Gardening Weekend and Green Verge Collection

The weekend of the 6th and & 7th of May was very productive in the garden.
The weather was fantastic and warm and with the "green verge collection" starting in our neighbourhood this week, it was the ideal time for my husband and I to trim some trees so we could put those branches out on the verge.

In the back garden, the lemon/mandarin (tangerine) was drastically trimmed as it's been very unproductive and has lots of thorns too.

Trimming the lemon/mandarin tree in the back garden

The passion-fruit vines along the side fence are flowering and fruiting again (they last fruited in December), so twice a year! We have two kinds - a purple one and a yellow one, the purple ones being less acid.
Flowers can be seen on the paw-paw tree (papaya), it's a young plant so it hasn't borne fruit yet.
The banana tree only bore 3 or 4 tiny bananas for the first time last year, so it also got a trim.

Passion-fruit flowers and fruits

Banana tree, Paw-paw (papaya) tree in flower and Pomegranate tree and fruit

The Pomegranate tree in the front garden is old and the fruits are usually few and dry, but this year it's fruiting a lot more, although the fruit is still a bit dry.

My husband also picked the olives from the small olive tree in the front garden. It was planted about 5 or 6 years ago, and this year it's given us 2 and a half buckets!
They are now soaking in water which gets changed daily for a couple of weeks and then will go into jars covered by a brine made with water, salt and vinegar.

Olive tree and picked olives in buckets

I managed to catch a couple of birds on the trees, and in the lemon tree there was an empty nest probably left over from Spring.

Honey suckers in trees, dove on the roof and empty nest found in lemon tree.

While we were working in the garden our cats kept us company, with Fluffy , our ginger boy always close to the action. Shelley preferred to take a comfortable nap, and Twiggy also came to survey the work.

Fluffy and Twiggy survey the cut branches, while Shelley prefer to take a nap

And below is the big pile of greenery out on the verge ready for collection.

Usually a big truck with some sort of mulcher comes along and they use all this stuff to make mulch.

Not sure what they do with it - sell or just use it for council gardens.

We had to remove pebbles from the edge and put down a few more cement pavers (we only had 3 enough for the rubbish bins) so that the pebbles don't get removed along with the greens. 

Greens collections gets done twice a year, so when we get notified it's a great time to clean up the garden.

Green pile awaiting council collection