Today has been a rather blustery and cold day at work. Unfortunately the sun hasn’t really been out at with the sky looking more likely to give us rain rather than sun.

I start my working day at 6.30am, which is too early, even by my early bird standards! Here in Sydney, that is a fairly standard start time for outdoor work in general, not just horticulturists.

The first job of the day on Tuesday is to go to the childcare centre down the road. Here the main job for us to do is to blow down the astroturf that the kids play on when outside. This is a job I cannot stand doing because plastic grass has no place anywhere as far as I’m concerned! As I’m the boss, I can pick and choose which aspects of jobs I do so I don’t do the blowing the sand over the plastic when I don’t have to. Instead, I did manage to do some plant stuff at the said childcare centre today. I tidied up the fig balls and also hedge the duranta hedges in between the fig balls-not my favourite plant combo, but hedges beats an hour of blowing sand around for nothing!

I’ve also done some whipping, using what the Australians call a ‘whipper snipper’ (hence whipping). In the UK, this is power tool is a ‘strimmer’. Either way, it does the job of tidying the edges of a lawn area that a mower can’t do.

I have also adjusted the irrigation in the rose garden as the soil was still saturated from the recent rain. Finally, there was yet more mulching in the rose garden to do.

At 2.30, it was thankfully time to get home where it was warm and out of the wind.