Yard Tales - An Update

Ha ha, it's a mess! That's the update ;-)

No, seriously, it's really gotten away from me. The rainwater from the recent storms has sent the grass growing wildly and it's been difficult to mow because it's still all so wet. On the plus side, it's nice to see the yard so green after being such a dry dead brown colour for so long.

Sunday's plan is to do a HUGE clean up. Mowing, weeding, pruning, and just general tidying. As a bonus, it will be good exercise.

It went from this: 😎

Back to this: 😣

There's tons of green mangoes lying in that grass too, half eaten by the rainbow lorikeets and the flying foxes. They're a little fun to hit when mowing, so I'll have to go through and pick them all up first. Otherwise it will be a noisy endeavour as the mower blades hit them and end with my legs coated in shredded mango!

Did I mention that I hate the smell of mangoes? Yuck! But the trees give good shade and shelter the local birdlife, so they're staying.

The good news is all those picked up mangoes will go straight into the compost bin, and then eventually into the garden beds. Speaking of which ... 😱

This one needs a good tidy up and top up with soil. The tomatoes are pretty much done, and the marigolds can come out too. The second garden bed is still empty as I don't have enough soil for it yet, but I do have some mango tree branches to cut up and place in the bottom. I guess a bit of a hügelkultur setup?

I've also got some frangipani (Plumeria acutifolia) cuttings to pot today. They've been sitting for a little while to callous first. There's a pink, a fruit salad, and a white and gold. I already have a white and gold cutting growing successfully in a pot, so hoping these all take off too. I haven't tried with cuttings that were in flower, so it will be interesting to see if they thrive.

Time to start the yard work! Luckily this beast of a mower does not seem to be phased by too much grass or the odd hidden mango. My only concern today is running into a snake in the backyard, we've had young brown snakes around and a couple killed on the road out front, but the mower noise should scare them off first. Wish me luck 👍

Until next time,
@Sammie