycle through flowering rye grass without a sci-fi type mask. All that pollen just loves sweaty faces. And irritates your eyes.
3. Fill vases of gloriously scented jonquils next to the seat where that your sinus-affected best friend will be sitting.
4. Give your hostess a giant bunch of home-grown liliums without removing the fluffy yellow (or orange) stamens. Their pollen is indelible. No tablecloth or white carpet will ever be the same.
5. Plant tomatoes too early. A frost IS coming. They WILL die (or be badly affected and become stunted, unthrifty bushes).
6. Plant carrots too early. They will go to seed, all top and no bum.
7. Plant six zucchini seedlings. I know they look cute and tiny now. Think of those monster marrows lurking under the leaves in January. All 2648 of them.
8. Hesitate to take that third punnet of tomato seedlings (that you will keep protected till the soil is warm enough to sit on comfortably). You can never have too many home-grown tomatoes. Last season I puréed all the leftover ones, raw, not cooked, and froze them in containers. Winter soups and stews have never been so good.
9. Forget to plant potatoes: they will just stop growing if we get a cold snap and restart once the warmth returns. A home-grown spud is a delight.
10. Waste your fences: cover with ultra-fragrant, old-fashioned sweet peas for great bunches of blooms to give away till Christmas.
11. Plant petunias without snail bait. Unless you are seriously into kindness to snails.
12. Buy pots of bloomimg pansies, even if they are cheap. They may be about to kark it now summer’s coming.
13. Plant petunias at all if your ultra-sophisticated friends scoff at petunias. (Unless you have the courage of your whims and then you can plant them for drought resistant colour all summer long. Or snail tucker.)
14. Plant marigolds. At all. Ever. Too bright and stink if you stuff them in a vase. And they don’t repel sap suckers – they encourage them.
15. Sneer at dahlias. Except maybe the plate sized ones that need three stakes to keep them upright. This will be a long hot summer and dahlias will live on their hump, like camels, and survive all that heat and keep on blooming.
16. Be nasty to anyone who calls their pelargoniums geraniums. They’ve been called geraniums for long enough for it to be used legitimately as a common name. Get used to it.
17. Eat snails that have eaten petunias. Snails for human consumption need to diet for three weeks on food that is edible for humans (like lettuce). And be cooked extremely well.
18. Eat the marigolds. All those ‘marigold’ recipes come from the UK or the US, where they call calendulas marigolds. Calendulas are edible, marigolds are not.
19. Do not eat calendulas unless you like the texture of damp wash cloth, and the flavor of nothing in particular (although if you like the look of scraps of slightly slimy orange and yellow petals in your salad throw some in).
20. Or rose petals, ditto. Looks good, rotten texture.
21. Or pansies. Won’t kill you, just feel like there’s a slug in your salad.
22. Make lavender sugar with any variety other than Lavandula angustifolia. The others have a faint tang of camphor and may even be toxic.
23. Make crystallised violets to decorate your cakes with African violets. Wrong violets. See "Botanical Poisons" below.
24. Be embarrassed to hang your undies on the lavender bush. Who cares if the neighbours know, your knickers smell divine.
25. Or on the mock orange bush, for a different scent entirely.
26. Or if your bloke prefers a spicy scent, dry them on the pineapple or fruit salad sage bushes.
27 Stint on slow-release plant food for your pots and hanging baskets …
28. or indeed to get some hanging baskets up there to cheer up the front-door area.
29. Hesitate to layer dried carnations in your underwear drawer for a truly "old spice" scent.
30. Wonder why your roses don’t last as florists’ ones do. Poorly fed roses don’t last as long.
31. Try to poison rich relatives with a cake decorated with fresh daffodils. The exude a toxic sap. Like most plants the active ingredients can vary. They will likely only become crook enough to be seriously wrathful and change their wills.
32. Make a pot of tea with the water from a vase in which daffodils have been sitting. Not that I can think why you would. But don’t, anyway.
33. Use oleander wood as skewers at the next barbeque. See "poisoning relatives" above.
34. Neglect the need for flowers at Christmas. A new flush of roses or sterile agapanthus (the ones that don’t set seed).
35. Plant yacon. Unless you like crisp roots with no flavour.
36. Throw out elderly chokos. Plant them as soon as frosts are over. Pick tiny ones with no "choke" when thumbnail size.
37. Harvest watercress or river mint from a creek for a bush-tucker feast. You may also ingest liver fluke.
38. Eat any wild mushroom except in the company of an experienced LOCAL mushroom hunter. Perhaps also wait 48 hours to see if they exhibit any dire symptoms, too.
39. Waste veg going to seed: keep the best to plant again, unless they were hybrids, in which case what you’ll get will almost certainly be edible, just … different from their parents.
40. Bother with growing Iceberg lettuce. There are dozens of soft-centred lettuce varieties out there that will tolerate heat better and be more delicious in the salad bowl.
41. Plant celery unless you will REALLY water it every second day and feed it fortnightly, or it will be stringy and only good for soup. Good, strong-flavoured soup, admittedly.
42. Plant in neat rows. Neat rows are for supermarkets. You want the pests to FIND your veg?
43. Forget to plant chives. You can never have too many chives.
44 Plant tarragon seed. The result will just taste vaguely green. True French tarragon smells richly of aniseed and must. be grown from cuttings.
45. Stick to one variety of lettuce. Sew a pinch of at least six differently coloured, soft or crisp hearted, frilly or plain leaved varieties. Go wild.
46. Buy all your veg as seedlings – packet of lettuce may give you 200 seedlings. A punnet may give you 12.
47. Believe you can’t grow melons in Canberra – just get small, early-ripening varieties.
48. Be conservative: when you grow your own there are thousands of varieties that you’ll never find in a supermarket.
49. Forget to mulch the strawberries. This summer will be hot and strawberries are shallow rooted.
50. Neglect to pick the ripe raspberries every day or the harlequin beetles will find and suck them dry – leaving them hard and far from luscious.
51. Leave buying fruit-fly exclusion netting till after the fruit flies have arrived and bred.
52. Stuff your compost with fruit peel and rotten fruit – fruit fliesadore rotting piles of fruit.
53. Waste your lilli-pilli fruit. Pick before it colours fully and tastes of turpentine and make jelly.
54. Let the fruit fly get your loquat fruit. Pick and make jam – like plum crossed with apricot but even better. Or toss them in the freezer, whole, to make jam some other time. Or even stew loquats to eat with lashings of natural yoghurt.
55. Soak your cumquats in brandy/rum/gin and sugar without simmering them gently to soften the skins first, or pricking many times with a needle to allow the sweet alcohol to penetrate.
56. Boil your newly sprouting rhubarb. Sprinkle with sugar and perhaps a touch of Cointreau and bake instead so it doesn’t go stringy.
57. Be stingy with your water. Trees can do two-thirds of their annual growth in spring. Water them so they can get on with it.
58. Allow the eel-worms or slugs to steal the ripe strawberries. Pick every morning and late afternoon. Berries can ripen fast.
59. Let the loganberries take over the garden. Train them upward where they belong.
60. Let mulberries stain your clothes. If you do get mulberry juice on your clothing try rubbing with the juice of unripe mulberries to remove. This is not infallible but worth a try.
61. Let the birds guzzle all the mulberries – pick the ripe ones every morning.
62. Let the white cockatoos get so much as a taste of your red cedar cladding or they’ll gnaw on lots of it.
63. Take your eyes off the wisteria or kiwi fruit vines: six weeks of good growth and they may be invading your roof space.
64. Plant potato vine. Ever. Potato vines love Canberra and its environs and nothing eats it. Plants that love us and nothing eats are called weeds.
65. Plant "sterile" broom. On its 21st birthday it may decide to produce viable seed and shed 100 seedlings.
66. Ignore your dandelions. If the dog hasn’t urinated on them (wash well) spring dandelion greens lack bitterness and can be added to salads, especially good with fatty or oily dishes.
67. Negligently allow guests to slip on your mossy paths. Spray bleach; wait till it browns then sweep firmly.
68. Waste your hair and beard clippings. Sprinkle around seedlings to keep snails off. Imagine you had a tummy like a snail all covered in prickly hair.
69. Spray toxic chemical No. 1684 at the first sign of whitefly or aphids. Pests breed at about 3 degrees the predators that eat them at about 12 degrees. Wait and they shall be eaten. Poison them and the predators may starve.
70. Use snail bait that may kill pets or lizards or birds that eat the dying slugs or snails. Use (a snail killer based on Iron EDTA Complex - a potent stomach poison for snails and slugs but non-toxic (except in huge quantities) to other critters and that breaks down to provide extra iron in the soil instead.
71. Stomp on spitfires that you shake or rake down from the trees unless you’re wearing gumboots or other strong footwear.
72. Be conservative with your vacuum cleaner. Those stink bugs in your citrus trees can just be whooshed up. Gently.
73. Bother poisoning scale on indoor shrubs. Scrape ‘em off with your fingernails and squish.
74. Think you can avoid black spot on many old-fashioned roses. Even an umbrella held over them every time of/it rains won’t help much.
75. Forget to check any cabbage, broccoli etc for caterpillars. Spray with one cup white flour, one cup boiling water, thinned with cold water and strained. Glued up pests stop eating your veg.
76. Neglect to use the glue spray on 28-spotted ladybirds either. (No need to count each spot. They’ll be the ones eating your potato plants. Most other ladybirds produce larvae that will eat the pests, not your plants.)
77. Prune your rambling roses … if they are spring bloomers you’ll prune off the young blooms. Wait till after they bloom.
78. Prune your wisteria, ditto.
79. Forget to trim back any winter-blooming flowering shrubs.
80. Prune hedges over-enthusiastically back into wood that has no leaves or shoots or the whole branch may die back. Result: Big, brown, dead patch in hedge.
81. Prune back cypress too much … branches, ditto.
82. Mow your daffodil leaves after the flowers fade. Yes, you will kill them.
83. Think you can’t mow hellebores once they’ve finished flowering. Once plants are sturdy a high mowing will get rid of ratty old leaves and slow/allow new foliage to emerge.
84. Ditto winter-blooming red-hot pokers. Slash and mow.
85. Neglect to water spring weeds and prunings so that you can turn them into compost for summer.
86. Saw off great hulking limbs of trees: the sap is rising and will spill out and exhaust the tree’s stored energy. It will also be a good entry point for disease. Wait till early summer when wounds heal fast, and paint with a fungicide paint when you do.
87. Neglect to provide cushions for outdoor chairs: no upholstery means they are hard on the sit-upon after an hour or so.
88. Choose any but water-proof cushions unless you enjoy the splodges of damp and rotting cloth.
89. Forget to sweep out cobwebs – and any lurking red-back spiders – from garden chair and tables.
90. Fail to check swings for firm foundations and general soundness with vigorous playing and don’t forget to create a soft landing spot below …
91. Ignore the footings of the pergolas in case they rotted over winter.
92. Allow above-ground trampolines – set them level with the ground so there is less distance to fall.
93. Forget the sunscreen …
94. or feel self-conscious in a wide-brimmed cool hat.
95. Bare your legs and ankles at dusk when mozzies wake and feed.
96. Leave the dog’s bowl in a hot sunny spot – warm, slimy water is unfair to dogs.
97. Put the birds’ water in a spot where cats can find a feathered dinner. Keep them high and safe.
98. Neglect the birds entirely – Canberra is rich in blossom but safe water is sparse.
99. Pick every single piece of fruit. Birds and fruit bats were here before us: leave at least 10 per centfor them.
100. Delay buying fruit bags to slip over peaches or bunches of grapes at least a month before they ripen: birds like sourer fruit than we do.
101. Set the mower so low you dig the soil instead of mow the grass. Bald patches will grow weeds that grow faster than the grass.
102. Think that mowing low means the grass will stay looking neat for longer. It won’t.
103. Put off the first mowing of the season. Early mowing chops the seed heads off the weeds. Grass evolved to be munched. Few beasties eat weeds – that’s why they are weeds. So they don’t like to be mowed either. Early and regular mowing will encourage the grass and – slowly – kill the weeds (or at least make them less vigorous).
104. Pour on herbicide like it’s a cup of coffee. Kill shallow weeds with a kettle of boiling water. Or dog wee. Over plant a daisy bush and let it smother the weeds.
105. Don’t forget to stop and smell the first rose of summer. Though not of course if you get hayfever. Or sinus. Or have a spare three hours for dipping the petals in beaten egg white and caster sugar and drying them to decorate cakes, which won’t taste any better for it.
Bung the rose in a vase and keep it on your desk to remind you that all seasons pass, even the freeze of the winter we have just had, and whatever summer is going to fling at us in its time.
Spring is short and no matter how long we live, we will always have too few of them. Don’t waste a single one.