A little light winter weeding

Best done only in sunshine. December weeding is a delicate dance when it’s winter in the appropriate hemisphere.

I’m only showing you the finished product.  That is grasses cut back, all ballota, phlomis, salvia, sedum cut back, prunings, weedings, armfuls of stuff hauled away.

Irises tidied and transplanted. You have seen all this already. But what you haven’t seen is the icing on the cake.

Mulched.

That is a surprise. I have on my wish list an illicit swing by the depot mulch pile to see if they have started chipping again. Wouldn’t that be a fab Santa surprise?

But for now the leftovers from the soft fruit orchard have been bagged up, dragged, (it’s a longish walk) and spread over the soil.

If you look carefully you can see some rather odd loggery going on; that’s my badger deterrent trick.

They don’t get a soft mulchy pile to rummage through. The whole area is a booby trap of wood.

If it’s the wild boar troupe coming past this lovely large bank won’t stand a chance. But I have reached peak fencing and these tough plants will just have to cope.

As will the grass. I’ve never pruned eragrostis curvula grass this early. And I’m quite excited by the experiment. If all goes well I’ll make a mental note to attack it early in the winter.  It’s a sort of quiet time.

Well, plenty of indoor thrills.

But the weather only gives you a few good solid hours of outdoor frolics. So warming up by perching on a steep slope with a pair of secateurs and a few hundred grasses is the tonic I was looking for.

Oh, and just to keep it festive here is out tree.

Not a proper Christmas tree, but it’s a weed. And it has to go. We don’t have pines in front of the house due to bushfire risks. And decorations will turn any ‘Charlie Brown Tree’ into a delight.