A productive weekend

The weather has been really fine over the last three days, so I have grasped the opportunity and done lots of gardening. Planted the last of the spring annuals, and red cabbage, spinach and pak choy in the vegetable garden. I hope this will look good in spring, with pots of tulips, making it look like a Dutch seventeenth-century garden. I've interplanted the red cabbage with mahogany pansies, picking up each other's colours. Amazed how hardy the pansies are, they've had snow on them and frost and are still blooming and looking well. I'd never have thought to plant them for winter display, but they use them a lot in the winter/spring bedding designs at the Botanic Gardens and they should know.
    Started with the big makeover/clearing out as well, cutting off dead stuff and overgrown stuff so that the spring flowers will have a nice tidy canvas to bloom against. The bulbs are starting to show above ground now, and it's a good time to see where the gaps are in the flowering beds. Also planted some bargain camellias that I bought at Odering's sale ($10 each) and put home-made organic compost on my "primavera" bed, the bed opposite the conservatory that is a focus in early spring - helleborus, snowdrops, species narcissus, celandines and primroses.
 Also grappling with the Big Questions - should I remove my holly tree from the vegetable garden where it sucks up all the nutrients I put down for the veg? (and poisons the ground with its leaves I suspect). Although it is a nice variegated one and feeds the birds in wintertime. Should I get rid of the cabbage trees which shade the Golden Delicious apple? The Cabbage tree is a New Zealand icon, I know, but they're big and messy and out of scale for a small garden like mine. And yes I will get rid of the gigantic Black Doris plum which only seems to bear about a dozen fruit a year, and rockets up like a dark, ivy-bedecked skyscraper on the northern boundary of the property.
    And today I've put out a net bag of pork dripping for the waxeyes. Thomas looks up at them and meows with excitement. If only cats had wings!