25 September 2009

Planting Strawberries and Flowers on Spring Equinox Day!

Tuesday the 22nd of September was Spring Equinox Day and we planted two strawberry plants and some flowers around my rose bed.












On Saturday I attended a finger pruning course by Ludwig Taschner at Ludwig Roses Winelands. I was amazed at how much bigger the rosebushes that arrived from Gauteng on Thursday were than the roses from the Cape. They were all pruned on the same day, the 15th of July, but the roses of Gauteng were about double the size of those from the Cape, due to our cold, rainy weather in comparison to Gauteng’s warm weather since the 1st of September.


But since Spring Equinox Day the weather started to change a little to the warmer side for the Cape. We have sunnier, blue sky weather now, with only a few, thin, wispy, high clouds and no wind. And the temperature is climbing accordingly.

Since Monday I’m literally measuring my rose bushes to see how much it grew since the previous day! I can’t wait to see my roses in full bloom, especially after everything I learned at the finger pruning course. I never even knew there was something like finger pruning and thought the most important and only pruning was winter pruning! On the contrary you cannot really go wrong with winter pruning, the rose bush will grow again, but finger/summer pruning is the way to manipulate your rose bush to have roses from October right through until late in autumn. I also bought Ludwig Taschner’s DVD on summer pruning.


Back to our planting on Spring Equinox day - we had so much fun planting the flowers and strawberries. Thanks to this website and blog, we could easily find everything we needed to know about planting strawberries. Thank you Wendy!

Planting the strawberries:














The children can’t wait to pick strawberries from their own strawberry plants!

Planting the flowers:




















Everyone helped to plant the flowers!

I’m also starting a vegetable garden this spring. But you have to wait to hear my full story and see everything we did until after the weekend. Yesterday, we drove to Somerset West to buy organic vegetable seeds and on Saturday we will buy some organic vegetable plants at the Stellenbosch Organic Market. I’m excited like a little girl about this new project we’ve started!

Hope you’re enjoying spring as much as we do!

4 comments:

Sonja said...

Haai Linnie,die snoei-kursus klink baie interessant! En dit sal seker n groot verskil maak. Rose bly darem maar die mooiste blomme!
En kyk hoe mooi blom jou dierbare rosies daar om jou in die tuin terwyl hulle blommetjies plant!

Linnie said...

Ja, Sonja, 'n roos is nou maar net vir my die mooiste blom en hoe lekker dat ek dit self kan groei en pluk vir my huis!
Ek gaan kyk toe weer die foto van my en my rosies in die tuin. Dit is darem maar 'n raak beskrywing!! Hulle is waarlik 'n vreugde soos rose, kan die heerlikste geure en kleure uitdra, maar ai mens moet hul darem so mooi snoei (oplei) om die mooie blomme te kan dra, en dan is daar nog die dorinkies wat so seer kan steek... vir mekaar en hul pappa en mamma.

Kelly-Anne said...

We have also planted strawberry plants! We cannot wait till we can eat them!

Linnie said...

Yes, Kelly-Ann, our first two or three strawberries is almost ready for picking!

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