Getting Ripe!

I found my camera cable! This is a third of my new raised veggie bed

Well the weather has been awful! It is supposed to be summer and it has rained a ridiculous amount. The tomatoes are starting to ripen, but the fungal spot that got one of them is still around. However the pink pearl (cherry tomato) has now grown taller than the fence! And has over 100 cherry tomatoes on it J

 I have found that the heirloom snow peas taste a lot sweeter than the standard ones. And the cool wet weather seems to be keeping them in season for a lot longer than normal. By now they should have been well and truly done but new shoots and flowers are appearing all the time.

A week ago I used some of my rhubarb stalks so make a rhubarb and apple crumble, it was delicious!

Cabbage white butterfly has been a bit of a problem. I put out some half egg shells to scare them away but must have been too late as I have spent that last few mornings squishing little green caterpillars...ewww...lol.

 More garden pics



By far the best way to grow potatoes!




Baby Spinach



Just one of the many figs growing on my tree

Beans

Capsicum

November Pickings

Well i have had a busy couple of weeks! I have built a raised veggie garden bed at the side of my house :) i have been looking for my camera cable so i can put up pics but havnt been able to find it yet :(.

It is made with untreated hardwood (treated wood contains arsenic and i try to keep my garden as organic as i can). I lined it with weed matting and filled it with a mixture of organic mushroom compost, organic vegetable compost, organic mixed animal manure and organic sugar cane compost. I have planted sweetcorn, borlotti beans, brussel sprouts, swede, baby spinach, cabbage and carrot (the raised veggie bed is 4.5m long and 69cm wide-the area at the side of the house is very long and skinny)

The november harvest was pretty good :)

12 potatoes
4 blueberries
4 strawberries
2 rhubarb stalks
4 sprigs rosemary and...

..ready for it...

50 snowpeas!!! that came out of one pot!!!!

considering i have a tiny backyard and up until this point it has all been grown in containers i think thats pretty good :)

I am very interested in heirloom vegetable seeds as you cant generally buy them in the stores, have a much longer history, come in awesome colours and grow true from seed (which hybrids dont). I am finding the heirloom tomatoes slightly more difficult to grow then some of the hybrids as i think they require more feeding but i am learning along the way. By far the easiest tomato heirloom to grow is the 'wapsipinicon peach tomato' which is an orange cherry tomato. But i have heirloom snowpeas and heirloom capsicums as well and they are no more difficult to grow then the commercial seedlings.

I have also just bought heirloom beetroot seeds from http://www.thelostseed.com.au/ but their wont be planted until the middle of january.

I will have to try to update this blog much more regularly :)

Spiders and powdery mildew

Arghh....i hate spiders, i know they do wonders for your garden but i draw the line at the house...a spider comes into my house and it dies. End of story. Yesterday i found a massive (read not tiny) red back in my toilet!! I fear these just a bit more than huntsmen. So i put a glass over it and left it until my partner Adam came home :) well he proptly filled the cup with hot water and dishwashing liqued :) it didnt like that very much! Despite being dead now it is also squeaky clean!

Back to the garden, some of my heirloom tomatoes are dropping blossoms and their bottom leaves are yellowing...grr...so ill tell you what it means. The yellow leaves at the bottom of the plant mean a nitrogen deficiency. If you are growing tomatoes in pots like i am you will be using potting mix, while being great and all the soil does tend to be lacking in some basic things, nitrogen being one of them. That is why you are recommended to give you tomatoes a tomato feed every week. Now my plants are not wholly organic but i do try to limit the amount of crap i put on them. To almost nothing if i can. So to raise the nitrogen level in the soil i have given them a feed from my worm farm :) both the juice and the soil.

With the dropping blossoms, it is most likely a calcium deficiency, now the most effective way to rectify that is by adding crushed egg shells to the soil, however i am all out of egg shells, sooo a more alterative method is to water with a cup of milk. :) will let you know how it goes

Oh and powdery milkdew is like a white powder that sits ontop of the leaves of things like tomatoes, pumpkins, zuccini etc. The best organic way to get rid of it (its been affecting my tomatoes to!) it to spray it with a solution made up of 1 part milk to 9 parts water. Once a week.

Other than that my garden is doing well, the raspberry is flowering, the runner beans have taken off and the apple trees have lots of new shoots. I counted over 20 tomatoes growing on my now 7 foots high cherry tomato plant!

That will do for today :)

I grew potatoes!!!!!

I put potatoes in an old tyre way before they were supposed to be planted and i didnt look after them, but they grew and then fell over (i didnt put enough tyres and soil on. and completely gave up on them). I pulled them out the other day and have been using the soil for my other plants. And just then i was stealing more soil and hit a potato!!! Im so excited...well here they are

Dirty

Clean

Its probably wayyyyyy to late in the season now to plant more potatoes but i did it anyway...i promise to look after this lot...lol

Pictures of my garden

Well is said i would take some photos so here they are..

Lavender



Basil




Heirloom Capsicum




Blueberry, looking a little sick




Tomatoes

 It is currently pouring with rain, and has been since yesterday afternoon! Hoping that the sunny weather due this week will make everything grow like crazy! Really have to get onto the weeding, they are taking over!

Spring Planting!!!

Well, we have officially finished all the spring planting! In the past few months we have planted tomato's (red cherry, tomato berry, yellow cherry, yellow, orange cherry, black russian and patio tomato, i think thats it), snow peas, beans, capsicum and basil. The red cherry tomato has already shot off and is now 6 feet tall!

Will post some pictures later. Have also been picking blueberries and the white currents are almost ripe. The nectarine tree has flowered and is fruiting quite nicely despite the rampant leaf curl. Grrr....it never goes away!

Our rubard managed to survive the winter (it was a close call) and is going crazy. I cant wait to pick the stalks, mum wants me to cook her a apple and rhubard pie.

At the start of spring we planted lavender in our garden to encourage bees (have previously have a lack of pollinating insects in the garden) and they are working a treat! Every morning when i go into the garden there are bee's humming away. I will admit when we first planted them i did go into the front yard (where there are tons of bee's) and took some in a jar to the backyard. lol. It didnt work so im glad they made it on their own.

Oh and after pinching off the ends of the fig trees new shoots new figs have started forming :) yay. My daughter Hayley loves figs!