September garden journal - Spring at Ligaya Garden

Hi!
I haven't done a #gardenjournal update for ligaya garden for a long time. The garden has been kind of stable, and will reach its 10th birthday on October 2, this year! But it's a good opportunity to take a wander with you while most of the cover is still to grow for this season, so you can see what's under the hood. Everything's blooming too and I remembered to spray for leaf curl before the leaf buds opened this year!

I've mentioned before that we've been successively reducing the size of key trees and that's about complete. Now that they're manageable, I'll give them a year before grafting onto them. They're all a good height for future management and will bring the fruit down top our level.

We've lots more open space than ever before. That has been intentional so that we can grow more healing herbs at ground level. Many of those need sun.

The Blackbirds and Doves are into their 10th generation, born and raised in Ligaya Garden. I've got these lovely pics of Mamma Dove who is nesting right outside our front door. I'm never successful gat getting pics of Mamma Blackbird. She's too quick and always manages to skip away with her scolding call.

This year, we have given away all of out tree mulch. The ground level is more than 60 cm above what it was and were nearly falling off of the garden when we step out onto the road! Also, that's all organic material which, while it sounds good on the surface (pun intended 😁) it means that it dries out easily and takes a lot of water to rehydrate. I'm going to import a half a trailer load if silt rich soil tp add to the organic material to help improve it a lot and hopefully help keep the moisture balanced more effectively.

The new dripper system is complete and had a month run at the end of summer and well into a dry autumn. The start of winter was so dry that i had to hand water everything a few times. Now we're getting bucketloads of rain so everything is wet.

Another reason I haven't posted a lot is because I like to post from my phone but the PeakD interface is annoying. You type something, them it all resets to the bottom of the post so that I have to keep scrolling up, making a small change, then do it again.

Luckily, because of our efforts over the last decade, we don't have to spend much money on the garden itself, just tweak it now and again or try to work out where that extra plant that we just had to have from the garden center goes. You know how it is 🤣.

Anyway, enjoy the Spring pictures! And don't forget to say to Athena!

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