When you have a small balcony garden, nothing much happens most of the time. At the moment, the only thing worth mentioning are the gardenias, which are blooming left right and center despite the rather wet, rainy and windy weather we’re having.

I didn’t have time to take any new photos of the little darlings, so it’ll have to wait til tomorrow. It looks like I’ve done right by these gardenias this time around and they’re rather happy at the moment. I love heading out there in more morning and taking a quick whiff of their heavenly scent.

I’m heading away for 2 weeks on Sunday. I’m quite anxious about leaving the plants (they’re the equivalent of family pets to me). I think the gardenias will be ok with the late autumn rain we’re having and I’ve got some gel spike thingies from Bunnings for the tomato plants. The frangipani should also survive on mother nature’s rain, it’s pretty dormant at the moment so I’m not too worried about it. I had to stake it the other night because it got too windy outside and the cutting started to lean unfavourably.

My only concern is the lavender seedlings. They need constant care at the moment and watering every 2-3 days. My dad has volunteered himself to take care of them while we’re away, he’s probably the best person I know to look after them. I just have to remember that good old saying, “Plants die, get over it”. It’s not like I don’t have another 92 lavender seeds
left to germinate if these ones don’t make it.

Can’t wait til I come back, there’s a lot I want to do, but I’ll save that for tomorrows rantings and ravings.

I’m probably going overboard, but I bought more plants for the office. The old lot of plants are looking severely sad, and I mean S-A-D, the only plant that didn’t look like it was going die was the bamboo palm.

The old plants consisted of a corn plant and dracaena marginata donated by my mum, she’s not going to pleased to know that they’re both suffering. We also have a yucca just clinging onto life. It suffered from a really bad infestation of some sort of mites. The leaves were covered with white, weird smelling, powdery stuff and I just couldn’t get it cleaned up in time. It’s such a sad looking plant, I’m considering putting it out of its misery.

So anyway, since the old plants weren’t doing so well, I thought I’d spruce up the office with some new plants that are harder for me to kill. I bought a mother in law’s tongue/snake plant, a peace lily and 2 more bamboo palms. They look rather attractive clumped together.

With a little more knowledge under my sleeve, I choose these plants because they do well in low to moderate light conditions. The only one I have to watch out for is the snake plant, it might suffer from my over-zealous watering.

Which brings me to mention my new device! I got a water/pH/light/all in one meter! I couldn’t believe it, for under $20 from Waldecks I got this fantastic little tool, and it’s so easy to use!

Oh, and I also got a little froggie ornament. He sits on the edge of the peace lily pot.

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.