20 years at Bloomfield Cottage - from woe to go .........

It's only when you look back at old photos that you realise how much has changed over the last 20 years. Of course, having adult children now is the real reality check, but looking back at how much blood sweat and effort, not to mention cuts, bruises, strained muscles and bad backs, has gone in to our 20 yr labour of love. As you can see we had very humble beginnings living on site with two little toddlers in a caravan whilst we built the house. Fortunately the big shed has a toilet and two rooms where we stored most of the furniture and a small room we converted into a basic bathroom. Life was simple and exciting, full of the future we were embarking on.

Little did my husband know what was going through my head for the gardens! I would often see builders shaking their head when I was right down the furthest reaches of our 1.5 acre, planting hardy shrubs and lugging watering cans around - they had no idea of how important this backbone layer of the garden would be one day, after all you can't plant soft and pretty things until you create the right environment for them to grow. We are situated high above the suburb and can get a lot of weather and extreme winds from time to time, so creating wind breaks with Juniper 'Spartan' was essential. There literally was no shade until it grew, so now we have 20 year old trees on the property.

At this stage of my life, I was heavily into borrowing beautiful country gardening books from our local library. I would gaze longingly at Edna Walling gardens (hence the drystone sandstone edges) and read 'Garden of a thousand roses' by Susan Irvine (also hence, the 600 or so roses!). I still have hundreds of gardening magazines and became an avid organic vegetable gardener and planted a small orchid of fruit trees near the large 6 bed vegetable patch.. The soft and pretty English gardens and roses have always resonated with me most, that, and a childhood spent with great aunties at the beautiful Adelaide Botanical Gardens. And so, I melded both, and now describe Bloomfield Cottage as an English Parkland Garden. 

These are scanned photos of the originals - and a map used for some of our Open Garden visitors.

As you can see, we've come along way in 20 years

View from the front door towards the pond.

And soon all the roses will be flowering - I can't wait

Keep watching for the next blog - we've got some big news ....

Homing some new Fan-tailed doves

I bought my husband a Dove Cote for his 50th Birthday some years ago. I had always admired a garden with a dove cote and he had always shown an interest in birds, so it was a great gift idea, and has been a huge hit with friends and visitors to our garden.

We are always asked why they don't fly away - but of course, once they are 'homed' to their house or cote, and their feeding stand, they just stay. The dove cote itself is situated in a protected part of the yard, quite near the koi pond,so water is always available. Right behind is the lookout - a tall, dead tree that is the home to our bee hive and used as a roost to survey all.

Beautiful aren't they? But over time our numbers dwindled for one reason or another and so we needed to buy in some new birds and 'home' them, which is a bit of a process, but worth the time and effort when you finally free them.

We use star pickets to stake a wire fence around the dovecote and feeding stand, leaving a makeshift gate to come and go from. Then we cover the lot with bird netting, tying it down securely so no roaming cats can get in, making sure the birds have an adequate flight path to the feeding stand and the ground. And that's it for 6 weeks! Then, hopefully when we remove it all - the birds stay.

We set them free after six and a bit weeks, one Friday afternoon. They flew up into the sky where they hovered for a few moments, then flew off. We weren't too worried until the wind started blowing a gale not long after they flew off. Boy, our timing really sucked this time, as the wind blew harder and it got dark, and our doves were nowhere to be seen. We lay in bed that night, listening to the wind blowing over pots and generally reeking havok, and wondered where our poor birds were and if we would see them again. 

The next morning it was raining and windy - and still no sign of the doves :(  We felt so bad that we had let them out before a storm and cursed our poor judgement. We stayed in a lot that Sunday, watching Game of Thrones, as it was bitterly cold outside, so it wasn't until we went out late in the afternoon that we discovered the doves had found their way home! Three weeks later all is well as the doves discover the joys of flying, bathing on the stones in the pond and walking about on the lawns and gardens. They love their new home - and why wouldn't they, it's beautiful when the roses are out.

You can see more of Bloomfield's roses  here                        http://rozgrowsbest.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/its-rose-time-at-bloomfield.html

A winter walk around the garden July, 2016

There's not a lot going on around the garden at this cold and wintery time of the year. There is a bareness, a naked view of the bones and structure of the whole scene. I love to prune bare trees at this time, when I can see the structure and future shape of just the branches.

Im not going to ramble on much today - I just thought I'd take you around the yard to see what's going on in the dead of winter. We are fortunate that we don't actually get snow here, but frost and zero degrees at night is normal in our winters (we also get to 45 degrees celsius in summer!)

So we'll start from the front of the house which is normally lush with wisteria and roses

I need to get cracking on rose pruning - there are literally hundreds, many are large climbers and old fashioned shrubs, including an extensive display of David Austin's. If you want to see an array of some of our most beautiful roses, go to the Featured Post -It's Rose time at Bloomfield Cottage

The Camellia hedge is looking great after some good rain to perk it up. These blousy Sasanqua's are first to flower, then the more formal Japonica's follow.

The pond always looks nice, even in it's winter state. We don't feed the koi fish much at all at this time of the year.

I have been busy though, building a new raised garden with some sandstone my husband bought home some time ago, and of course I tidied up the whole pathway whilst down there. 

Looking back the other way. I love the hidden pathways around the garden :)

I've also been busy in the vegie beds. 

All the Broccoli, Kale and Brussel Sprouts are netted from the pesty cabbage moth - no sprays used here. The soils are all freshened up with lime, cow manure, horse manure, and organic seaweed.

I don't have a lot in the glasshouse at the moment, however the orchids are all starting to flower.

This patch of succulents seem to thrive on the cold. In fact, it's tips turn quite pink with the cold weather. We are going to use little florets of this succulent for my daughter's wedding tokens, done up in little glass terrariums!

And of course, winter is the beginning of bulb time here. These are the first to come up and flower in the middle of winter - Erlicheer jonquils, always a cheerie sight with a strong fragrance!

Daffodils and Tritella's coming up in clumps under deciduous trees.

I can't believe how much new growth some of the roses have already - much too soon. It makes it very difficult to spray with lime sulpher after pruning, as it will burn the new delicate foliage. It is an important step at rose pruning time as it cleans up any over-wintering blackspot and fungal spores.

And as you can see, I have loads of roses to prune in the diamond beds. These are the Hydrid Tea roses that I use for showing and cutting.

And because Cleo followed me around everywhere while I took photos I thought I,d put one in of her for good measure.

See you next time ..........

Meet our Miniature horse Hunter

Isn't he just gorgeous? Well that's a mothers view of course. And to be honest, he is always very popular at 'open garden' days and family functions. His name is Hunter and he is a miniature horse,very much part of our family. The dogs are great companions of his too, often found sitting with him while he crops the lawn.

He is 13 years old this year, which is probably the adolescent stage of his life, as mini's can live 30 years and more! That being said, a horse is a lifetime pet and not just a whim, so it was a big decision based on whether I was prepared to look after him for a very long time to come - because we all know that children grow up and leave home and the pets usually stay! When my children and I went to first view him at a property near Goulburn, NSW,  he was only 6 weeks old and truly the cutest little thing we'd ever seen, frisking about his mother. Then, when he was weaned at 6 months old, he was delivered to our Bloomfield Cottage property where we had prepared his own fenced off area and built a small manger for protection from weather and feeding. He was the same size as our golden retriever at this time and was very popular with all the neighbourhood children!

He has been a great companion while I'm in the veggie patch as his corral is right next to it. He will whinny and neigh his hellos and we often have a little nuzzle and a kiss on his soft nose. Hunter always gets little treats from the veggie patch but usually we tie him to a strong stake around the lawn so he can crop at leisure - he is definitely not to be trusted anywhere near the garden beds or the roses - which I might add are his favorite.

When he was little, the girls used to comb and platte his mane with beads and all sorts of pretty ribbons - poor boy. But these days his grooming is left to me and I just brush him occasionally and trim his tail and fringe. We don't cover him with a blanket in winter, so he grows this amazing thick fluffy coat to keep warm. If you run your fingers through it you cant feel his skin at all it's so thick.

He got quite sick once, about 6 years ago, and we rushed him to our local equine veterinary hospital. We had the vet out the week prior because he wasn't eating or pooping - very bad for horses! They operated immediately on him and removed two large 'stones' from his stomach that was blocking all functions. We kept them as a reminder to keep his diet plain and regular and he has been fine ever since. The stones feel like pumice stone and smell of chaff. The vets are not sure what causes them
but they usually occur in the spring, which this did.

He is a wonderful part of this lifestyle living, and his manure is always greatly appreciated in the gardens and worm farm. Like all animals he is wormed regularly - we don't put that manure in the worm farm though.

Hunter is just one of the many animals we have at Bloomfield Cottage that makes this a fulfilled and busy lifestyle.

See what comes out of this odd little cocoon...........

I found this funny cocoon thing the other day. Iv`e never seen one like it before - and I can tell you that over 30 years of gardening, iv`e seen plenty of weird insect eggs, sac`s and cocoons. But this one was a slightly corky little thing, with a tiny hole in one end. Such a cleverly built little thing, which was securely attached to a branch of wisteria.

Have you ever seen one of these before? Well I hadn't, so I cut it off the branch and bought it inside. I put it on the window ledge in the kitchen in a vase of water so I could photograph it, which I did some days later. My daughter said 'yuk, what is that' and I said I don't know, some sort of cocoon.

'Don't leave it there - what if something comes out', was her initial response. 'Oh it's not going to hatch overnight' was mine.

So it sat there on the window sill for a good 10 days, until one morning, I came into the kitchen to find hundreds of creepy little insects all over the window glass and bench tops. 

Luckily my daughter and husband were still in bed! Thank goodness they hadn't yet traveled too far around the kitchen, and were still isolated to the window and sink area. As you can guess, I raced for the insect killer spray and quickly sprayed the crap out of them! I had goose bumps and the creeps!

After gloving up and finding the old dish cloth I removed all the dead little bugs before my family saw them! Ha, nothing worse than your 22 yr old daughter telling you 'I told you so'.

Well she was right, and I learnt my lesson - don't bring any suspicious insect nests in to the house!
I'm still not sure what they were, but I suspect they are a hatchling of a wasp or perhaps grasshopper? I'm so glad I only just caught them crawling about everywhere - imagine if I got up and the nest was empty and they had all disappeared throughout the house! There were hundreds of them! Argh, that doesn't bear thinking about.

Please leave a comment if you think you know what the little critters were. I searched the net but there are just so many weird little cocoons. I've since found two more cocoons outside - which is where I will leave them - lesson learnt.

Deaddie insects. 

Summer rain storms and damage 2016

Summer for me, is not about much actual gardening, it`s all about the watering - trying to keep all my treasured plants and shrubs alive in our scorching heat. No-where near the coast, and at the foot of the Blue Mountains, means we live in a hot dry dustbowl sometimes. So summer is all about time consuming watering - mostly by hand. We have lots of irrigation and rain water tanks, but it`s never enough in this heat, you need a strong jet of water at the base of each plant, drippers and sprays are just not enough. However.....

We are forecast to have a very rainy (and thundery and lightening) week, which the dogs will hate. I just wish I`d already gotten all the fertilisers sitting in my garage thrown about before the rain :[  It`s mid summer here and was 41 degrees today, it`s been hot and dry, but a big storm blew in mid afternoon, offering a cooler wet week with some gardening respite.

In fact, a rainy week is the perfect time to pack away the Christmas tree and all the decorations and tuck into some indoor chores and healthy cooking - and do a bit more blogging! I`m sitting on my verandah enjoying the temperature as it cools and the rain begins....

The very next day, a really nasty storm hit our suburb leaving loads of damage and power outages. Sadly, a man was even killed when a tree fell on his car.

The mini tornado came in sideways with gale force winds and driving rain and hail, wreaking havoc and destruction all over the place . Here is our contribution....

                            All along the back pathway is smashed of all places! You can`t even get through up there. We are still getting periods of high winds so more damage is likely. It will be out with the chain saw when the weather clears up, then time to sharpen the hedgers.....

A good deep soaking is just what all the large trees and shrubs need though, and Iv`e put in a request to my husband, for a trailer load or two of stable manure to top up the veggie gardens after the rains are done and the soils are saturated. I`m glad I got all the boundary and garden edges weed-sprayed before the rain, otherwise the weeds would have taken over with the rain and humidity. It doesn`t take long for nature to grow out of control if you don't keep on top of it at this time of the year.

The 48m camellia hedge along the driveway, is the next to get the big prune - it`s over the fence in parts and with all this rain it will shoot up quickly. After a quick inspection of the camellia hedge today, I was horrified to see it budding up already! it`s very early, still mid summer, and not even pruned yet! If I want a good floral display this Autumn I need to get cracking.

So Iv`e got my work cut out for me with fertilizing, manuring, hedging and chain-sawing!

and thanks for visiting Bloomfield Cottage