I can’t believe I forgot to blog about the whole seed planting thing. I added the frangipani photo gallery and forgot to actually blog about the planting of them.

Anyway, so I planted a bunch of seeds last weekend, 20 frangipani seeds, a heap of lavender and 10 or so perennial candytuft. I’m keeping them moist but not wet by watering every 2-3 days with a 10 mL syringe.

I know it’s been less than a week, but the first seeds are starting to show some…. progress.

The first of the lavender seeds has germinated.

The candytuft seeds are… hairy? I have no idea why, I’m hoping it’s not fungus! Anyway, one or two of them looks like showing the first signs of roots, but they’re so small that I couldn’t get a good photo. This is a photo of the hairy seed.

The last thing I did was to try and fix the Moses in the cradle. I pretty much cut it back so it’s more compact again, and I stuck the cut bits back into the pot. I hope that works! If it doesn’t, the little bastard’s going in the tip ;o)

Wow, despite the huge amounts of rain in the past 24 hours and the crazy wind we’re getting here, the new gardenia has already given me a pretty flower. It started opening up yesterday and this morning it was pretty much in full bloom.

Here are some photos of the little darling.

I’m so surprised at the quality of photos that my point-and-shoot camera can produce! It’s a Canon Ixus 70 with 7.1 megapixels and the usual goodies that decent point-and-shoot cameras have. The macro function is actually quite good, compared to the unusable Sony DSC that we had for 6+ years. Amazing how technology advances so quickly.

The last photo is really pretty when cropped close up. You can really see the detail and texture of the petals. I think I might print it out one day, the quality of the image is definitely good enough to print a 6×4 inch photo at 180 dpi.

There’s quite a few more buds that look like they’re going to pop open in the next day or two. Fingers crossed that they do!

When we first moved into our little place, we got a gardener in to plant some gardenias on our balcony. The gardenias flowered exactly once before neglect over their second summer killed them. The soil was in such bad condition that even weeds couldn’t grow!

So I had to remove all the old soil, put in new soil, but some new gardenias and plant them. Sounds easy enough, but it took me about 2 months to complete!

The containers that held the gardenias are probably about 70 L, they’re massive! It took me three loads of soil for each planter, and I had three of them, to empty out the soil. Eventually, the soil removal took 3 weeks, but then the planters sat empty for another few weeks because I got distracted.

So last weekend I went to the garden nursery, mostly for a bit of a browse, then I saw that they had gardenias for sale at half price. So many varieties, which one to pick? I was initially going to go for the Four Seasons variety, but then the photo on the label didn’t look as appealing. I ended up settling for a variety called “Ocean Pearl”, which I later learned is an old variety of gardenia re-released under a new name (previously known as “Veitchii”).

I bought six Ocean Pearl gardenias, two for each planter. There were 3 per planter with the previous lot of gardenias that I killed, but I always thought they looked a little cramped. So, 6 pots of gardenias, 6 x 30 L potting mix, some perlite, fertiliser for acid loving plants and one Saturday afternoon later, I can say I have gardenias. Take a look:

Note the flower in the middle planter? She smells devine! If I’m [extraordinarily] lucky, the other buds may open up for me in a couple more days. Mind you, it’s raining something terrible in Perth right now, so I don’t really expect the flowers to open, but you never know.

I bought some Lavender seeds from Bunnings. It’s just some generic Mr. Fothergill’s seeds, nothing too special. I thought since I was going for a rather fragrant collection of flowers for my garden, that a dwarf lavender would be a nice addition. Only problem is that I have no idea where I’m going to put them!

Anyway, it’s the Munstead variety, also called English Dwarf. I thought they would look very nice in the 3 terracotta (yes, I know, sinful terracotta, but they’re so pretty!) pots I have. 2 of the pots are being used to grow cherry tomatoes (now that’s super sinful), but I expect them to finish fruiting, if they ever fruit that is, I kinda planted them in the wrong season since I was so eager to try to grow them. Anyway, after the tomatoes finish fruiting I’ll be throwing them out and planting the lavender seedlings in their pots. I think the purplish blue flowers would look quite nice against the orange red of the terracotta.

So anyway, I successfully germinated some of the lavender seeds. I’ve got 5 seedlings right now, but I’m afraid one of them might be dying on me already.

Here are a couple of photos.