Welcoming The New Aussie Plants To The Garden After I Said There’d Be No More

After promising myself that I would not further complicate the garden already lacking space for any new members when visiting 沼ノ上農園 (Numanoue Nouen)  yesterday, I spent today planting the bunch of additions that I invariably picked up.

We bought a bottle tree at the popup shop at Urawa PARCO, and then ended up buying basically a forest full of trees when we went to the nursery itself in the afternoon.

I’ve long found the best way to deal with temptation is not to resist it, so I woke this morning expecting a delivery, probably in the early afternoon given that we had not made the order until the afternoon and it needed to travel from Deep Saitama.

I got a bit of a shock, then, to see the deliveryman come in with a couple of huge boxes just before 9 a.m., which meant that plans to buy bigger pots and soil had been subverted. Worse was to come when I looked inside a couple of soil-filled pots I had planned to use and discovered they were filled with the larvae of koganemushi, Japanese beetles. These bugs feed on plant roots, to devastating effect in our garden over the past few years.

Anyway, this necessitated a trip to the local DIY center, where I picked up some soil designed for native Australian plants. I’d also ditched the bug-filled soil on a barren nature strip outside our house, so I grabbed some lawn seed and topsoil to beautify that area.

It was glorious weather and I got to replant the heath banksia in a huge pot I filled with new soil, including a batch specially prepared by Numanoe Noen, used some dirt I already had to replant yet another attempt at growing a flowering coastal banksia and then re potted a lemon tree. The bright sunshine helped, and I was pretty chuffed.

I broke the stand on the Big Red bike, though, by trying to prop up more than 50 liters of dirt carried over the top of the mountain from the DIY center to home.

沼ノ上農園関連

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