And so it goes on

Some time ago I followed avocado-growing advice I’d read online and nipped out the top leaves. The aim was for it to bush out a bit, but instead it focused its energy on just making the remaining leaves bigger. Not quite the idea. So I took a chance and followed the advice then left for [...]

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Hippeastrum new year!

It turns out that the flower bulb I was given for my birthday is a hippeastrum. How do I know this? Well, thanks to Ray I knew it would be an amaryllis or hippeastrum, so when it flowered on new year’s day (what show-off timing) I knew what to google. The flower is a Butterfly [...]

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Avocado leaves

A few days after I last blogged the avocado’s progress, I followed the given advice and nipped out the top leaves. The idea being that the avocado now focuses its energy less on the growing long and spindly side of things and more on the work of getting a bit bushier. I’m not sure the [...]

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Elephant sparrow

We have an occasional visitor to the garden who has a rather unusual beak. This long-beaked sparrow turns up from time to time in the crowds of sparrows who feed on the seeds hung from the laburnum in the front garden. Despite the excessive length of the top half of his beak, he seems to [...]

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7 Days: Day 3 – Pumpkin massacre

This afternoon I’m turning my fingernails yellow as I chop, peel and cook 14.5kg pumpkin. The job should get done today, which is in sharp – and pleasant – contrast to the three tiring days the job took me for my last pumpkin harvest in 2007. Back then I had 32kg of pumpkin to deal [...]

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New leaves

It’s been two weeks since I last showed you the winklage of my avocado. The top winkle is now about six inches high and has pretty little red and green leaves growing at the top. Very soon I need to pinch out the top leaves, so I thought I’d better take a photo of this [...]

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