It’s warming up, and the flowers are responding to not just warmer days, but warmer nights too. Roses, osteospermum, Mexican petunia, nasturtium, marigold, and lots of others are brightening up the borders and attracting lots of flying and buzzing insects over for a feast!

The male kiwi is putting on plenty of its thick, fleshy leaves, and not far away, on the rebar obelisk, a female red kiwi is flourishing. Let’s hope they make baby kiwis!

Chopping and dropping is going on in earnest. I love the analogy of mulching being like cleaning your teeth. You wouldn’t clean them once or twice a year and say they’re done… and mulching (particularly with chop and drop) is the same. Most days you’ll find me chopping something back, somewhere in the garden, and dropping the prunings around a recently-watered plant to hold in the moisture and improve that particular area of soil as it rots down. The thing is, because the prunings start to break down as soon as they’re cut, they will always need replacing. Deep is best!

I have seedlings of Malabar Spinach, a perennial spinach that looks very attractive and will hopefully survive our harsh summer conditions. I was also gifted some physalis in February, and the resulting seedlings will soon be ready to go out.

In the middle of the month, we had a terrible weekend of local wildfires. In one, the flames could be seen at night just over the mountain. Scary times, and a clear indication of the dry conditions. Whilst there are bans on burning in most places from April to October, people do still have agricultural fires. On a positive note, there are a lot of people calling for this practice to change, and for the prunings from the olives, oranges, and vines to be shredded to use as mulch instead.

Happy April gardening!