Harvesting and pruning

We've had visitors staying with us and Linley agreed to help me prune my roses and surrounding rosemary hedge. I know it's a bit late to prune roses in Brisbane but they have had a fairly traumatic few years and I wanted to leave it as long as I could. As a result of the floods in Brisbane 2011, I had to urgently move my roses before the earthmoving machines moved in to repair the massive landslide directly behind our home. I had to prune them to nothing and move them with little notice. Luckily, I had been composting up a new garden bed and it has ended up being a great location for them. I also planted a functional hedge of rosemary around them as a box hedge to provide some grey contrasting foliage and act as a pesticide resistance for the roses.

So not only did we get in and prune my poor roses to try and help them grow and prosper, but we gave the rosemary a good old haircut. It grows prolifically and the more I hedge it, the more it seems to grow. So, I have heaps of rosemary to give away at work tomorrow (like about 5 buckets of it).

Then it was off the check on my galangal plant and see if I could harvest some of it. The plant (I should have taken a photo before I cut the tops off it) is about 8 foot tall and looks and flowers like a ginger plant. They are closely related but galangal has a different flavour - awesome in asian cooking. After about 20 minutes, we had the prize in our hands... problem was there was so much of it we couldn't lift it. After we'd washed and trimmed off the roots into manageable pieces, I still have HEAPS (about 5 years worth for us). So now I have no idea what to do with several kilos of galangal...