Useful flowers

IF you want bright flowers which attract bees and add colour to your vegetable garden then you cannot look past the Calendula.

Yesterday while walking around East Geelong looking at gardens and getting ideas for my new place, I cam across a nature strip planted out with a riot of these gorgeous members of the daisy family.

As you would expect, there's some excellent information on the Gardening Australia website too.

I'm going to go back and knock on this gardener's front door and offer to swap some of my heritage seeds for some of their calendua seeds - fingers crossed!

Hakea heaven

A COUPLE of years ago I planted a hakea bush on the front nature-strip amongst some grevillias and now it's a blooming delight.

Bees make straight for the nectar as do honey eaters and other native birds and the flowers are such a lovely beacon on these grey winter days.

It is not simply a gorgeous shrub with its beautiful flowers, fast growth and thick foliage it is also a marvellous screening plant.

Recently the local council put in footpaths on my side of the street and they dug up most of my nature strip garden, despite not needing to place the concrete there. In their wisdom, the workers dug up most of the plants leaving the grevillias roots to the sky.

Somehow amidst the carnage the bottle-brush and hakea survived.

I managed to save a couple but the majority have died.

But every morning when i walk outside and see the hakea in flower, I'm grateful it's still there.

Autumn in your patch

THOSE stalwart folk at Sustainable Gardening Australia are at it again - this time with heaps of good ideas for getting our veggie beds all sorted.

But although my veggie garden needs some attention - and more rain, I concentrated on the front non-food garden today.

Not a lover of chocolate, after breakfast I spent Easter Sunday weeding and replanting the front nature strip garden after it was decimated by the local council when they constructed the (unwanted) footpath in our street.

Good old native iris - it divides easily and is a great plant, enjoy and neglect options and produces lovely flowers.

Thankfully, while the poor old grevillias were upended roots to sky (they have been replanted but it's not looking good), the bottle brush and hakea survived. So this afternoon I divided and planted out loads of native iris which if grows a smidgen as well as it has in the front garden, will soon grow nice and bushy and keep any weeds out.

Hopefully we will see some rain tonight and the grevillias will recover, thrive and survive.