The highs and lows of February gardening

The highs

 As this is an alpaca blog I thought I should include some of the girls in the background

It’s a great time of year in the garden, everything is going into overdrive: chillies, capsicums, a second flush of strawberries, more tomatoes than we can manage – we’ll be bottling and preserving within the next week or so and the grapes! we only grow them for the Alpacas as treats (alpacas love grapes and vine leaves) but there’s more than we can use this year – and we still haven’t finished last year’s grape jelly.

The Lows

Stink Wort…. Horrible stuff. If you’ve never met it before, it looks like wild rosemary and has a sticky sap that smells like rotting violets. It’s not toxic but it is an intestinal irritant for animals and we have, or rather had, an outbreak in the stud boys’ paddock. Trouble is that, at this time of year, unirrigated soil is like iron. I’ve certainly broken up softer concrete. Weeding over here involves a pickaxe, mattock and hours of hard labour singing chain-gang songs.