Lately

Wow, don't post for a bit and those photos really pile up!

We've been away on a brief driving holiday to Sydney and back. 

Saw loads on Olearia in full bloom through those endless mallee lands. Naturally I had to pull over and have a good look. 

Stayed in a funky (and very dilapidated) old pub in Ouyen both there and back. Oh, if I had a few spare million to restore it to its former glory... 

If you have an opportunity to visit the Australian Botanic Gardens at Mt Annan, NSW, you really should do so. Free entry, free parking too, glorious flowers; I was in heaven.  

Went to the other botanic gardens in the Blue Mountains too. We only had a spare hour, I so wish I had more time to really explore. 

Came home to launch full steam ahead into spring. 

Put the girls to work doing my neglected weeding (they refuse to pose nicely for a photo). 

They are paying their board with so many eggs I've started selling the odd dozen when I get overwhelmed and can't bear the thought of another quiche (and I'm trying to cut down on the sweet baking). 

Gave the lemon tree a pretty thorough haircut and picked a few lemons. There are so many I might need to pop them at the gate with a 'free' sign. 

And the potato tower that had done so little at my last post has gone 'kaboom'. How fabulous! 

How I love spring xx

Growing cats in the potato tower

Or something... 

Actually, Jamie at Garden Amateur wrote in his most recent post (Garden Amateur) that his potato bags were sprouting, and so since we happened to plant our spuds on the same day I thought I'd check my potato tower, and Lo! Mine are sprouting too! Not many yet, I only found a couple over the whole thing, but at least I'm finally sure they haven't all just rotted away in there. 

Meanwhile, apples are planted, pears are planted, roses are 1/2 planted. I try not to moan too much, but sometimes it's so hard to get anything done when you have small children for company :/ But we did visit the Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens for the start of the yearly Magnolia bloom, and that was lovely and the kidlets hardly complained at all, despite falling into a bog and a long walk up a very steep hill. 

Potato Tower

 I haven't bothered with growing potatoes for a couple of years now, because fun as it is, it's also quite a lot of effort and space for minimal return (I've found). Anyway, on my beloved Pinterest I found pictures and links to 'potato towers' (http://www.growinglotsurbanfarm.com/potato-towers-living-fence-posts/) and being intrigued, I thought I'd give it a whirl. I especially like the minimal amount of ground area this takes up! 

Anyway, all we have here is pea straw, four bags of bought compost, a bit of half-made compost filler from our compost tumbler to add bulk down the bottom of the tower, and two handfuls of Seamungus, one each one third and two thirds of the way up.

 From top to bottom the layers donuts) of potatoes planted in here are:

-King Edward (plus a couple of Kestral from one gone green in the kitchen)

-Bintje

-Nicola

-Royal Blue

-Dutch Cream

-Kipfler

Diggers afficionados will recognise the 'members' mix' of spuds here! No red  varieties though, I'd have liked some but they were not included in the mix and I didn't want to spend any extra money. 

Stay tuned; I will update as we go along, and fingers crossed this works well otherwise it's a bit of an expensive experiment!

What we are eating: December, 2011

There is so much going on in the garden right now, and we are starting to harvest some long-maturing crops planted earlier in the year as well as eating early summer veggies. It's all a bit fabulous!

The garlic I planted way, way, way back in April finally flopped over and the leaves dried out, so out of the ground it came. It was such a good crop to grow, set and forget! Needed nothing more than the occasional weed and it did it's thing (albeit very slowly, not a good one for the impatient).

The 'Early White' softneck garlic bulbs were quite small but came out of the ground largely intact and were easy to clean up.


The 'Early Purple' garlic is a hardneck variety. The bulbs are much larger, around supermarket size, but the skins tended to split or be absent from at least half of the cloves I pulled out and were a bit of a bugger to clean all the dirt out of. The skins were also very fragile and a number of bulbs were easily damaged by pulling and cleaning. As that's not good for storing the garlic, I crushed all the damaged bulbs and mixed them with oil and have frozen the mash to use as we go along (the oil makes it easy to just scoop out teaspoons of frozen garlic).


Now these, these are completely fabulous and I can't seem to stop raving about them. They are the first of the potatoes I planted in August. The potatoes themselves arrived in the post in June - you might remember I didn't know exactly what they were! - and I think they're fulfilling all the promise of that mysterious brown paper bag. Now, these particular potatoes I grew in green plastic potato bags and they suffered a Lack of Water while we were away and the tops died off in these particular bags so I unearthed the lot. There are still half a dozen plants growing well in the ground, and a few more still in potato bags for later in the season. So far we've had about 2kg of the beauties! Many of them were a lovely size which fit in the palm of my hand.


And an awful lot of them were the size of peas. After a thorough scrubbing, we boiled them up, then cooked them briefly in a pan with loads of home-grown garlic and parsley, salt, pepper and an unhealthy amount of butter. Despite their small size, they were delicious (of course!)
At my best guess these potatoes include Bananas, Cranberry Reds, Sapphires, and Pink Eyes (or are they Pink Edwards?)


We're also still eating mushrooms out of September's mushroom kit. You might wonder how we kept it going while we were away for a month? Well, I handed it to my mum who got about two mushrooms out of it, and then she went away for a while so she lent it to her mum who got a few more, and then it went back to my mum where it did nearly nothing, and then it came back to us and it's had it's first genuinely decent crop - 200g - of mushrooms, enough for one pot of mushroom sauce!


Added to that mushroom sauce was a glorious FAT Red Legs spring onion. I much prefer spring onions over normal onions. They are easy to grow (but much slower than I realised they would be) and they don't hurt your eyes when you cut them.


And for dessert? Muffins made with the first of the rhubarb.


And finally, though not for eating - unless they have seeds and then our future-chickens will get them - are my sunflowers. The yellow variety is beginning to open:


And the reds are open all the way and are much lovelier and more varied in their colour than I imagined they would be, shot through with russets, golds, oranges, and stems of deep purple.

Winter wednesday #12 - Bountiful

Before the weather rolled in yesterday afternoon I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden, appreciating it in all it's blustery and soggy goodness. Look at all this! Spring onions, a baby beetroot (yes, just one!), more rainbow chard and...


...a cauliflower! I'm super proud of this one. Who'd have thought I could grow a real, live, edible cauliflower?


This little section of the garden is doing fabulously. At the front is garlic, in the middle are the experimental greenfeast peas, at the back are my tall broad beans.


I tried to take a photo to show you just how many flowers are on those peas, but I don't think it quite conveys it. There must be hundreds, and they are starting to set peas. I can hardly wait to start eating them!


The broad beans are suddenly bursting out with flowers all over too.


There are lots of spring onions out there too. These are called 'red legs,' and they are planted in a pot with my Tahitian lime tree.


The globe artichokes I planted sometime last year are finally looking a little bit happier and less weedy. Perhaps I don't have to pull them out after all? Behind them, looking good, are the second round of broad beans I planted a couple of months ago, such babies compared to the early sowing!


This little unknown 'gambler's choice' fig is sending out it's Spring leaves already, well ahead of the pack (I have, I think, five fig treelings now!)


The weeds are doing beautifully too. Look at them go, so lush and luxuriant!


Yesterday wasn't just about harvesting and photographing, I got a couple of important jobs done too.

I planted my new 'Nellie Kelly' grafted passionfruit, it's new leaves are almost metallic.


Her new home is up against a west-facing fence with the brown turkey fig. Now, please, a special request to whatever bugger ate the passionfruit I planted last year down to the ground: Please leave my newbie alone!
I'll rig something up on the fence between the posts to give her something to climb up against.


I also completed 'round one' of the potato planting. You're supposed to plant after all risk of frost has passed, and I figured since we don't get much frost in my area I could take a chance and start now. I planted 7 out of 20 gourmet assorted tubers.


Well, I say 'planted' but as I mentioned a few posts ago, I'm using a no dig method this year for most of the potatoes, so they were just plonked on the ground after I'd turned it over and tried to take out the worst of the soursobs.


Then I piled on the peastraw, manure, blood and bone, potash, and a sprinkle of Dynamic Lifter and a general slow release fertilizer for luck, and watered the whole lot in with a dash of Seasol (I love that stuff! It was a bit like making a giant, layered pie. I hope the spuds like it! It was quite a lot of effort.
I'd bought a bag of compressed peastraw to try out, and whilst I don't like to moan about such things, I have to say don't waste your money on it. I had this grand idea that I could keep the bag to plant some more taters in, and I did manage it eventually, but it was so hard to get out without destroying the bag that I ended up cutting it halfway down and making my bag half the size. That's not a reason not to buy the stuff of course, but the straw was very fine and would blow away in a light wind I think, and it didn't go very far and was quite expensive, so all in all I wish I'd just bought a couple of bales of normal peastraw and gotten at least 4 times as much for the same amount of money.


Lastly, just for kicks, I had to show you my 'firelight' kangaroo paw which has been slowly, slowly growing it's flower spikes up to chest height. Beautiful, hey? I wish I had more than one! That red against the grey of our house is pretty special.


Head on over to Hazel's to see how other people are getting through the tail end of Winter

Holding pattern

Today the sun shone, then it rained, and then the sun shone again and then MIL's garden gleamed and sparkled so bright it could have been sprinkled with fairy dust.


Meanwhile, inside I'm admiring the progress of my greening potatoes on the windowsill. The brown, earth covered ones at the right are a few of the seed potatoes I have bought. The green ones at the left - which have been on the windowsill for longer - are ones from the supermarket which went green before we could eat them. I have lots more seed potatoes, but I might stagger the planting over a couple of months, although I'm not sure it will make much difference to when the individual plants mature.


Now I know you're not supposed to plant supermarket potatoes in case of disease, but I'm going to give it a go and put them in pots so they're excluded from the general garden. I dithered and dithered about whether to get big cheap black plastic pots or to go for planter bags, and in the end - after thinking about this for literally weeks, which is a long time to be thinking about what to plant potatoes in! - I have ordered 6 x 45 litre planter bags. I thought you could only put one seed potato per bag, and I was having visions of my backyard being filled entirely with pots, but I've since learnt that you can put several seed potatoes in each pot/bag which will save me a lot of space and money.

The rest of the potatoes - my certified disease free batch - will be planted in the garden using a No-Dig method. For this I've referred to Peter Cundall's The Practical Australian Gardener, where he tells me it goes like this from the bottom up:

1. Green manure crop, flattened/lawn/mown weeds/bare earth
2. Seed potatoes, 30cm apart and rows 60cm apart
3. Straw material fluffed up and pile at least 50 cm high
4. Water thoroughly
5. Sprinkle blood and bone and added potash (10%), one handful per square meter
6. Animal manure - several shovelfuls per square meter
7. More water

I was having a slow Sunday so I made a diagram in paint (click to enlarge):


It's important, I've read, to make sure all light is excluded from the seed tubers, and if the straw seems to flatten down too much over a few weeks (to less than 15cm) then you can top it up. If the tubers have sprouted through the straw already then just pile your straw around them but not over them.

I've also been doing some reading on whether or not to cut the tubers. I found an interesting document here. It's not all relevant to the home gardener - for example I'm not going to pile my 800g of seed potatoes more than six feet deep! - but it's good to know that each seed tuber or piece should be between 1.5-2 ounces (that's about 45-60g, or the size of a hen's egg), and that higher yields are generally associated with larger seed pieces. In short, in my little bag of seed potatoes I'm better off leaving them alone rather than being greedy and trying to double my number of plants with the aid of a sharp knife (but, if you do decide to cut your tubers, you need to let them dry out again afterwards for a few days.)

So, there you go! I've never really done much research on any of my vegetables before I planted them until now, but I'm hoping it will pay off in my potato yields. We'll just have to wait and see!

Patience, Grasshopper, patience...

Check!

I love making lists and then ticking things off them. Done! Check! Tick! The current gardening 'To Do' list was only stored in my head, but today was one of those miraculous afternoons when the sun is shining as though we are three months on from now, the air is still and nearly warm, lorikeets are bickering in the trees, and in four short hours I got so much done in our yard. It was amazing!

I managed to:

• Finish pruning the roses.

(View from new 'Nightingale' [astringant] persimmon through to pruned roses)

• Plant the quince tree (even though I swore I'd bought all the fruit trees I was going to this year I convinced myself I needed another one. Besides, quinces are one of Chef-D's favourite fruits.)
• Plant the asparagus crowns (one purple asparagus, one 'Fat Bastard' asparagus. I had a brainwave about putting them in amongst the roses.)
• Plant another round of broad beans (this time, 'Bunyard's Exhibition.')
• Tie up the Experimental peas.

(Experimental 'Greenfeast' peas already have some flowers)

• Transplant a living, healthy lavender from the end of the hedge (where it was an extra) to replace the dying one in the middle (why, oh why, is it always plants in the middle of hedges that turn up their toes?) The dying lavender went into the rose bed in case it proves to be a Lazarus cultivar.

(Dying lavender)

• My boy, wonderful husband that he is, got rid of the last of the Awful White Gravel for me!

• And the last thing I did today was plant the lomandra border along the driveway (I really need to scan that garden plan to show you...) I did it as the sun went down, as my grubby hands stiffened in the cold, and I completed just as it got so dark I couldn't really see anymore if I'd planted them in a straight line or not, and finished off with coffee and a biscuit from my boy while my babe caught a nap in the car.
  

And when we got back 'home' to MIL's there was a package in the post for me. Actually, it was addressed to D ('Um, did you order something in my name? What is this? It's really heavy'). That, my love, is 800g of mixed heritage and gourmet seed potatoes! I think I must have looked at just about every Australian nursery site on the Internet to find these babies. I wanted as many different sorts as I could get, but not too many of each because I don't want to fill up the entire backyard, and although I found a number of sellers who had a really good variety, only these people would post exactly what I wanted to South Australia.


In my 800g of potatoes, there are 20 individual spuds, and 16 varieties within them. Unfortunately, they're not separately labelled so which one is which will only be my best guess, especially under the layer of dirt. The other slight problem is that some of the photocopies of the labels are unclear and I can only read 12 out of 16 despite my best squinty efforts. Shall I tell you what they are? For the potato connoisseur, I have: Sapphires, Nicolas, Red Norlands, Pink Fir Apples, Toolangi Delights, Sebagos, King Edwards, Cranberry Reds, Kennebacs, Bananas, Bintjis, Brownells, and the four mystery varieties (not expensive either, less than $20 including express post).


What's the plan for all those potatoes? Well, this time, for once, I'm not winging it. I've actually done a bit of research, referring primarily to Peter Cundall's Practical Australian Gardener. I'm going to use a no-dig method which starts with a green manure crop (which I sowed about a fortnight ago, a bit late but oh well), then involves lots and lots of hay and manure and potash. I've even already bought the potash; I'm ready to rock and roll... sometime in August.