It's all about sex, really. Spring, I mean. Spring also means sinus, hay fever, noticing just how dusty your windows became over winter and with luck, seeing the birds haul away most of the cobwebs outside the house to construct their nests.
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The birds are here already feeling sexy, the first daffodils have poked their heads up and the deciduous trees and shrubs are budding. It time to get ready to enjoy every second of spring.
Spring flowers are glorious in colour, scent and profusion so they can tempt birds, bees, wasps, moths, the occasional gardener with a thin paint brush and other creatures to cross pollinate them, carrying pollen from flower to flower as they hunt the nectar.
Thanks to human breeding programs, today's spring flowers are even more stunning than the wild ones, individually anyway. Wild flowers have a glory all of their own. I have never seen a garden as overwhelming as trees dripping with clematis and wonga vines, a hill ablaze with indigophera, or a bluebell wood in England that was a sudden sunlit carpet.
Flowers, however, are not blooming to tempt us to pick them. A flower ripens to produce a seeds, and seeds need to ripen on the plant. Or most of the time - I have had gladioli thrown out from our vases produce a whole crop of new gladdies. Others may do that too.
From a gardener's point of view, however, picking flowers - LOTS of flowers - is just what your garden's flowers need. It takes a lot of plant energy to ripen seeds. Every time you pick a flower, you are focusing that energy on producing more blooms, and more again, instead of seeds. You are also giving the plant a much-needed haircut, a kind of mini prune.
Be generous in your picking - some for you, some for friends, some for work or the doctor's reception area or left on a neighbour's letterbox. The more you pick, the more you get, though feeding and watering the fertiliser in will help too.
Spring fruit, on the other hand, needs to be picked or fall from the tree to propagate, and if it falls from the tree the seed may be nibbled by rats. Not that I expect you to plant out every seed from every fruit you pick or eat in spring. Wouldn't it be wonderful though? Suddenly a few million fruit trees springing up all over Canberra, maybe even on that waste of green that covers Parliament House. It would look far better covered in dwarf apples, and be better insulation too, with murnong daisies planted underneath.
Spring fruit here includes citrus - oranges, Seville oranges for marmalade, lemons, Tahitian limes, Malabar limes, mandarins, tangelos, lemons, and finger limes. The next are tamarillo; avocados, which you can grow in Canberra if you are prepared to baby them for five years; then loquats, the improved kind that have sweet flesh and a small slippery stone, just like the stones we kids used to spit out at passers-by last century. You can spit a loquat stone a very long way indeed. Then there are mulberries, strawberries, loganberries, even more rhubarb, peaches from November onwards, and finally the first plums, cherries and apricots and summer is here.
Given flower picking season is beginning, this is the best way to do it:
1. Use secateurs or sturdy scissors for a clean cut that doesn't uproot the plant - some stems can be tough.
2. Pick in the early morning, before the dew has dried, and thrust the stems into a bucket of cold water. (You are unlikely to get anything but cold water out of a Canberra hose this season).
3. Cut the stems under water again, neatly as rough bits encourage early rotting.
4. Keep flowers out of direct sunlight, and as cool as possible. If you feel fanatic enough, put them in the fridge overnight.
5. Change the water every day, and rinse out the vase to discourage gunge which lessens the life of your flowers. Another snip of the stems won't hurt either, to help them take up water.
6. Commercial flower extenders really do help, but sadly all the homemade ones I've tried haven't made much difference.
7. Or ... even better ... just grab an armful of flowers when you have a spare 10 minutes to wander around the garden, deeply breathing spring air, unless you get sinus or hay fever, in which case wear goggles and a mask because soon the weeds, grasses and conifers that are the true sinus bad guys will be spreading pollen in the wind too.
8. Now bung the flowers into a vase, put it where you will see it most often, and don't forget to pick even more flowers on your way out to give to someone else.
Method number seven means you will need to pick a lot more flowers. Your garden will be the better for it. So will you.
This week I am:
- Remembering I planted pea seeds and hunting to see if they have germinated, rotted, or the ants have carried them off.
- Waiting for the last of the late camellias to burst into bloom.
- Admiring the massed yellow lengths of flowers hanging from the carob tree.
- Cheering as there are definitely three new buds on the rose cuttings. They have taken!
- Feeding the lemon trees, which are looking a bit pale after winter's cold and producing a massive crop of lemons.
- Gazing at the sprouting chokos and wondering if maybe we do need another choko vine. Maybe over the chook shed?