I've got a couple of clearer weeks ahead of me... well, I'm not travelling at least, but there are still quite a decent amount of things to plan and do if I don't want to get hit by a huge snowball of things later in the month! Plus, the winter is looking a little bit sunnier this week... and so that means it is a good time to get out and do some little gardening things before everything gets busy again.

First things, the clipping back of various bushes and trees.... I'm not sure if now is the BEST time for it, but it is the time that I have. If I was constantly waiting for the exact best time, I'm sure that it would just not get done at all! So, I was going around with this heavier clipper to prune back various greenery parts, and my younger daughter was following around with a pair of secateurs to clip all the small twigs and everything. She was also keen to go caterpillar hunting again, but in the winter, they have all disappeared!

Meanwhile, there were new shoots of the passionfruit starting to peek up in various places again... much of it now newly accessible after a bit of an undergrowth trim. I had much less luck chasing the new shoots back to the roots this time... partly as I was running out of time in the gardening time slot... but I also found that these shoots had often come from at least 10 or 15 centimetres under the ground... and quite often, I wasn't making a deep enough cut in the ground to find the root before snapping off the new shoot. Sigh... that means that there is going to be more work later in the season when they pop back up again.

Meanwhile, I'm now in a bit of a two minds sort of state about some of the thorny bushes.... there are a few that are just thorny without much other growth... and there are others like this one that is pictured, that has thorns and spines but with decent thick growth and the potential for flowering as well. So, I think I'll end up keeping some of them that are doing well, and digging up the others that seem to only serve to rip up my clothes and spike me with no additional aesthetic benefit.

Slowly... we are also starting to make a move on the retaining walls at the back. We finally went to the local hardware shop to start looking at the various options. I like this one... a sort of textured tone with smaller lower levels and a capstone. However, for some reason, my wife doesn't like the textured stones...

... so, we are likely to get something like this for the veggie wicker bed retaining walls... and we are still in "discussion" about the perimeter retainers. I'm dead against timber for structural and maintenance reasons, but my wife insists that it will look better.... this might take some time to resolve!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
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