After last month's misery, it's turning hot and windy and flowers are blooming and the antihistamines are within arm's reach, although we had a final venture into minus territory last weekend, killing off my bean seedlings and one or two other things, meh. These little mesembs, aka vygies in my country always herald the start of spring. These tough little plants like it hot and sunny and don't need much water so they are perfect for the garden
Some more: these were from the closing down sale
but wait, there's more!
On to the planning: last year, we cleaned out this corner and removed the remains of the roots of the invasive belhambra tree , which was in the process of smashing the wall again. The wall is an awful eyesore but I'd prefer not to pay to build another one. I left the ground to settle and now the plan is to plant edible vines to cover the thing.
I was given a Cairo vine tuber, an indigenous edible plant - both the tubers and the leaves - of the Ipomoea family and that's one candidate. The other is an indigenous cucumber that is more resilient in my climate
Then, I'm finally going to going to be able to construct a dry house. A dry house is a greenhouse for succulent growers and it is basically a tinted polycarbonate roof to keep excessive amounts of rain off the plants and supply some shade in my case. I'll build it out of the leftover brandering from when I replaced the upstairs tiled roof with zinc, because the idiots who built my house put tiles at a pitch that is suitable only for zinc. Of course the thing always leaked.
Here's a garden selfie for @riverflows, it's a few years old, from when I was clearing the overgrown mess to the left of the corner I showed. I got proficient with using chainsaws, axes and machetes dealing with the awful mess in my yard
The dry house will enable me to grow even more succulents, because my long-term goal is to be able to sell plants as an extra income. That's my excuse for having too many plants anyway.
That's what I'm up to in September: @ewkaw and @kansuze why not join in and give us and update on your gardens? Look here: @riverflows/hive-gardeners-its-time-for-the-september-gardenjournal-challenge-25-hive-in-prizes
