Dividing the tropicannas

Not content with practically annihilating the globe artichokes yesterday, I got stuck into the tropicanna lilly without so much as a glance at any book or website which might tell me if this is a good idea now or at some other time of the year. When we arrived at our new home, replete with a mortgage rather close to the price of the house, a baby in my tummy (well womb to be more precise) and a three year old who wanted to go back to the old house alternately with going back to London, way back in October 2006, there was one small lilly plant and no flowers or energy whatsoever. No light either until Favourite Handyman got stuck in with loppers, then a saw, then an axe and ultimately every tool we could lay our hands on to help exterminate the shadey, shady, ugly, overgrown by twenty years shrubs.

I dug some bokashi in beside the lilly and found some fishbones. The next year we got some flowers. Since then it has been all go, proliferation of lillies without us lifting a finger. They are not especially gorgeous but they do seem to do well here in wetville. So I dug them up today, mixed mushroom compost into the soil and put half of them back and the other half I have planted about 1.5 metres away, on a pile of ash to which I added compost.

Found some buds on the clematis and on the yellow banksia rose today. All go on the flower front. Even so, the best thing flower-wise is that the yellow kale flowers are attracting heaps of bees. I saw about a dozen on the kale plants near the poultry palace today. In a world threatened by colony collapse and ultimately dependent not on machines but on bees for our food, my kale plants are nothing less than heroic, or so I like to think.