Self care by growing a garden

Lovely @Mandy1 , will take a picture of mine too

@Mandy1 I love Wooly Bush. I've got a little one planted in our garden, but we have resident wallabies, and guess what, they like it too. It's been nibbled down a fair bit, so I'm protectively watching it and hoping it will put out new growth. It wasn't very big to start with!

I bought it from a native reveg nursery that our town's garden club visited last year. We were all having a quiet laugh at the nurseryman, because he pulled out a largeish Wooly Bush in a pot to show us at the start of a talk about the nursery, then spent the entire time he was talking stroking the stems. When he asked if there were any questions, one of the ladies asked him how much time it needed to be stroked for each day, and I asked at what point could we expect it to start purring...

@Mandy1

Pics through - cannot send a 2nd like - plants look good.

Spent a bit of time trimming, tidying, and repotting and replanting etc. I try and do a BIG watering in around this time of year, and the roots then have to go deep t survive the summer. Its not that I totally neglect them, but I had to be tough to adapt to Aussie conditions and so do my plants.

It was lovely, not too hot, a little company, and a visit to a brand noooo library.

Hi @CheerBear Your garden sounds great, but a handful.

Hi @CheerBear. 🙂

There are a lot of flowers that will grow well with the company of vegetables. I mix mine up through the garden. At the moment I've got one patch growing fennel, garlic, silverbeet, nigellas, snapdragons and a poppy or three. In another spot, I've got broad beans and sweet peas sharing the same trellis. I don't grow sweet peas with edible peas in case the pods get mistaken, but they're quite different from broad bean pods so I consider that safe enough.

The flowers, as well as looking nice, are a great drawcard for bees and other helpful insects. A lot of the pest eating insects are carnivores when they're "babies" but the adults feed on nectar, so flowers encourage them to breed up in the garden. Ladybirds are one of the best pest controllers- they eat little sap suckers like aphids as if they were potato chips.

The thing to remember when planting flowers with veggies is to choose ones that won't crowd each other out. Poppies are actually a bit unsuitable, because they release a chemical from their roots to discourage other plants from growing, but the odd one here and there doesn't seem to hurt. (Same goes for sunflowers. But you could get away with growing a few in between strong growers like zucchinis.) Low growing things like alyssum and violas can be good around carrots, onions. garlic or beans, because as well as being low enough not to bother the veggies, they help keep the soil a bit cooler. In the case of beans and garlic, you can plant both at the same time. With carrots and onions, you need to get them started and grown to medium size before putting in the flowers because the young plants are so small.

Some veggies are also quite pretty in their own right. Beans can look great when they're flowering. If you plant Scarlet Runner beans, the red flowers look like sweet peas, and even smell sweet. If you let parsley go to flower, it looks a bit like gypsophila, and coriander has pretty flowers too. Plus they'll then form seeds and give you plenty of plants for the next year.

I don't have any current garden pics handy, but from a few years ago, here's a kohlrabi plant sharing a bed with alyssum, dianthus, violas and calendulas.