This should be the busiest time of the year for avid gardeners. (My spellchecker just tried to make that ''rabid'' gardener. The advice applies to rabid gardeners too).
Why now?
1. Because it's rained
2. Because it's rained
3. Because we will possibly get more rain
4. Because autumn is the time to plant for winter and next spring, as well as mooch around the garden centre or any local plant sale.
Planting now make save you $10-$100 a week all winter and spring, depending on how many you are feeding and how good a cook you are and whether you are organised enough to take a thermos of vegetable soup for lunch.
Step 1. Plant veg. Many veg survive Canberra's winters well. The veg just don't grow much once the cold weather hits. Want leeks, lettuce, carrots, red cabbage, celery, parsley, broccoli, brussel sprouts, parsnips, swedes, long winter radish, beetroot, salsify, silver beet, spinach, sweet Japanese turnips, peas, snow peas, rhubarb, and much else to munch all winter? Plant now.
Step 2. Plant flowers now. This is an investment in health and well-being: fresh air, sunshine and vitamin D, exercise and then the fulfilment of flowers as well as a touch of smugness that your garden blooms all winter.
This is the perfect time to plant annual flowers for prolific winter colour. Nothing much happens to annual flowers in Canberra's winters. This means that if you can coax pansies, violas, primulas and Iceland poppies to bloom by the beginning of winter they will keep blooming, each flower slow to emerge and slow to fade. Plant seedlings now; feed weakly weekly, and water them if the rain doesn't.
This is also spring bulb planting time. Plant! Bulbs are cheaper by the 100 - form a bulb cooperative. One daffodil bulb will give you two bulbs next year, four the year after, eight the year after that, which is a far greater return on your investment than any bank will give you. Stick to bulbs that will survive our hot summers though. The plain yellow daffs are a good beginning, single or double, or Earlicheer jonquils, Paperwhite jonquils, plus any of the tulips that the breeder declares are ''suitable for hot summers''.
The sunniest, barest bank in the valley - shale rather than soil - is covered every spring in creamy white freesias. No one would have planted them there - I reckon seed or maybe a bulb or two bounced out of someone's ute on the way to the dump, a lot more than 50 years ago as that was when first saw them, and they must have been multiplying for decades at least before then. Freesias are easily smothered by weeds, but no weed has ever bothered to colonise this bank.
Be extravagant and buy some winter blooming shrubs, too, fragrant daphne, early mid-season and late camellias, wintersweet, bright red flowered pineapple sage or gaudy pink fruit salad sage for a sheltered spot by a sunny wall. They won't have grown much by winter, but they will all still bloom, and double in size year after year, which (possibly) means a 100 per cent return on your investment. Accumulating plants that grow lush and green and fruit and flower is a lot more fun than counting money.
How to grow your own toilet paper
The local shelves were bare of toilet paper when Bryan rolled the shopping cart along them this morning. This is not a crisis in a household with at least 100 books that need to be purged. NB These are also ones that no one else is likely to want to read.
But you can grow your own toilet paper. The lovely mauve-flowered, fast-growing shrub ''lavatere'' is said to have gained its name by being planted by the Roman legions exactly for that purpose. Its leaves are soft, and slightly furry - shiny leaves are not adequate in the toilet paper stakes.
Peppermint geranium (a pelargonium) is also fast growing, soft furry leafed, and even naturally fragranced Tamarillo grows fast and its leaves might be similarly useful.
A mild warning here: I have not seen any evaluation of the effect of home-grown toilet paper on flush toilets or city effluent systems. Leaves do break down eventually, but not as fast as paper does. I have only used them in pit dunnies or composting toilets.
This week I am:
Watching the hellebores that had died back for 12 months slowly poking up pale green shoots. They will be blooming by mid-winter.
Wondering if we really will get to harvest what should have been early summer apples in late autumn this year.
Grinning at the crepe myrtles. (If you do not have crepe myrtles, plant them now. They are the flagrant pink bushes/small trees bursting into flower right now).
Listening to the creek sing or bounce boulders, depending on how much rain we've had.
Regarding the vast plants in the vegie garden with suspicion - are they really rhubarb, or some weird mutated monster?
Picking the first post-drought native limes. Gorgeous.
