First day of Gardening for 2014

Tuesday was our first chance to get in the garden.  It's looking very happy despite some very hot days.

We weeded, harvested, planted & made new beds......

A snapshot of our main garden plot....

Painted mountain heirloom corn

One of our small mixed guilds. Planted a few weeks ago.

Kim watering in the new laid beds.

Tomato,eggplant and capsicum bed.  there is also 2 brocoli's in there....

 Two tone corn....

 Snake beans.  These are surprising nice, i thought they would be tough but I ate one fresh and it was crisp andv ery green tasting but not as beany as some.  it also cooked up really well....

 Rattlesnake beans.

Royce preparing a new bed.

 New tomato bean & herb bed by the pool.

 Rhubarb flower.

 A few more of mixed  guild beds.

 Newly planted bed with zucchini, rhubarb, beans & herbs.

 Our harvest, very happy....

The onion bed was so over run with grasses that we pulled the lot up and plan to move the chooks here to work the soil for us.

 Carrots were int eh bed next to the onions and as we were moving the chooks down we have to harvest these too or the chooks will get to them.

 Our potato bushes started dying so I have been harvesting a potatoes as i need them for dinner.

 A few of our heirloom tomatoes.  AS these were bought as a mixed pack we are not sure which these are.  We are thinking perhaps Pink blush and valentine.

 The leeks had to be harvested as one started to bolt and we have learned from experience that once one bolts they will all bolt.

 As Royce lives in the granny flat across the driveway I made up a basket of veg for him & Kim.  He made a pot of leek & potato soup.....

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Preparing for Spring planting

On Thursday Royce & I spent some time in the garden preparing  a few things for our spring planting. 

 

The first thing we did was build a domed enclosure that will be covered in chicken wire to use either to keep chicken on a bed or off that bed.  We also plan to cover it in plastic if needed to make a greenhouse. The girls had to check it out while we were working.  The bottom left hand corner is the run we made last month, we added a wire roof to use for the last of our winter seedlings.

 Said enclosure in use on our most rested bed, two of our girls needed to check it out.  This bed has the last of the winter lettuce, kale, leaf beets and leeks.

 

Our girls hard at work. The cage is where we lock them up at night and they all fit inside Russell the converted dog kennel.

We also have sewed a variety of herbs and vegies in polystyrene boxes and have put them in the small greenhouse until it warms up a bit.  This way when we are ready for spring planting they are ready to go.

Last day of July in the garden

Royce & I did a lot of work in the garden today.  We built a chicken run, tidied up the yard, dug through a couple of gardens to encourage the chickens, covered one bed, clean out the garden shed.

 

 

The horseshoe is one of the only places we are growing at the moment, apart from the herb bed..  We have leek, beets, rhubarb, lettuce, comfrey, lemon sorrel, broad beans, lemongrass and a few artichokes (out of season but we will see how they go) growing  in there.

 

 

Russell the converted dog kennel is now ready to be used to house some of the girls at night so they can permanently live in the vegies patch till early spring.  We have also made a small run to use in conjunction with Russel until they get use to him as their home for the night.

You can see how much work they have already done  in the bottom right photo. 

Herb garden is looking very happy.....

Preparing our winter garden

To prepare for our winter planting Royce & I have extended our horse shoe garden which was really were it all began, When we first moved here 8 years go we inherited a parsley bed over, time we cleared the parsley out and I planted my first crop of tomatoes just up from where you can we our bean structure in the top right photo. it then just kept being extended to be our herb plot, then we decided to make it our perennial garden.  But as our main plot needs resting this winter we decided to grow our winter crop over here.  The small bed near the pool fence is where our garlic will grow this year.

 

This is what our main plot looks like at the moment, a bit of a mess as we ready it for the girls to come down and work the soil for us.

 
Our celery is the only thing still growing in the main plot and we willcover it when the girls visit to protect it from them

 

Above is our nursery where we start our sewing polystyrene boxes, then once they are seedlings we transplant them into larger boxes that have been lined with milk bottles.  Once these are more established they get moved to garden beds.  the milk bottle stay on for cloches until the plant has established it self into the garden.



 Our herb bed is doing very well.  we have in the last few weeks finally put a border around it and this has help incredibly with keeping the lawn out of the garden. Here you can see some of the milk bottle still be used as cloches for lettuce.

 This bed is our winter beetroot, sugar beet, leeks, spring onions and Asian greens.  Royce had great success last time he sprouted them under planks of wood so we are giving it another shot.

To tidy up the garden we had to harvest quite a lot, here is the last of our kohl rabi, cerliac, spring onions and 3 bunches of celery.

 

We chopped half of that up added a few veg from the fridge and made a HUGE pot of vegie stock, which has since been turned into many meals for freezer.

 

we also harvested quite a lot of rhubarb a few weeks ago that I turned into the yummiest compote to have with my yoghurt for breakfast. I chopped it up, added the zest and juice of one orange and baked it for 30 minutes then added a punnet of quartered strawberries and cooked for a further ten minutes.

 

so that's what is happening in our garden and kitchen, what is happening in yours?

 

 

Our Garden early April

A Beautiful day for gardening.

 

 

 

 

We started by pulling out the corn patch. We had over 40 stalks that produced the most amazing sweet delicious corn.  next year we hope to plant a few waves to keep the eating season going a little longer.  Quite a lot of weeding was needed and we played with the herb garden to get it looking a little more like a herb bed and not a bed of pineapple sage.

A days harvest, carrots, parsnips, tomoates, colored beets, herbs, zucchini, eggplant, capsicum, chillies and cucumber.  We have been harvesting lots of parsnips for Royce to take to the resturant he is working at - Silo's at Jaspers brush.

 

 

I have been playing around with the macro on my camera again, which incidently eventualy turned up....

 

These photos were taken in the first few days of April, just took me nearly two weeks to get around to posting them.....

Stay tuned as i have more photos to put up very shortly.....

How does your garden grow.

We are on the last of our summer gardening and the garden is looking a little raggy but we are still harvesting most days - tomatoes, corn, zucchini, leaf beets, carrots, parsnips, kohlrabi and lots of herbs.

We have had a big battle with weeds behind the garden bed as Royce removed the natural mulch from under the trees and the weeds just took over. we are on our way to get them under control,hoping in the next few weeks to put up a fence from the chicken paddock to the vegies patch to let the girls in to do their thing while we rest the garden over winter. Royce has been offered a garden patch on the wine estate that he is now working at (in cellar door as well as restaurant) for his vegie garden as he hopes to supply vegies for the restaurant. Our garden has never really been rested in the three years we have had it.

So here is what our patch looks like.....

A general over view of two of the beds.  Our tomatoes took of quite late this year and we are still harvest a container ever few days.

We had great success wiht our corn patch this year, next year we will do several planting to make the season last a little longer.  I picked the last of the corn yesterday but unfortunately a bug got into them...  but we had almost a month of picking several ears each day.

 

We planted our pumpkins and melons a little late this year so we are not sure if we will get any fruit as the days get shorter and cooler.

A close up using the macro on my new camera (which I unfortunately left behind on the weekend and am praying desperately that it turns up) of a sun flower and red leaf beet (as silverbeet).

 

Thank you for joining me in my tour of the March garden....... please don't forget to leave me a message, I read everyone of them.

Garden update

It's been such a long time since I have given a garden update. I don't have piccies of the garden itself as I thought you might prefer to see what is coming out of our garden.The basket is what I picked this morning. I am probably getting this many yellow tomatoes & beans every day but the larger tomatoes including the 3 black russians in the top photo are only being picked every 2nd day, the cucumber have only just started fruiting again. The spring onions are getting huge and we only pick them as we need them, but we want to clear that space this week so we can prepare half of the onion bed for the broad beans to go in. The zucchinis are not doing to well so we have planted more and we have 2 watermelons ripening - we are very excited about them.

Even Feeny is excited about our vegies, he spent a good half hour last night pushing a green bean around the family room.

Blogtoberfest day 28 - how does your garden grow

Very well thank you.........

Our vegie patch is just loving the rain that we are having every few days.

from top left is our tomatoes, legume bed,view from the legume bed to onion bed and tomato bed, brasica bed and root crops, this bed was mostly plated as seeds.

From top left - zucchini, cucumbers, beans & lettuce, dwarf peas and beans, close up of a bean plant - this is very exciting as the beans and peas were the first seeds we planted.

Our herb bed has gone quite wild with all this rain we have had. While I was trying to weed it out I found this little fellow watching me work, he was quite happy to sit in this large rhubarb leaf.