A restart

So I've realised how long it's been since I last updated this old blog. I can't even blame it in the new baby, since my wee boy is almost nine months old (yes!). Anyway, with a view to brevity (never a strong point of mine), I'm going to try something different, more of a 'photo or three a day 'in a garden theme. What's growing, what's flowering, what we're picking, what's inspiring, a la minute... Sort of. 

To kick us off...

Baby watermelons, quite gooseberry-like with those little spikes and stripes. 

 Love me xx

April Harvest

The Summer vegetable garden is slowly drawing to a close. Yesterday I pulled out the last of the zucchini plants and most of the tomato plants. Only the Amish Paste tomato is still going strongly now. I also took out the entire northern section of corn (flop!) and the remains of the butternut pumpkin plants (almost a flop: I got one lonely, very little baby butternut from them). The veggie patch is starting to look a little bare now. The Lebanese eggplants are still ticking along, and we ate our first broccolini recently, although some of it was so insect infested I had to throw it straight out.

Yesterday we also harvested our last pot of potatoes. They are Desiree, and were planted way back in Spring last year. I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for the leaves to die down, but they were showing no signs at all of doing so and I was impatient for the big pot (so I could plant my kiwi-fruit into a bigger pot), so we upended the pot onto the lawn, and look at them all! OK, so perhaps not so impressive to seasoned potato growers, but I was very happy with our little harvest, almost 1kg worth (2 pounds). Next year I will plant more, all into pots (to avoid another in-ground failure), Kipflers maybe, and those purple ones Digger's sell....

Speaking of Digger's, my seed and garlic order arrived the other day so I got cracking, planting lots into where the old lawn was. Lots of broad beans ('Aquadulce'), peas ('Greenfeast'... and then I read the label properly and realised they're supposed to go in during Spring. Oh. Oops! An Out-Of-Season trial?). The Garlics I bought were 'Early Purple' (a hardneck variety) and 'Early White' (a soft-neck variety), I have never grown garlic before but how hard can it be? (Say she who can muck up with peas!)

And the Piece de Resistance: Our Watermelon!
It was a potted variety. The first time I planted it, it was promptly eaten by a marauding creepy-crawly, so I tried again. It made a lovely big plant, but only one watermelon ever grew properly on it. This is one expensive melon! I will try again next year, but make more of an effort to hand-pollinate it (I did this year, but only half-heartedly). The plant had shrivelled and wilted to naught, so we picked our melon and admired it;

We felt it's hefty weight;

We cut it open with an old knife, on what was once the foundation of the laundry wall;

Tasted it, and deemed it delicious!

 

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.