Not Organic

I would like to be able to say my garden is organic, but it isn't. There's only so many times you can plant out pumpkins, only to have them eaten (snails, slugs and earwigs laughing at my organic baits and traps), before I ring my seedlings with a protective perimeter of snail-bait. This year's first round of pumpkins are 'Golden Nugget' (four seedlings thereof, in between the lemon and the apricot tree). I have never had much luck with pumpkins in general, so let's see how this early, inorganic planting goes. 

In other news, just as the fruit trees start blooming their heads off, the spring storms roar through with their ferocious winds. Like every year. 

Mmmm, pumpkin!

2.022kg (4.4lbs)! Not bad, hey, for a pumpkin self-sown out of a compost heap! There are a couple more on their way, too. I don't think they'll get so big since it's getting quite cold outside now, but I'm quite impressed with my free food.

(This post is just to stay I still exist! We are the Lurgy House at the moment but hoping to be back and blogging properly soon. I'm not sick, by the way, I get to be the nurse this time.)

Virtually free food?

Last time I told you about my butternut pumpkins (that's butternut squash too, for any overseas readers). Those were the pumpkins I planted myself in carefully prepared ground. But then, up the back are three GINORMOUS self sown pumpkins. They came out of the compost heap which I moved - and spilt - because it was in the way of the chicken coop which we were building (and still are, slow work in progress). I'm not sure what kind they are, I'd guess Jap or Queensland Blue since they're what we'd generally buy from the supermarket.

(Please ignore the weeds, they have gone mental and I'm telling myself I'll get on top of them once we move home...)

These three pumpkin plants are a demonstration that plants can - and will - adapt to the conditions they have. Self sown at almost exactly a meter apart, they have never had any water beyond the rain and yet never got wilty except on the very hottest of days. The butternuts, on the other hand, wilted at the first hint of heat and had to be watered almost daily through the summer. The butternuts got completely covered with downy mildew after some summer rain and the few nice warm days which followed... Not one spot of mildew appeared on my mystery pumpkins. Now, they're covered in male and female flowers, and although I was tempted to continue to leave them completely to their own devices I have been hand pollinating the baby fruits at every opportunity (many more fruits on each plant compared to the butternuts too which had about one each). Now I just have to wait and see if we get nice pumpkins from my irrigation-free plants or if they are completely inedible.

Little veggie update

Just a wee update of what's going on in our veggie patch at home. More pictures than text: here we go :)

The garlic is doing quite well, needs a bit more of a weed but I've gotten rid of the worst of them.


My experimental Greenfeast peas look great in their tangles.


The broad beans - Aquadulce - have taken off. They're much more delicate and fragile looking than the variety I planted last year (I can't remember what sort that was, but it wasn't Aquadulce).


The pepino is looking blousey and lush, and it has striped violet and white flowers! I don't know how well it will set fruit, it's very cold outside and there aren't very many insects about for pollination.


And even though I pulled out most of the pea-straw peas a couple of weeks ago, I did leave one little patch to their own devices (mainly because they weren't in the way of anything else) and look how beautiful their flowers are, like dancing faeries.


SP thinks it's all super interesting. All the drizzle has been keeping us inside, and my poor little bird is bouncing off the walls a bit. She doesn't like being confined like that.


And last, but not least, I picked the little pumpkins and we ate them last night. I made that mistake of planting out a few varieties and not writing down which was where, and so of course I've forgotten which one this was. Most of them did nothing, but this wee plant made a couple of fruits. I think it might have been the Golden Nugget, but maybe it was just a plant which felt like making very small fruits? The little ones were too small and fiddly for me to be bothered with so they've gone to the fish tank for fish food. The bigger ones fit nicely in my hands, tennis ball sized, I cut them into slices and roasted them with Australian olive oil and a touch of salt. Pretty good! But if only they'd been more than two of them!


I've made a couple of gardening resolutions for next Spring:

1. Write things down! Make diagrams of what I've planted where, because my memory will surely fail me.

2. Plant fewer varieties of pumpkins, but more of each variety (ie not one butternut, one kent, one golden nugget etc, but maybe four butternuts, four kents...) and put some in the front garden where there are more flowers to attract the pollinators.

April Harvest (2)

We made a visit to our little house the other day and found that there is still lots of edibles in the garden. The corn looked as ready as it was going to get, I peeled back the layers and had a look, poking it with my fingernail and the juices were foggy and yellow so I took the plunge to pick. The smaller patch had small cobs (although not as much as a failure as the back patch which had nothing!), the bigger patch had nice big cobs, almost supermarket-worthy. I gave half of it to FIL, payment for his excavation work so far ;-)
There were also a few long but thin Lebanese eggplants, and a couple of the 'Fairy' type which I picked even though they seemed quite hard. There were even a few purple capsicums ready to go. The capsicums and eggplants have all gone straight into a big pot of bolognese sauce for lasagne.

While I was picking the corn, I found a surprise! Here I was thinking that the rockmelons were a total flop, and yet, there, hidden amongst the corn was a fruit! I wasn't sure if it was actually ripe, the vine was still pretty green (though the leaves are just starting to yellow), but the millipedes had found it and were gnawing, creeping and crawling all over it, so I thought it best to pick it before our one and only rockmelon became food for legions of Portugese pests!

It wasn't bad actually, it weighed almost 1kg (2 pounds) and was very edible, though a little on the bland side. I think it just needed more time.

I pulled the last of the tomato plants from their pots because they really were just looking too shabby to go on with. They've been hung in the shed, a bit experimentally, because I've read that you can ripen late tomatoes that way. Besides, I want the big pots!

And out there, still growing surprisingly well is the pumpkin plant I thought wouldn't set fruit at all, and the rainbow chard which is so pretty and bright even though it's sorely neglected.
 

 

 

Resting the vegie patch

I had the opportunity yesterday to have a bit of a potter in the vegie garden. I pulled out a few weeds, picked some Amish Paste tomatoes, and pulled out most of the daggy squash and zucchini plants. Plenty is still going on out there, even though the days are rapidly cooling and shortening.

My 'Yellow Patio Watermelon' has one lonely melon, but I am guarding it zealously and hoping like mad nothing happens to it before it ripens! It's about as long as my hand so far.

The Broccolini was ready to be picked so we sliced the tops off with a sharp knife. Three out of four plants produced lovely heads, though small. The fourth was totally insect infested and went straight to the compost heap. I left the plants in place to see if they'll do anything else. About a fortnight ago I also planted baby cauliflowers, some brussel sprouts, and more broccoli. I did have both broccoli and cauli seeds sown which had sprouted about a month ago, but they got frizzled off by a few very hot days.  

The pepino looks good. Nothing has tried to eat it yet!

The pumpkins are a disappointment overall. I will have to try again next year. We have only one butternut pumpkin (Butternut squash for the rest of the world!) actually growing. A number of other pumpkins started and swelled a little, then fell off. Maybe I planted them too late? There did seem to be an awful lot of male flowers compared to female ones.

This pumpkin, which I must admit I can't remember the name off, still looks healthy and strong but considering how the rest of the pumpkins went I'm skeptical that any of the fruit will go beyond their current walnut size. 

The other recent action in the vegie patch was green manure sowing. For the uninitiated, green manure crops are crops which are grown to add organic matter and nutrients to the soil. You sow plants like clover, beans, fenugreek etc, and you slash them down when they are still green and then mix them into the soil or use them as a mulch on top. They're something I've read quite a lot about but have never actually tried. I didn't have specific green manure mixes on hand at the time, but I did have fenugreek spice seeds from the supermarket which sprout very readily (in a day or two, in fact) which are legumes and will fix nitrogen (from the air to the soil). We can also eat the leaves as a herb. I also had half a packet of sprouting seeds (chick peas, mung beans and soy beans) from a very brief and unsuccessful foray into sprout growing which I scattered out there as well. A few weeks ago it looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

I've put patches of green manure throughout the entire vegetable garden and in the new garden bed I am still very slowly creating around it.

Disaster!

Some little sod has eaten two out of four of my Delicata pumpkin seedings. I went out to give them a drink this morning and found my poor plants. I thought, at least if the buggers are going to eat my plants they could have the decency to eat the whole thing and not just nibble at the stem so that it snaps off! BAH. I guess gorging on the first plant left no room for the second in tiny insect stomachs.




At least the other two are OK and I am busy drinking too much coffee so I can use the grounds as a caffiene barrier around them:


Today SP hung out on the grass while I did the rounds. I wonder if she'll be a gardener like her Mama?The broad beans are being pollinated by the honeybees.

Both the strawberries and the snow peas have their first flowers.

The bluebells finally have flower shoots too. I was starting to wonder if they were going to flower at all this year.
The coriander flowers look like lace. Even though I want the big pot, I'm leaving the coriander to it's own devices so that I can collect the seed and replant it.
Lastly, a little peek inside my kitchen. Yesterday on our way home from an ABA meeting (Australian Breastfeeding Association) I stopped by the side of the road and collected some wild freesias. Now the kitchen smells quite floral, but not as strongly as when I brought some of the jonquils inside.
They're very pretty with their creamy petals and sunny yellow details.