The brave gardener!!!

All the rain that has turned south Queensland into a lagoon made my backyard a rather scary place to be!!!

It's an entomophobic's worst nightmare

 I can tell you right now that in the past a GIANT spider has jumped out of that rather large sage bush! However since I haven't been in the garden for several weeks due to the rain everything was crazy. Poor Fredrick has some weird caterpillars on him.

 I mean what on EARTH is that thing? There were two, poor Fredrick. I took a deep breath, put on gardening gloves and squished them into oblivion (with a wad of paper towel). Then I covered EVERYTHING with Dipel to hopefully kill any more that come my way. He has only just started growing new leaves since the hail storm ripped him to shreds. Furthermore there were spiders curled up in his leaves and just bugs everywhere. My skin crawls just thinking about it. Why on earth did I start this garden??? However my two readers will be ever proud to note that I didn't cry and/or didn't wait till Vaughan was home to deal with it. I held onto my breath and dove in ... because when you hold your breath bugs obviously leave you alone.

To my great joy I discovered that my garden is not just home to lots of icky bugs (which are a very good sign) but also home to 4 lady beetles!!!! The most I have ever seen. When I was weeding my sweet alice (shown on the left) when something flew out of it in a mad panic and landed on my shoulder. I looked down and saw a beautiful red lady beetle!!! Which is fantastic because that's exactly why I planted it. It is meant to attract the good bugs, like lady beetle's and bees into your garden that kill pests and pollinate flowers.


As I weeded and chopped my way into the garden, I found something fantastic!!

CUCUMBERS!!!!!!!!

Look at that guy!!! That's totally a cucumber!!!!! After the hail storm I had to wait ages for the plants to recover. It's taken a month for them to grow back. I've spent ages trying to hand pollinate my zucchini plant only to realise today that I've been pollinating male zuchinni flowers with other male flowers. * blushes*

I had started to worry that I should have been pollinating my cucumber vine only to discover that there are TOTALLY cucumbers on it. Furthermore - I'm also growing carrots!!

You see those spikey leaves - they're carrots.

 The larger leaves are radishes. My mother gave me a great tip. You mix the seeds of radishes and carrots together. The radishes grow super quickly and let you know where the carrots have been planted, which take much longer to grow.

Overall - today I feel accomplished :)