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Looking after ourselves
My period of love of gardening started with taking an Dutch Iris bulb and some pelargonium cuttings.
Before that it was just one of the seemingly endless chores.
its so exiting that I actually know what some of the names of the plants are .. as an inner city kid I only knew geraniums and cala lilies!
Here's a rose pic
@Former-Member "Edibles, ornamentals or both?" Very much both! 
I did actually write up a long post about my garden last night, but something glitched and it disappeared... so here I go again.
Our family has had a crazy run of one thing after another for more than a decade. MI, major emergency surgery, natural disasters and other events and situations way too convoluted to list, so I decided a long time ago that my sanity-saver garden had to be crisis-resistant.
The past couple of years have been really tough, and it's wearing me down badly. As a result, the big annual veggie garden in the back yard has grown very little except weeds this year. The few crops I have planted went in too late. Doesn't matter too much with the cabbage and broccoli plants. Most of them survived summer by sulking, and from past experience, they'll start growing properly as the weather cools down. But the tomatoes, eggplant and sweet potato have produced little or nothing.
And now the "crisis resistance" advance planning kicks in. I've got lots of friuit trees, so with no attention paid to them, we've had a few apricots and plums, and heaps of peaches. There's assorted herbs all over the place, perennials like rosemary, sage, lemon thyme, lemon verbena, lemon balm, garlic chives, various mints, fennel and others; and self seeding ones too- flatleaf parsley, chervil and borage. Lettuce and silverbeet also self seed, although none of them made it through summer. I'm expecting the next batch will start coming up soon. There's an asparagus patch (but it's not big enough- need to plant some more!!) and heaps of Jerusalem Artichokes that are currently taller than our side fence and flowering. They'll be ready for winter soups and casseroles.
Same goes for the ornamentals. There's a lot of drought tolerant flowering plants like bearded irises, lavender, buddleias, chinese lanterns (very tough once they get established), agastaches, senecios, yarrows, a few natives. Bulbs like tulips, nerines, daffodils and jonquils, belladonna lillies, grape hyacinths and more that grow over autumn/winter/spring when there's moisture in the soil, and self seeding flowers that do the same- nigella, poppies, calendulas. (Not an exhaustive list by any means. There's all sorts hiding around.)
At the moment, the garden looks messy. There's weeds everywhere, and lots of things in need of pruning, but it's still growing and producing. I'm hoping to get part of the big veggie patch back into order to plant some winter crops, and wanting to use the fact that it's currently empty as an opportunity to relay the beds into a better plan.
We've got plenty of wildlife that love our garden, including some friendly but not really tame wallabies... they're a bit of a problem because they like fruit trees and veggies too, but they get away with it because they're so cute. This one's a female with a rather full and bulgy pouch. 
