There's a lot to be said for rainy mornings. For one thing it means the gardener gets the morning off from hose-pointing duties, as Huey the rain god turns on the heavenly sprinklers for a few minutes. And so it was this morning, but in addition to thanking Huey for the favour, I was reminded yet again that the best thing about rainy mornings is how nice gardens look when they are wet.  This November morning I enjoyed the perfect type of rainy morning: showers. So it rains for a few minutes then it stops raining. That means you can go outside and not get wet but you can enjoy the g ..read more

While my enthusiasm for garden blogging might be on the wane, the opposite is true for gardening itself. I've never enjoyed it more. Perhaps the blogging has been getting in the way of my enjoyment of gardening? In recent years I suspect so, hence very little activity here on the Garden Amateur blog. So here's a rare posting on how things are going here in spring. I may post  something during summer, but right now in spring there is almost too much to talk about. The one thought that hit me the other day as I was admiring all the flowers and crops is how spring makes you feel like you're ..read more

  These YouTube videos are making a lazy blogger of me! Yesterday, for reasons unrelated to gardening (ie, I was changing where I parked my motorcycle in the backyard) I ended up moving my potted Thai lime tree from the spot it has occupied for the last five years to a new spot just four or five feet away. And this morning, when I stepped out into the backyard I was taking in a much more colourful, flower-filled view of Garden Amateur Land than I have ever enjoyed before. The spring flowers no doubt help, but moving a "blocker" from the foreground has worked wonders. And the only thing th ..read more

  There is no time of day to compare to the mornings in our garden. As you stand at the back door and look out, the low morning sun appears in the far right corner of the north-facing property and steadily lights up every plant as it rises. However, as an early riser who's often out there before the sunbeams appear, the truly best time to view it all is that gentle brief time between dawn and the moment the sun starts casting shadows.  That soft, low morning light allows the many different greens and the subtle greys to do their version of glowing, before old shiny guts appears over ..read more

  One very strange thing I haven't been doing lately is visiting gardening centres. Prior to all this covid disruption, you'd probably find me browsing through a garden centre at least once a week. They were right up there with bookshops for me: regular haunts. But that was back then, and I haven't been to a bookshop for quite some time, either. So, instead of picking up a punnet of seedlings at the local garden centre, for the last few weeks I've either been sorting through my stash of seed packets, searching the small section devoted to seeds at my local supermarket, or — by far the bes ..read more

  Hi everyone Apologies! Just a short (for me) and apologetic posting to everyone who subscribes to my blog via email. Apparently lots of you have been getting the text, but instead of the videos there's just a huge black box with nothing in it. That wasn't the plan! So, to repeat the video postings of the previous two days for anyone interested in spending five minutes on YouTube looking at my guided tours of Garden Amateur land, here are the links, just as old-fashioned links to click on. Handy hint: turn the volume of the sound up! Here's a link to the first one (west side of the garde ..read more

  After showing you briefly around the western half of our small Sydney garden in the video I posted yesterday – the last day of winter – today I have another little video showing you the highlights of the eastern half of Garden Amateur land on this, the first day of spring ..read more

 Late this afternoon I decided to do a short experimental video, wandering around part of our garden. And so here is "And now for something completely different" a short walk around one part of our tiny garden on August 31, the last day of winter ..read more

I didn't think I'd be doing a detailed "how to" involving a hammer and a sharp knife when I woke up this morning, but here we are anyway (and it was a smashing success I might add).  I have more than one curry leaf tree growing in my garden, and quite some time ago I had promised to give my one-metre tall potted curry leaf tree to my good friends Jolanda and Paul. They used to have a productive curry leaf tree in their garden, but while they were away travelling for several months in 2019 (lucky them!) the tree didn't survive, so they needed a replacement. The problem is that my p ..read more

Pictured below is nothing less than a disgrace. A weedy disgrace, a total temporary victory by the evil onion weed. And so last week I decided I had to do battle with this almost invincible foe, or die in the attempt. More to the point in my current state of health, I didn't so much fear death by onion weed than a relapse in my recovery from the broken foot/wrecked ankle. Neither happened, I'm still here. I won (kind of), and here's what happened in the Coliseum Match of Gladiator V Onion Weed. Neglect onion weed for a few weeks so it gets a foothold in your garden, then wait for a thoro ..read more