The Kitty Garden

I'll start by saying I'm no Faux Fuchsia. My idea of gardening is nowhere near as competent or wonderful as hers. I like things that are low maintenance. When we first moved into the house the garden had suffered from years of, well, not quite neglect, but Mr Kitty's Dad wasn't active enough to keep up the heavy work required. So it did require a lot of work to get it back to passable. many weekends spent elbow deep in dynamic lifter and potting mix.

It's a bit of a miss-match really. I like lots of flowers - roses and lavender are particular favourites. Mr Kitty likes hedgy type things. I like herbs and vegetables. Mr Kitty likes citrus fruit.

We try to do the minimum possible to keep it looking good. With our plans to knock down the house and completely revamp both the front and backyards, it seems silly to spend all our weekends and oodles of money on the garden. But parts of it still look nice.

One area we spend time and energy is our rose garden. We have planted a lot of new roses over the past 5 years as well as trying to keep up the hybrid tea roses that were already there. We hope to be able to use them in our new garden - our plan is to put them into the courtyard near Mr Kitty's study so he can enjoy them.

This rose is called Gold Bunny. it produces the most divine yellow roses, and loads of them.

I can't remember the name of this rose but it's a gorgeous variegated pink and white rose with a spectacular lemony fragrance. I think it's my favourite one in our garden.

Our iceberg rose going crazy - it's grown a foot in less than 6 weeks!

One of the hybrid tea roses - produces lovely flowers but no smell, unfortunately.

I did cut a few for our lounge room. They look so pretty!

My other favourite rose from our garden is called Charles De Gaulle. It's a beautiful soft lilac with a gorgeous scent. I only really like roses that smell rosey. It is a very slow grower though.

Our rose geraniums - we struggle with being able to grow them well. They are really slow and don't seem to flower often, unlike others I have had in the past.

The other area I invest time and energy, with somewhat middling results I am afraid to say, is the herb garden.

Hurrah! Our flat leaf parsley seems to be back! It died away over winter and I was sure it wouldn't come back but it has.

These are our raspberry canes. We bought one last year and it cost us $20. It produced a disappointing 10 raspberries all up. But some of them must have dropped and seeded some new raspberry plants! We'll have to stake these ones but I think there are six in total. Fingers crossed we get some fruit!

Speaking of fruit, here is our strawberry pot - we usually get a handful or two of strawberries during the season...

One of Mr Kitty's orange trees. This is the late fruiting tree which is currently in blossom. Lots of hard work has paid off with this tree - it now produces twice as much fruit as it did 5 years ago.

The Kitty herb garden - Rosemary, lemon thyme and mint taking over the garden. We pulled that plant out four years ago and it keeps self seeding... I learnt my lesson there - always plant mint in a pot! I still have to plant my basil plant, chives and maybe some coriander, but I haven't had good luck with coriander in the past. I am trying to work out if I bother again... I am also thinking about tomatoes but I think I might be too late for seedlings.

So there you have it - not exactly Faux Fuchsia level, but it does the trick. For the moment anyway!

Kitty