While I love sharing the pretty flowers and amazing looking plants on my blog, there are times where I also have to share the bad practices that I see along with the odd stuff I see too. Today is one of those days where I share the good and bad that I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks.

First up is some good stuff, namely roses and ladybirds. Flowers are always great to look at, and ladybirds are always helpful allies against those aphids that seem to love roses so much. Thankfully, the roses here only have a little trouble with aphids, rather than being overrun with them like I’ve seen at previous sites.

Now for the dodgy gardening practice of the month, which really annoys me because it’s laziness in the way it was done and isn’t as effective as it should be, looks ugly and can cause rotting, so let me explain.

The brown stuff in the two photos below is supposed to be granular fertiliser for the roses. There are a few issues here:

• The first being that roses don’t need that much fertiliser at one time. It just needs a light sprinkle round the root zone.
• The second being that the fertiliser has not been put where the fine, feeder roots actually are-not next to the base of the trunk/ stem of the plant in question-the roots that take up nutrients and water are further out from the stem.
• When you apply fertiliser like this, if you can mix it into the soil this will be a lot better than leaving it on top of the soil. It doesn’t have to go deep into the soil.
• If you have fertiliser or mulch right up to the base of plants like roses, it can cause that plant to start rotting if, or should I say when, that mulch gets wet-the stem or trunk doesn’t have a chance to dry out so always leave a gap.

I didn’t do this fertilising job, and where I am working at the moment doesn’t value my input in any way shape or form. Saying anything doesn’t get me anywhere, even though I’ve had the same training and experience as anyone working there. There are other issues going on here too, but that’s not gardening and should be irrelevant to the work I do and will remain so here.

I saw these lilly pilly fruits earlier. These fruits are now ripe and a wonderful colour.

The next three photos are of grevillea flowers. I love grevillea flowers-showy, colourful and just awesome as far as I’m concerned.

Finally, just because hibiscus flowers are also fabulous and I don’t want to end on a negative. I just wish I saw more of them around.