Time to Rethink

I think I saw the DVD Food Inc at the right time, when I was reconsidering what to do with my backyard. The film has reinvigorated my desire to turn it into something much more productive.

It is now almost 5 years since I started the garden and my approach has always been uncoordinated. I hoped something worthwhile would evolve as I tried a bit of this and a bit of that. My hopes haven't been very fruitful.

When we moved from out flat in Sydney I had three things in mind for our first garden. I wanted natives (especially Grevilleas), I wanted Roses, and I wanted to grow my own veggies.

I now have a promising native garden growing in the front of the house as well as a variety of Grevilleas near the fence at the back. Some of them weren’t placed very wisely and have grown much larger than I made allowance for, but at least they provide thick cover for birds and attract a variety of honey eaters.

Roses have been more of a struggle. They don’t cope too well with the weather extremes. We get a wonderful show of flowers for a week or so in spring and then they get knocked about by the heat, the rain or the wind. They have been a disappointment but I don’t want to give up on them.

The vegetable garden has given mixed results. At times we don’t seem to have enough room to grow what we want – and at other times we struggle to make use of the space we’ve got. We’ve also had a lot of failures; some things just don’t want to perform well.

Along with all of this I’ve tried to add a few flowering plants. While a few pockets of this ornamental part of the garden have been pleasing, we have far too many areas that haven’t worked.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the latest veggie season hadn’t been the best. At least the failures have given me the chance to clear up the veggie beds and start over again.

At the moment I have a bed of zucchinis, squash and pumpkins that are coming to their end. It will be ready for re-use in a few weeks.

The other three main beds were empty up to last weekend. One I have planted with garlic, taking up most of the room I had intended for onions. Another I plan to use for broccoli, which are the only brassicas that I’ve successfully grown.

The third has become a dumping ground for grass cuttings, leafy weeds and other organic material, along with an application of manure and blood and bone. I have now thickly sown broad beans on the top of it all and have covered the beans with some cheap potting mix. This third bed has become a no-dig project. When the beans have grown sufficiently I’ll either cut them down and mix them in, or I’ll flatten them and pile biscuits of straw on top.

Meanwhile I will be looking at the rest of the garden and thinking of how to reorganise it, to give more room for other edibles.

Surely next season HAS to be better!

We’ve just had the worst vegetable season since our move to the country almost five years ago. It’s the first time we haven’t needed to give away a surplus of zucchinis. We’ve barely had enough to keep ourselves going, even with the addition of three plants of button squash filling the shortfall.

Our butternut pumpkins have also been very disappointing. We’ll be lucky to get 10 pumpkins this year. In previous years we’ve always exceeded 50.

Tomatoes have never been much of a success at our place, so even the poor crop we got was a slight improvement, but it ought to have been much better. Gloria pulled up the last couple of plants yesterday.
And our corn was possibly left too late before being picked – it was very dry despite having more than ample water with the record summer rains.

Our main successes have been onions (even though they were down on previous years), garlic, beans (lazy housewife and purple king are still pickable) and several cucumbers (the most we’ve grown so far).

I now have three empty veggie beds. One has been enriched with homemade compost and several bags of cow manure. On another I’ve been throwing prunings and grass clippings. I’ll top that with straw when I get around to buying a bale or two and hopefully will make it into a decent no-dig garden. The future of the third bed is still to be decided.
The only bed still in use has the last of the zucchini, squash and pumpkins. With frosts not too far away the productivity of that bed is also close to an end. So soon I’ll have a totally blank canvas to start all over again.

No More Cabbages!!!

I’m giving up on cabbages.
I am also abandoning cauliflowers.
Both continually disappoint in my garden.

This year the cabbages seemed to be doing really well. I grew them under netting which was very successful in keeping them free from caterpillars. However, when the cabbage moth couldn’t spoil the crop, the slugs “stepped” in to take their place. And earth worms haven’t helped either. Both have made their home between the leaves. It’s impossible to use the cabbage without removing each leaf separately to pick off the slugs and worms, this really spoils the appetite.

Instead of wasting more time and garden space on leafy veg failures, I’ll stick with things that do well. This year we tried Kale for the first time. It crops prolifically a short time after planting and it provides a very worthwhile alternative to cabbage.

We’ll also stick with broccoli. The netting idea has helped prevent last years problems in which the broccoli heads were infested with caterpillars. The net keeps away the butterflies, preventing them laying their eggs on the veggies, therefore keeping them free from caterpillars. I’m not sure what type of plants we used this year, but the broccoli heads are massive – dinner plate size – and the smaller side shoots which are usually broccolini-like, are more the size of the normal broccoli heads sold in the supermarket.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z

I’ve tried a few times to start this review but haven’t been happy with any of my attempts so far. So I decided to stop trying any “cleverness” and to come to the point. The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z is an excellent book.

It is a joy to read, it is informative, encouraging and entertaining. It can be read one topic per sitting if time is short, or if circumstances and several free hours permit it could easily be read from cover to cover with barely a break.

Emma Cooper is an enthusiastic amateur gardener sharing her experiences and discoveries. Many gardening books have left me discouraged, making the garden seem like an alien environment needing detailed technical knowhow and abundant finances to maintain. This book helps make a successful garden seem more attainable.

There are sections covering many gardening related topics arranged in alphabetical order. A quick count reveals around 150 separate topics are covered. Different kinds of vegetables, garden pests, soil conditions, gardening practices, environmental issues and helpful resources are all touched upon in sufficient, but not overwhelming detail, most of them across two pages.

Cooper seems to have a particular interest in trying the unusual, from exotic fruit and veggies to using a Grow Dome instead of a traditional green house, but this does not distract from more common and widely familiar plants and gardening experiences.

While many readers wouldn’t see the need to grow Quamash (”an edible bulb, a staple food of native Americans”) or Tiger Nuts (an edible tuber related to papyrus), Cooper still makes them interesting topics to show we don’t need to stick to the common and predictable within the garden. Experimentation and discovery can add a new dimension of interest and maybe extend our diet beyond the handful of familiar veggies we tend to stick with.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden is a very personal account of gardening, and as the title indicates it relates mainly to the growing of edibles. I’ve wanted to increase the productiveness of my own garden by incorporating more food producing plants and I appreciate the help and inspiration this book provides.

For a very good idea of what the book’s content I recommend a listen to some of the Alternative Kitchen Garden (AKG) podcasts. The link will be provided below.
The podcast was my introduction to Emma Cooper. Her short broadcasts, and now her book, have been very helpful for my own gardening journey. Somehow she manages to discover and share basic information that the gardening “experts” somehow forget to tell us.
Before I discovered AKG I had been puzzled by the round garlic-lie balls that had grown in my garden. These I found are the product of bulbils, tiny cloves that grow on soft-neck garlic. If left in soil they grow into the single balls of garlic that I had found. When these balls are left a further year (or when replanted) they form into the more familiar segmented heads of garlic cloves.


Link to The Alternative Kitchen Garden Podcast:
http://coopette.com/akg

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Undercooked, Oversalted and Full of Fat

Are we the only ones?

Gloria and I have been enjoying the new TV cooking obsession, but we get more than a little annoyed with the way celebrity chefs dictate how food should be cooked.

Both of us like our meat to be well cooked – but the chefs insist that it needs to be practically dripping blood. Recently I realised why – bloody meat can be cooked in a matter of minutes. On the other hand, a good well-done steak according to their directions would take around 40 minutes to prepare.
Do the arithmetic. Rare (raw!) steak gets people in and out much more quickly, giving the restaurant a better turnover of customers.

The other gripe I have is the obsession with salt. They continually refer to seasoning the meal they are cooking. Or they complain if a contestant has not adequately "seasoned" their dish. What they mean is they personally like to throw tons of addictive salt into the food they are preparing.

When I eat a meal I prefer to taste the meat, the veggies, the herbs and spices. If I wanted them masked by salt I’m totally capable of picking up the salt pot from the table and sprinkling a bit (or a lot) on my own food.

And their idea of mashed potato is very misleading. It would be better named mashed butter with a hint of potato to hold it together! When I make mash I can actually taste the spuds – and THAT is what I want.

Last night at home, we had a vegetarian risotto created and prepared by Gloria. It had no butter and no salt. It was moist with a good consistency and tasted wonderful. We could actually taste individual ingredients like pumpkin and spinach...
And the best part is – I’ve been given leftovers for my lunch at work today.

Neglected Blog Updated

This blog has been suffering more neglect than my garden. At least the remains of my veggie patch has been getting some occasional water from the tank.

The vegetable crop has been a little disappointing. We had a reasonable supply of Lazy Housewife and Purple King beans, but not as many as last year. Corn was very disappointing with less than 10 cobs out of three separate sowings. The last lot attracted a lot of bugs – Gloria refers to them a stink bugs, green things about the size of my little finger nail. I can appreciate the reason for Gloria giving them that name. A few months ago one flew into my mouth and the taste it left was revolting.
We also found the silk ends of the corn cobs were being eaten by something. What we managed to salvage were very juicy and had good flavour, but there were far too few to keep us satisfied.

We had far less zucchinis this year, but that lack was more than compensated for with our yellow button squash. We are still getting a few of those each day even though everything else has given up the ghost.

I’ve now sown one whole bed with seed I saved from my broad beans. We didn’t really like the beans but they’ll make good green manure. They are growing quite healthily. I also put in some green feast peas and snow peas. Those are two regular failures that I’m hoping will give us better results than usual. The only other things on the way are a few rows of carrots, beetroot, turnips and radishes. We always do okay with beetroot and had the best harvest of carrots we’ve ever had over summer.

One thing I want to try again is cauliflower. I’ve tried them every year and had only two successful heads. This time I want to read all of the books and make sure I do everything right. If I fail again we’ll have to resign ourselves to buying them instead of growing our own (which will be no change from the current situation).

Yesterday afternoon I was pleasantly surprised to find a few goji berries on our bushes. I’d been wondering whether it was worth keeping the plants because they were a bit straggly and have demonstrated a tendency to send out vigorous runners. We’ve had a few new shoots emerging a metre and a half away from the parent plants.

There wasn’t much fruit but we had enough to have a taste, and if they become more prolific it will definitely make it worth keeping them. The fruit was very pleasant: sweet and juicy but I’m not sure what the flavour could be compared to. The bright red-orange fruit would make a very interesting addition to a fruit salad. The fresh fruit is nothing like the dried examples we found packaged in the supermarket. As a dried fruit I found them tasteless and splintery. Gloria tried to re-hydrate some and describes the result as smelling like an old wet blanket, and tasting exactly like they smelled.

Last weekend I reduced our lawn by several more square metres. I laid down heaps of newspaper and had some topsoil trucked in. I think I’ve almost decided on the layout for that part of the garden. Part of the remaining lawn will be turned into a paved or gravelled area suitable for an outside table and chairs. I’d prefer gravel but I’m concerned about its potential to get weedy, and if I change my mind it’s much harder to remove gravel than it would be to pull up paving.

I now have quite a large area of bare garden beds. I’ve held back from planting anything until I decide what kind of plants would be most suitable. At the moment the whole area is covered with sugarcane mulch waiting for me to be hit by some inspired planting ideas.

For the last few days we’ve had swarms of locusts all over town. You can’t walk anywhere without stirring them up. We’ve often had patches of them outside of town but this is the first time I’ve seen so many in around the town itself. I tried to photograph them in the garden but they don’t come out clear enough in the photographs.

Sunday turned out to be a day marked by weird coincidence. In the morning I started reading a book called Blackout written by Connie Willis* In the evening Gloria and I were watching a new TV series called “Survivors” about the aftermath of a catastrophic plague that kills off most of the population of the world. Of course, as a result of the plague all public utilities including electricity collapse. Just before the end of the episode our own power was cut off, blacking out our part of town.
It was annoying to miss the end of the show, but there was some compensation for the disappointment: on a moonless, powerless night, the stars have never looked more brilliant.


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* review to come on my other blog as soon as I finish it.

Mixed Vegetable Results

My other two blogs have been getting more attention than this one recently. So what have I been doing this year so far (apart from writing elsewhere)?

I haven’t been doing much in the garden apart from collecting a few veggies as they appear. Our yellow button squash are by far the most productive thing and I’m keeping work colleagues well supplied as well as having plenty for personal consumption. However it’s the worst zucchini year I’ve had – but there have been plenty for our own use at home so I can’t complain.

Corn has been a failure with maybe only six half decent cobs being produced, however I’m hoping that the late sowing of the last of my seed may produce a bit more.
This season I tried purple beans for the first time and had a reasonable supply for a couple of months, but there haven’t been any to pick for a few days now and the plants are starting to shrivel up. I had a much better crop from my regular bean – the Lazy housewife, but again there has been little to pick recently. But those bushes are still very healthy looking so I might get some more out of them.

The plants I’ve been most concerned about are my tomatoes. They’ve had an abundance of fruit but it’s been very slow ripening. I’ve mentioned before that they were grown from seed given away with Burkes Back Yard magazine. Maybe the biggest disappointment has been one called Yellow Stuffing. They are refusing to ripen on the bush and so far I’ve seen only one fully ripe example – one I picked early and kept in the house for a couple of weeks.
I wasn’t impressed with the resulting fruit. It had hardly any flavour and was quite dry in comparison to the other varieties. If we had more ripe fruit to try we would put its name to the test. It is clearly a fruit created for stuffing, consisting mainly of a firm fleshy shell, hollow except for a small ball of seeds in the centre. It is very capsicum like in appearance.

Another type I’ve been able to pick is a large orange/red variety whose name has eluded me at the moment. It has a large pumpkin shape fruit. The ones that have ripened on the vine have been quite soft. I’m not sure whether that should be the case. I tend to get worried about soft tomatoes after a fruit fly infestation a couple of years ago. So far we seem to have avoided that problem – although I think I did see a fruit fly inspecting the fruit a few weeks ago. I also salvaged a couple of fallen fruit that were swarming with tiny little maggots. They were quickly dropped in a plastic bag and left in the sun for a couple of days.

Gloria has been making good use harvested tomatoes, using them in salads, on sandwiches and for a salsa-like creation for use on pasta. I’m only hoping she is being vigilant enough to notice the presence of grubs should they be in the fruit. But as the old saying goes, what we don’t know can’t hurt us and maybe the addition of a little protein to the vegetable pasta would add to the nutritional value.

I also planted a Black Russian tomato purchased from BigW – but the fruit from the plant has not been the right colour. It has remained a common red instead of the darker colour expected of a genuine Black Russian. Most of the fruit we’ve picked so far have been from this pseudo black Russian plant and most of it needed to be picked earlier than I’d like because the blackbirds quickly attack the red fruit.

Last Post for 2009

Almost Christmas again and I’ll be away from my computer until after the New Year holiday. I haven’t contributed much here in recent weeks because I’ve been concentrating on my newest blog which is devoted to books. One of my recent entries on that blog is a review of Linda Cockburn’s new novel Who Killed Dave which many will find to be an entertaining read but overall was not to my taste. Some will know Linda through her blog, her articles in Organic Gardening, or her previous book Living the Good Life.



According to recent weather reports we can expect some heavy rainfalls over the Christmas break as the remains of tropical Cyclone Laurence head into NSW. A decent downpour would be very welcome to top up my water tank. It is now down to half full, the lowest it’s been since it was full to overflowing a few months ago.

The most productive things in the garden at the moment are the yellow button squash. We have three plants that are bearing more than enough fruit every day. We are also getting a good supply of zucchini, but they have not yet reached the fruitfulness of previous years.

This year I have tried a new type of bean. It has purple pods that are supposed to turn green when cooked. We have now begun to pick the first of these, but so far haven’t had the opportunity to try them. We also have our usual “lazy housewife” that is beginning to provide a promising number of beans. Its still early days, and I sowed fewer seeds this year, but we will hopefully get enough from the plants to meet our needs.

Last week I harvested all of my garlic. It is now hanging in the garage to dry. Likewise my Barletta onions were ready and are also drying out a little more under cover. The rest of my onion crop has also done very well but needs more time in the ground.

We had expected to get our first reasonable sized blueberries this year, but we were too slow in netting them and every bit of fruit disappeared thanks to the birds. Fortunately there weren’t many on the bush so there weren’t many to lose – but it would have been nice to at least get a taste.

At the back of the garden I have two Goji Berry bushes. Be warned – if you are thinking of growing them they send out vigorous suckers. That’s not the kind of thing they list on the label when you buy them. Ours are now entering their second year. I’m not sure when they are supposed to fruit but we’ve had no sign of anything yet.

Our Raspberry is also looking very vigorous, but again no hint of it fruiting. It also has new growth springing up everywhere in its immediate vicinity; but at least I was aware that it would send out suckers and the many new shoots were no surprise.

I now realise that I’ve overplanted my tomato patch. It is very congested and hard to see the fruit. Most of them were from seeds that were free with Burkes Backyard magazine but I did buy one Black Russian plant from Big W. That plant is doing very well and being on the edge of the garden I can a lot of good sized fruit waiting to ripen. Hopefully we can avoid fruit fly this year. It’s been three years since I last tried tomatoes, hoping the break might help us to avoid the problem when we tried again. The first tomato crop we grew wasn’t helped by the fact that a peach tree had been neglected in the garden prior to our move into the house. The peaches became infested with fruit fly so we decided to cut it down and to rely on the many nearby stone fruit orchards for our summer fruits.

Tax, Zucchinis and the Effects of Rain.

This afternoon I have an appointment to do my tax return. My last return was wonderful. Having been unemployed for most of the year I got all of my tax back. It was the best tax refund I’ve ever received.

Things will be different this time. For part of the year I was working two jobs, and one employer wasn’t deducting the correct amount of tax out of each pay, so I’m not looking forward to the outcome. I’ll certainly have to pay the Tax office instead of having them pay me.

If only our bills could be paid in produce rather than $$$. With the Zucchini season starting I can imagine that I could more than pay any pending tax bill with a suitable quantity of zucchini. They’ll be growing quicker than I can pick them in a week or two.
We’ve already picked the first small ones. They were barely 5cm in length but I thought I’d grab them before they shrivelled up. Last year we lost a lot of the first ones to appear. I’m not sure whether it was because they weren’t fertilised. At the moment we don’t have many male flowers on the plants to do their job

The last week has seen some significant growth in many of the veggies, which is probably due to the massive downpour we had one day last week. We had 46mm of rain in around an hour and parts of the town temporarily flooded. The rain has also given life to the lawn. Over the past few months I’ve used the lawnmower more times than in the previous three years and I’ll have to mow again this weekend if I get the chance. Two weekends in a row is a bit excessive in my opinion, so it’s time I moved onto the next stage of lawn replacement by extending the garden beds again

The Day the Garden Went Mad.

The Day the Garden Went Mad (well...the weekend it went mad to be more truthful).

Yesterday we received 46mm of rain that mostly came in one hour.

It's the most rain in one individual downpour that we have received in the three years since we moved here. Hopefully it won't have a negative effect on the upcoming fruit harvest. Too much rain at the wrong time causes the fruit skins to split, obviously spoiling the fruit.

At the moment the sky is clear, but more rain and thunder storms are forecast for the next few days, and temperatures are supposed to rise to the mid 30s(Celsius). It looks like we are facing some humid days ahead.

We went away last weekend for a couple of days and came back to find the garden had gone mad. We returned to a mass of colour with every rose at the front of the house in bloom. Our veggies also sprang into life over that couple of days. Peas that had been newly sown were already tempting the birds and were desperate for a bit of protection.

My two types of climbing beans were showing different rates of progress. The "lazy housewife" were struggling - they seem to be much more appealing to nibbling critters than the robust "purple king" that were sown at the same time. The latter had not been touched, but the former had been chewed severely.

This morning I saw the season's first blaze of golden yellow in the zucchini plants. While there have been buds for a few days, today was the day the first one opened fully, inviting fertilization. All of the zucchini and squash (three plants each) are looking promising, but I'm very concerned about our pumpkin prospects. The butternut seeds I sowed have so far produced one good plant, that succumbed to frost burn despite being covered, and now one struggling plant that will hopefully erupt into health with yesterday's heavy watering.
In previous years butternuts have been one of our most successful crops.

We have almost finished off the last of the kohlrabi. I don't think I'll bother with it again. It took so long to grow and took far too much room in the garden and produced very little - although the little we were able to cook we enjoyed a lot. We even tried some of it raw and found it had a very mild radish flavour, though it totally lacked the moistness of radish.

A few weeks ago I tried creating my own seed mats after reading about it here: seed mats on Thomas's "A Growing Tradition" Blog.

I tried it with radishes (successfully), with carrots (successfully) and with Mesculun Salad mix (failure). This approach certainly helps to neaten up the rows of veggie seedlings (and if you want to see a very neat garden check out Thomas's blog!)

A bit seedy today

I am ready to order my seeds and I’m considering my options. Do I stick with my previous supplier or do I try someone else?

The important factor is delivery time. After leaving things for so long I want my seeds delivered yesterday.

So far I’ve chosen 15 different types of seed to order. Thirteen are vegetables and two are flowers. The choices were not as easy as they should have been and I was troubled by the following questions:

Do I stick with the same things I’ve tried in previous years or should I get more adventurous? Apart from trying some new types of veggies should I change the kind of beans I’ve had in the past?

It’s easy to get used to a particular type of bean, cabbage, beetroot, zucchini (name a veggie of your own choice) and so miss out on a potentially BETTER kind.

At the moment my garden is growing small turnips and kohlrabi. Both of these were a bit of an experiment. We’ve never bothered with eating turnips in the past, but they seemed like a nice addition for winter casseroles. However, despite being labelled “harvest in 40 days” it has taken 4 months for them to develop enough to use them.
The same kind of thing has happened with the kohlrabi. It should also have been ready 3 months ago but is only just starting to show a swelling in the stem that will hopefully develop into something more or less tennis-ball sized.
(I gave some seedlings to my boss and we have a competition going to see who will be the first to bring a tennis ball sized kohlrabi to work).
Apart from the esteem of beating my boss, I’m not sure what use the mature plant can be put to. Again it was intended to be used in casseroles, but now we are moving into spring casseroles will soon be off the menu until next winter.

On the whole I’ve decided to take a reasonably conservative path, taking only two or three less predictable detours.

The choices so far (probably subject to change):

Veggies

1) Mary Washington Asparagus
2) Lazy Wife Beans (our usual)
3) Purple King Bean (still beans but trying a different type)
4) Bulls Blood Beetroot (branching out again to see how they compare with our usual “globe beetroot”.
5) Royal Chantenay Carrot (have yet to find a preference – so hopefully this will be the one).
6) Jolly Roger Corn (not much choice available and this one’s picture looked most tempting – oh the subtle power of an advertising image!)
7) Lebanese Cucumber (the only one Gloria seems to like).
8) Black Beauty Eggplant (I’ve never grown or cooked this before but I love Moussaka.)
9) Plum Purple Radish (a change from the French breakfast)
10) Glaskins Perpetual Rhubarb (supposedly bright red).Our current rhubarb has the merest hint of insipid pinkness along predominantly green stems. We wasted a lot while we waited for it to change colour, only realising our mistake when most of it had spoiled.
11) Mesclun Salad Mix (non-hallucinogenic I hope)
12) Zucchini Black Beauty (another vegetable from the stable of the Anna Sewell fan club).
13) Turnip purple top


Flowers

1) Pentstemon
2) Larkspur

These are all potential ADDITIONS and do not take into account what I already have in my seed collection. The most noticeable absence from the above list is a tomato. Last week I bought the Burkes Backyard magazine and received some free tomato seeds. They have been sown and are hopefully germinating in a makeshift indoor "greenhouse" (a clear plastic storage container in the garage).

Turnips, Onions and other assorted Vegetables

Forty days to harvest according to the seed packet.
It is now three months after I sowed the mini-turnips and they are almost ready. It will be interesting to taste what they are like. We’ll probably use them whole in a casserole or tagine.

A second sowing of turnips has grown only a few centimetres high. They have been starved of sunlight being too close behind the first lot. Hopefully I’ll remember next time to start my planting at the back of the bed (southern end) and work forwards with subsequent plants or seeds. It’s taken me all of this time to realise my mistake. By planting at the front of the bed I’ve guaranteed that everything else would be struggling in the shade.

I wasn’t quite as foolish as it may seem. There was a reason why I planted the broccoli at the front. The bed previously contained “lazy housewife” beans which were still reasonably productive at the back while those at the front had given up the ghost. Therefore the broccoli went in where there was room. It was unfortunate that conditions were less than favourable for everything that eventually replaced the rest of the beans.

On the weekend I had to remove the remaining Snow Pea plants. It is several weeks since we were able to pick any peas. We lost a lot to the frost. Even though the plant itself seems to be tolerant of the cold, the pods didn’t fare well. I’m not sure whether to sow more seed at this time. I received a planting guide by email today and it suggests it’s time to sow all kinds of peas, but I’ve never had a lot of success with snow peas. They always seem to take up far more room than they deserve considering the feeble crop they have produced for me in recent years. I have a row of green feast peas that have germinated, but they are still very small, falling victim to some nibbling creature. Time will determine whether they survive and thrive long enough to give us a decent amount of peas later in the year.

Currently we have a little broccoli left. It hasn’t been the best year for it. Last year we were able to freeze a lot for later, but this crop is barely enough to keep us going from day to day.
We also have beetroot that can be used for the occasional chocolate beetroot cake. Gloria cooked up three beetroots today which after cooking weighed around half a kilo, enough for two cakes. The chocolate beetroot cake would be one of my favourites. It is very moist and heavy, almost like a mud cake but not quite as dense.

Some time soon I’ll have to do something with my bed of onions. I sowed the seed directly into the beds and now they are ready to be thinned out and replanted. I only hope that I have enough room to spread them out a little. Fortunately (?) none of the spring onions germinated so I have some room in the bed where I can relocate some of the others.

The Patience of the Gardener

Very little has been done in my garden for a few weeks.
We’ve had some extended periods of rain and some weekends away visiting family so the garden has been neglected for a while. The recent rain has been very welcome. I’ve enjoyed the sounds of the hidden waterfall within the new tank (which is now close to full).

The last significant gardening I did was to prune half of the roses. In previous years I’ve pruned them towards the end of winter after being advised that frost would damage the new shoots if they were pruned too early. Unfortunately the late pruning meant the flowering season was much shorter. By the time we had a good show of flowers it was almost summer and the heat possibly did more damage than the frost would have done.
This year I’m doing a little comparison by pruning some plants early and leaving others until later to see which is best.

I’m now approaching my fourth year of trial and error gardening and I’m slowly learning a few things about the things I’m trying to grow. Unfortunately it can take months to find out whether something is working or not and then the lessons learned often can’t be put into practice for almost another year. That is the frustration of gardening, everything takes so long to get right, and it can often take years of trying different things until something works.

I also planted most of the new plants that arrived from the Digger’s Club – and again patience is required. How long must I wait to enjoy the fruit from the blueberries (at least two years), the raspberry and the gooseberry? The two Chilean Guava plants are still in pots waiting for me to find time to plant them out.

After work yesterday I had a short wander around to see how things are going. I noticed the broccoli is looking a bit unhappy. Their leaves have increasing brown patches which I guess is some kind of mould caused by the constant cold dampness of recent weeks.
At least the onions, leaks, garlic and broad beans seem to be progressing well, so we should get something productive out of the winter veggie patch even if we have to wait until spring and summer to get the benefit.

EXPOSING MY LAZINESS!

I very recently found a very interesting and inspiring site at the following link:

http://www.happyearth.com.au/

It is owned by a couple who are achieving what so many of us only dream of doing. They have converting their average suburban block from swimming pool and concrete into a very productive garden.

The website is full of interesting articles detailing the journey they have taken. Their experiences are also heavily illustrated with before and after photos, and their progress is also recorded on video.

Even though their experiences in themselves are a great inspiration, the website has additional interest for me because they have a block of land the same size as mine and they are based in Wollongong where I grew up.

The only negative aspect of their project is that it shows me up for the lazy unimaginative person that I really am. What I’ve dreamed of doing and what I’ve planned to do – they have actually DONE!!!

Rain & Frost

It’s been an uneventful couple of weeks in the garden, including a week of almost continual rain. A week ago, between showers, I was able to plant out a punnet of leeks and a handful of broad bean seeds.
I also made an effort at recycling our old clothes line by using the arms as posts and reusing the wire to create a climbing frame where I hope to grow next years butternut pumpkins, thereby freeing up more ground space for other things.
Unfortunately the wire looked vey untidy. I couldn’t stretch it tight enough without pulling the posts out of position, so I had to use other means for cross pieces on the framework.

The period of rain was followed by a few days of frost. One day the official temperature was -3. I’ve been covering the Grevillea Ned Kelly each night, but despite the precautions it has still suffered burning on the leaf tips.
Unfortunately, due to her size, I haven’t been able to cover the Bulli Princess and I’ve noticed burning on her leaf tips too. I’m not looking forward to the two or three heavier frosts (down to -6) that we always get each winter. They are likely to cause significant damage. Hopefully the worst of it can be pruned, leaving the Princess not much worse for wear.

The major recent development is today’s installation of my 10,000 litre water tank. I’m missing out on all of the fun because I’m at work, and I have to rely on regular updates from home. Gloria is also taking every opportunity to photograph each stage so I can see how things progressed throughout the day when I get home.

I’ve been a bit worried because it took longer than expected to get the work done. The main holdup was the delivery of the tank. I was under the impression that the government rebate expired at the end of the month and I though we would miss out, but I’ve just found out that it expires at the end of June 2011 so we’ll be fine.

I think rain is forecast again for later in the week, so hopefully we’ll get a significant start on filling the tank before too long.

Productive Politics

Here is an excerpt from an article on the green-change blog that suggests a veggie garden at the Prime Minister’s Canberra residence would be a good idea.
The Obama’s were quick to turn part of the White House garden over to veggies – so why not the Rudds? It would definitely be a healthier and more productive way for Australia to follow America than ways taken in the past.

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Kev’s Patch

The Obamas have famously planted an organic vegetable garden on the lawn of the White House in the US.
The idea was first posted at OnDayOne.org, a site collecting proposals for the new president to undertake upon entering office. It was picked up by newspapers and media, and quickly became the most popular proposal on that site. The web site EatTheView.org served as a focal point for the movement.
The Eat The View proposal eventually went on to be voted the grand prize winner of the On Day One contest.
On 20 March 2009, the Obamas started their new White House Kitchen Garden. They’ve even published the layout as an example for others.
This simple action is inspiring families all over America to do the same, which can only be a good thing for their health and budgets!
So Why Not The Lodge?


The whole article can be found here
http://green-change.com/kevs-patch/

Fruit & Veg

Beetroot

This is the first time I’ve grown beetroot in a properly prepared bed and the difference is clear. It’s taken me a couple of years to give up trying to improve the soil (clay!) in the garden by digging in organic material. I realised that it would take far more compost than I could produce from my inadequate compost bins. So now I have built some borders with concrete blocks to create raised beds.

The beetroot is in the first of these beds and their leaves look much more lush and healthy than in the last two years. I suppose this could have meant that all of the plants growth was in the foliage with nothing of value happening under the ground, but a recent inspection showed that the roots themselves are also growing quite well. After only a month and a half they are already as big as those several months old in previous crops.

Our beetroots are one of the essential vegetables we grow – without them it’s impossible to bake the chocolate beetroot cake that is one of my wife’s favourite cakes to make (and one of my favourites to eat). I’ll try to post the recipe at a later date.

Australian Garlic


I am growing three different known types of garlic. This is the third year that I’ve grown Russian (or Elephant) garlic after buying one head from the diggers club two years ago. From the original crop I saved two of the five heads for replanting and this year and I planted around twelve cloves saved from last years crop. This is one of the milder varieties and is actually a type of leek with very large cloves.
I also bought two heads each of Australian White and Silverskin, both of which have are now displaying short shoots. The Silverskins have only just broken the soil surface but are showing a lot of promise.
We use garlic regularly and have recently used the last of our home grown cloves and had to buy some from the supermarket. Fortunately they had some local garlic for sale for a reasonable price. I intend to use some of that to supplement the named varieties that I’ve already planted and maybe next year home grown garlic may last longer.

For the last two weeks I’ve been listening to The Alternative Kitchen Garden, a very informative gardening podcast from England. One episode helped to clear up a mystery that’s had me puzzled for a while. We found that some of the garlic last year failed to form into individual cloves and grew as a solitary ball and we didn’t know why.
This year when I harvested my Russian garlic I noticed some small growths on the side of the cloves. With a little pressure these broke off reasonably easily. Through The Alternative Kitchen Garden I learned that these are bulbils, and if left in the ground they will develop into the individual garlic balls. These balls, which can still be used as normal garlic, will develop into fully formed garlic cloves if replanted and left for another year.

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Broccoli - first sign

This week I saw that the broccoli is developing well with the first tiny head starting to develop. I have two different types planted out. The most developed is one I bought from the nursery as seedlings. The other I grew myself from seed and planted out a couple of weeks later.
Last year it was hard to keep up with the heavy cropping plants. Eventually we ended up blanching and freezing the excess. For some reason broccoli is not as easy to give away to friends as zucchini are.

Vegetable Beds.

Snow peas, beetroot and Russian Garlic to the left.

Broccoli and Mini Turnips in the centre bed.

5 types of onions to the right.


I’m not sure how my bed of onions will develop. I sowed some into punnets in early autumn and planted it out two weeks ago. According to the seed packet they should have been sown in winter. Some of the seedlings didn’t survive after we had a few hot days but I still had enough to plant out a couple of rows. There were two varieties in this planting, both of them red onions, but one was a longer “Florence Red”. I’ve seen something similar in the supermarket that is being sold as “Tuscan Red”. I’m guessing that they are the same thing considering Florence is in Tuscany.

After planting these two rows I decided to take a gamble and I sowed the rest of the bed with a few different onion varieties instead of firstly sowing them into punnets. I still don’t know whether this will work out okay. After a week there is no sign of anything, so patience is required. I did sow them into furrows of seed-raising mix, so I can’t see that the conditions are too much different to being sown into punnets. I’ll probably just have more work to do transplanting a few of those growing too close together when they mature enough to be moved.

Those additional varieties include a brown onion (cream gold I think it was called), spring onions and barletta, which appears to be the same as those the supermarket sells as “salad onions”. They are white and flatter than the commoner round onions. I grew a lot of them last year and they are quite mild.





Tahitian Limes

The limes in the photo are most of this years crop from a dwarf Tahitian lime. After the photo was taken they were all zested and juiced, producing about 2 litres of lime juice and a good amount of zest.
The juice was frozen in ice cube moulds and later bagged, ready for future use in cakes and deserts. Our lemon tree of a similar size is loaded with fruit.

Both the lemons and limes are extremely juicy, have very thin skins and very little pith.

Vegetable Garden - Approaching Winter

I spent Saturday afternoon trying to finish the border around my latest veggie garden. We harvested the last of the butternut pumpkins the week before and I have enclosed the area where they grew with grey concrete blocks to match two previously created gardens.
Demonstrating my usual DIY aptitude, I built a low, crooked retaining wall. Hopefully next weekend I can correct the mistakes I made and straighten it up. I think the extent of the crookedness is emphasised because the garden is in direct line-of-sight from the back door.



Taking the photo at night helps to hide the shoddiness of my work.














At least now, through trial and (multiple) error, I have a clearer idea of how to do the job right and can hopefully improve the appearance.

I’ll probably make this new garden into a no-dig area, building up various layers of organic materials which will hopefully break down into a reasonable quality soil. The first layer will be a combination of chopped up pumpkin plant and part-ready compost. On top of this I’ll start with layers of newspaper, composted cow manure and straw. Time will tell how successful this approach will be and how long it will take before it’s ready for use.

The beds I created earlier (the borders of which also need a bit of maintenance) seem to be going well. The first was started with beetroot, pak choy, snow peas, and sugar snaps. I also used an area close to the back to plant some excess Russian garlic cloves and the last of a packet of radish seeds. The radishes were picked and eaten over the weekend.

One row of beetroot looks like being the best I’ve grown, but the second row is too close to the pak choy and is being overwhelmed by pak choy leaves.
The snow peas look very healthy but aren’t yet producing many pods. The sugar snaps are a total disappointment, and have barely grown more than 6 inches. I’ve never had much luck with Sugar snaps.

In the other bed we had a very good crop of beans (as mentioned previously) and I’ve now reclaimed part of the bed to grow broccoli. After an initial caterpillar attack the plants are now growing well. A couple of applications of derris dust seem to have solved the problem.

Immediately behind the broccoli I sowed two rows of mini-turnip seeds. On Saturday I saw the first signs of germination, so they seem to be going well. The Kohlrabi seeds I sowed into punnets at the same time aren’t yet showing the same promise.

Sometime soon I’ll have to find somewhere to plant out the two types of onions that are now ready in punnets. I have a lot more onion seed to sow including a new packet of Barletta that I recently received from the Digger’s Club. We had a lot of success with onions last year, especially with Barletta. Unfortunately onions take so long to mature that they tie up an area of garden for several months. Successful management of garden space is not one of my strong points so slow maturing things like onions and garlic can be a problem in making the best practical use of my garden.

Vegetable update

I ordered some garlic from the Digger’s Club and it finally arrived today. I also received my member’s free seed entitlement. As far as I can recall they have sent me my first choice seeds – mini turnips, kohlrabi, barletta onions and nasturtiums.
I’m not sure what we can do with the kohlrabi. I had a quick browse through our books (both gardening and recipe) and couldn’t find any advice on how to use them properly.
I thought their inclusion in the free seed offer would give a good opportunity to give them a try. According to the sowing instructions they’ll reach maturity in approx 60 days.
I should be able to find room to sow some of the seeds. I have half a bed of bean plants to pull out when I get the opportunity. I also still have room in another bed alongside beetroot and Pak Choy.
The garlic is perhaps more of a problem. I should have prepared somewhere to plant them during the month I’ve waited for their delivery. They take so long to grown and mature that I don’t want to tie up my usual garden beds. I think I need to prepare a specially designated area for them where they won’t get in the way of other things.
That’s what I did with the Russian garlic, which I planted mostly in an area otherwise devoted to ornamental plants.

This year I’ve tried to keep track of how productive my veggies were, but I was only able to keep a reasonably consistent record of the zucchinis and the beans. The totals I compiled aren’t totally accurate because a few were given, freshly picked, to the neighbours over the fence and therefore missed out on being weighed.

Now that the crops of both have finished, the final results are:

Zucchini: 42.285 kgs
Beans: 15.95 kgs.

Unfortunately the zucchinis can’t be stored for long so what we gave a lot away. Some of the excess was converted to a delicious soup and frozen. We also tried freezing grated zucchini and that seemed to be successful too. Maybe next year we can try freezing more.

I am now able to pick a few butternut pumpkins. Most are still not quite ready, but I may have to harvest them anyway. Last year we were hit by an early frost and several pumpkins were lost when they started to rot before we had the chance to use them.

So far I’ve picked 18 butternuts and there are many more left – although nowhere near the 80+ that were grown last year.

Other productive plants are the two varieties of “spinach”. I have a healthy patch of silver beet and a very vigorous climbing spinach. The latter has a much firmer texture. It can be used in salads or cooked and has a milder flavour than the silver beet.

THAT ISN'T A ZUCCHINI

THIS is a Zucchini!