No(vember) UFOs

No UFO numbers have been announced for November. I don't want to annoy the person who was doing it, so I'm just keeping on working on my Wild and Goosey sashing:

I have only 11 more to make! If you look closely you might notice that some of the sashing units have a different background colour. I was running out of black and grey fabrics. I'm considering a couple of arrangements of the different coloured backgrounds. My decision will determine how many of the remaining units will be black or blue or maybe even something else. Then I need to decide what will go in all those cornerstone gaps you can see.

In the garden, another rugosa rose has started to flower:

Isn't it lovely? It is "Conrad F Meyer".

Creswick Garden Lovers

This weekend has been the Creswick Garden Lovers Festival. Lots of gardens around the town were open, and there was a flower show in the town hall. I took many photos, but I just found this video which could have saved me the whole trip!

I visited three private gardens, two commercial ones, and the flower show today. Plus got caught up in the crowds at another open garden which wasn't actually part of the Creswick event.

A few photos from the gardens I saw:

 This quirky garden was more about the constructions than the plants.

 It wasn't boring!

This garden is probably a bit more my style:

 Beautiful coppery-orange rose:

I've never seen a rose this colour before.

I know where they got these panels:

The same place our gate panels came from. But what about this:

 A huge ball of harrow discs. Where could I get some of those, I wonder?

Bees love echiums, which is why I wouldn't want to sit here:

A rose arbour just starting out:

A wisteria walk just starting out:

It would be interesting to re-visit this one in a couple of years to see how it develops.

A garden with 60 varieties of peonies:

An unusual water plant in a bowl:

An interesting day all round!

Actual Gate

While I was out today, this happened:

A gate! It still needs a catch and some paint, but it is hanging in place and dogs can keep an eye on things through it. Fantastic!

Tiny Orchids and a Hoverfly

These tiny native orchids are growing on the highest point of our block.

They are easy to miss unless you look very carefully. They are just a single stem rising out of the leaf litter. The flowers are about 2cm across:

But the insects can find them!

Forgotten Seedlings

Back in February the seeds were sown of this year's TreeProject trees. During March they germinated. And since then they've grown, although quite slowly over winter. Slower than in previous years; winter is colder here than in the city. They even got frozen in May.

Through September and October I was expecting to be notified that the landholder was ready to collect the seedlings, or that we should deliver them. When nothing happened, I thought perhaps where they were going was too water-logged for planting after all the rain we've had. But it is nearly time for the next year's kits to be started - we'll be getting ours in a couple of weeks!

Today it turned out that the landholder had lost track of two batches of seedlings for his order. It must have been a large order if 700 missing trees weren't immediately noticed. Our batch, and those of another grower in Ballarat, were the forgotten ones. He is coming to pick them up tomorrow.

So I gave the seedlings a last look over. Here they are:

You might notice that there are a few empty tubes. Some of the seeds had very poor germination this year. The paper barks and the tea trees all had only about 50% germination.

Here they are loaded into the ute for their trip to Ballarat:

Only five boxes after discarding the empty tubes. We dropped them off with the other grower of forgotten seedlings. We didn't see hers, but she said she had the same low germination rates and the same slow growth. In fact she thought these ones had grown more than hers.

The landholder will collect them tomorrow for planting out this weekend. Grow well, little trees!

Potential Gates

One of our neighbours works at a metal-cutting factory, and he told us that they sell some of the off-cut sheets to the public. Today we went to have a look and came home with two panels like this:

It's a little bit bigger than the opening, so will need to be trimmed down. But it is quite a groovy pattern!

Sashing Half Done

Now that I have finally resolved that I need 60 sashing pieces, I know that when I got to 30 today I was definitely half way there:

31 done in this picture.