And it's not even Spring!

I know that as we in the Southern Hemisphere move into Autumn that our posts are supposed to turn to thoughts of raking fallen leaves, knitting warm jumpers and rugging up in front of the fire/heater, but I don't mind bucking the trend from time to time.

So today, we gardened. We had to cut down the cordylines in front of our house as we had to have all the mortar redone in our brickwork (the enclosed balcony on the left front of the house is single brick - in some places you could see right through the gaps in the bricks into that room! Not good when I store yarn in there...). I hoped they would sprout again from the stumps, which they have, but they still look pretty ugly. So we thought we'd try and cover them up while they grow back.

And on the right front of our house, we had to cut out the hebes we'd planted originally as we let them get all leggy. Lucky we didn't replace them before we got the mortar done! (look how good it looks now!)

And we never did buy enough camellias for the camellia hedge on our neighbour's fence. So one more to go in there (after bulk weeding to get rid of the t. pallida - or what is commonly called "wandering jew" - I thought there was a new name for this weed, but couldn't find one on the internets).

We bought the plants yesterday so we could plant early this morning. Lucky, because about 5 minutes after we finished planting, it started raining - yay for lovely rain to soak the new plants! We put cuphea in front of the cordylines - easy to maintain, flowers pretty much all year round, and won't grow too high. You can't see them, but they've got hot pink teeny tiny flowers.

Replaced the hebes with new ones. Must remember to trim them after they finish flowering... . And put in a red standard rose for my dad, to go with the standard peace rose we planted for Husby's dad (you can just see it in the photo above and also in the first photo).
And the final camellia - hopefully it will spread nicely and in about 100 years (well, maybe 5 more) there'll be a nice camellia hedge along this fence. We still have to plant something in front of the camellias. Maybe I'll replant some of the agapanthus from the back yard. Of course, that's pretty much my gardening effort for the next 12 months. Not my favourite task I'm afraid. Especially when it involves weeding, which I did as well. Stupid onion weed. But yay for pretty plants which are low-maintenance and even grow flowers from time to time! Like our lovely tibouchina tree!

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Answers to a couple of questions on the Rugz 4 Kidz blanket in my last post:

-there are a set number of knitters for each blanket - about 20 (although some have volunteered to do two strips!). So it's almost done, I think there are about 5 or 6 to go on this rug.

-I won't get to see the finished blanket in person, but there should be pictures posted on the blog.

-I didn't mention this, but along with the rug is a little book - each knitter writes something in the book, like a hope or a prayer, and the book will be given to the child along with the blanket.