A Garden update.. the Autumn edition.

On the evening of 20 April Lake Macquarie and other parts of the east coast suffered some significant storms.  The high winds and torrential rain lasted for 3 days.  A lot of trees came down, a lot of property was damaged and a couple of people lost their lives.  I got off lightly.  The power was out for 36 hours and the phone ....  a whole lot longer, about 6 days!!! As a result there was a lot of damage in my veggie patch.  Some root veggies like carrots survived unscathed, but others, like ginger and garlic were awash.  I'm not sure if they will survive and prosper, only time will tell.  Above ground crops were badly affected.  All the corn was lost, an entire bed of it. Although it was planted late in the season and may not have been overly productive anyway.  I thought the broccoli was a goner, but it seems to have survived and the first heads are ready for harvest.  The silverbeet was lost, the spring onions flattened and the peas and beans and all their climbing framework was lost.

After the winds abated and the lawn began to dry out I cleaned out beds 1,3,6,7,9 and 10 and replanted with new seedlings.  20 silver beet, 4 mini cabbage, 8 brocollini, 8 cauliflower, 2 rhubarb, spring onions and a mix of different varieties of peas and beans.  There are still 4 beds unresolved.  Today the sun is out and bed number 11 is getting a makeover.  The basil in it was flattened, but has much young edible leaf.  It will have to go though and then the bed will be built up with a bag of moo poo, and a handful of troforte M, Searles 5 in 1, dynamic lifter, blood and bone and some lime for good measure.  I try to feed the soil, not the plant and it has worked for me so far... but I might be doing it very wrong.

I'm not sure what I might plant in bed 11.  Possibly more beans but it will be dependant on how the rest of the veggies are coming along and what is in stock at the nursery.  The yard needs a lot of work, there are two mid sized trees right down the back, both are harbouring dead limbs.  One assaulted me as I tried to remove it.... one is far to big for me to attempt.  Both might get a visit from Mr Nextdoors chainsaw later today if I see him!!!

Last Autumn white moth decimated my broccoli crop.  So I visited my local hardware and built a  frame of PVC covered curtain rods and plastic corner pieces that allowed me to drape mosquito netting over the frame and effectively exclude the moth.   This works well but the framing cost nearly $40.  A few weeks ago I saw flexible pvc coated metal rods that were 180cm long.  I bought 3 at the enormous amount of $2.80 each and they work in the same way.  They are only suitable for lower growing crops like cauliflower and cabbage, but work well to exclude the moth and uses less drapery in the process!  Still looking for the ideal solution, but I am moth free this season!

As usual, photos follow.

This is the set up with the 180cm bendy poles and mossie net.  Underneath is 4 drumhead cabbage and 8 broccolini I think the broccolini might grow too tall.

As the sign says!

Wish I could get more of these markers, they will last forever and are pretty groovy!

Snow peas, not my favourites, but I couldn't get any sugar snap ones. I usually plant peas and beans from seed, but after the storm took everything I used seedlings to speed up the process.

This time I used carrot tape as my last 3 attempts all failed. 

Pilchy, on guard duty!

A garden full of goodness

Well I thought it might be time to do a veggie bed followup.

 A couple of years ago I was given a Hills Adda garden raised veggie bed for christmas.  The Hills Adda garden are 120x90x30cm corrugated iron veggie beds that sit atop the lawn.  Yes, if you were wondering,  I am difficult to buy for and this was a complete surprise.   So with one bed assembled, filled and producing I thought I should buy another.  I had twin beds going for a couple of seasons and I really had the "growing your own" bug.  In 2013 I bought 4 more beds, so I had 6 in total and finally could rely on a reasonable crop of some items.   As 2103 was drawing to a close I realised Hills were changing the profile of the Adda Garden Bed I had to either jump or miss out forever on expanding the garden with matching beds.  Yes, matching IS important!!!  So I found three more matching beds and my garden of nine beds was complete.

The beauty of the Hills Adda garden is there is minimal wastage.   After assembly and before filling, the cardboard  packaging forms the base of the bed and ultimately kills the grass and then decomposes adding carbon to the mix!   The only bin items are a small plastic bag that the screws came in and two cable ties that held the 4 panel pieces together for transport.  Less than half a handful!!

So with 9 beds I began to look at crop rotation as a method of pest control and soil rejuvenation.  I'm seriously no expert but I do understand the concept.  Root crops should be followed by leaf crops.  Beans "fix" nitrogen issues so should follows plants that exhaust nitrogen in the soil.  Some veggie types will not thrive in beds with some from other families.  It's a minefield, but I am trying to implement a relaible and functional system.

I rarely use fertiliser.  I tend more towards enriching the soil between plantings.  Of course there are times, especially with high yielding crops like cucumbers and tomatoes where  a hit of thrive helps in the dying days of the plants to get just that little bit more out of them before they become compost.

I also avoid pestacides.  I try all the touchy feely "green" alternatives before ultimately removing a pest infested plant.  Soapy water, fish emulsion and cardboard cutout butterflies to name just a few of my oddities. I use chillies and marigolds to entice good bugs and bees into the veggies and use lucern in preference to snow pea straw as a mulching product.

I don't have a water tank, so I rely on rain and "town water".   I'd LOVE a tank, but I don't really have somewhere to put it so that it doesn't look like an eyesore.  No matter how much I water, a few drops of rain will yield a better result!  I think it must be the chlorine in our drinking water that acts to hinder some growth.  I do think I would have more produce with stored rain water tank set up.

When crops are at their peak I wander the neighbourhood with a baskets of excess produce and I often receive fresh eggs for gifted veggies.  Its a very gentle system.  There are only 8 houses in our street, so everyone gets something.   One lovely neighbour, new to the street, has no land for produce, so she has recently gifted me some beautiful art books.  Her late husband being an artist and his collection far exceeds her needs.  So win win!!

The nine beds are all numbered with the aim of making my sparse record keeping easier.  Actually the record keeping is a complete failure!  Growing right now are birdseye chillies, spring onions, carrots, 2 varieties  of tomatoes, corn, silverbeet, 2 varieties of zucchini, cucumbers, red runner beans, french dwarf beans, Rajan super hot chillies, baby squash, celery and capsicum.  There is also a vast array of herbs and some other chillies in pots.  This morning I planted 2 more varieties of beans, specifically as a legume crop to follow a brassica crop in bed 5.  I'm hoping that works well.  Fingers crossed!


As per usual some piccies as a thank you for reading this far!

I'm no Costa Georgiadis or even Jerry Coleby-Williams

I'm no Costa Georgiadis or even Jerry Coleby-Williams.  I'm not even close to being a Jane Edmanson or a Sophie Thomson. Nor even a Pip Courtney,  but I do love to tinker in the veggie patch.  What started a few years ago with one 1200x900x300mm raised bed has become a bit of an obsession with 6 beds full to bursting with the freshest of veggies imaginable!   In the height of summer I have so much produce I give it away to family, neighbours and friends.  Now in the thick of winter I struggle to get enough out of it at all.  But that's not a bad thing. Winter is when I replenish the soil and build up the worm population.

I am trialling a 6 bed rotation system this year.  No two crops from the same family in a row.  Alternating root crops with leaf crops season by season yet still attempting to adhere to the principals of companion planting.  I don't use any insecticides or pestacides. I do make my own compost and I do use a mix of crushed up fish guts and seaweed as a deterrent to the white cabbage moth, but otherwise I hand pick pests off leaves and hope for good rainfall, sunny days and strong growth.  Season dependant I use chillies and marigolds to discourage bugs.  Fortunately the local possum population is not fond of broccoli or radish, so they leave me alone.

I've done a little experimenting too this season.  I planted spring onion seeds into a mini greenhouse and let them establish.  I transferred  them into a bed after a few weeks.   That same day they were planted I directly sewed seeds from the same packet into another bed and 10 weeks on the direct sewn spring onions are thriving.  The greenhouse crop, whilst older, is far less advanced.  Whooda thunkit!  So for spring onions at least I will buy seeds now, not punnets. Seeds are HEAPS cheaper and are always on hand so  I can zip out and plant a few rows instead of driving to the nursery and grabbing a punnet THEN planting!  Over time I will test that theory further with other veggies too.  

So with my 6 beds full or replenishing before a spring crop I needed to either buy more beds and get another truckload of soil delivered  OR acquire more space by other methods.  I'd like to increase the variety of plants I grow and so some extra beds are essential. The backyard here is massive, but massively overgrown.  It is just your classic quarter acre block, but I have left one area wild for native birds and animals.  Side beds are overgrown and have poor soil with neighbouring trees sucking the life blood out of them and being a mass of twisted tree roots.  The large lawn section is where I have placed the 6 beds I already have, but that still leaves me with masses of lawn to mow and realistically I could put another 6 beds in........  but then it wouldn't really look much like a backyard anymore!!  So in my quest for more space  I have acquired the use of a long narrow disused veggie bed that is divided into four smaller spaces at my sister home, just up the road.

That bed is in really poor condition!  Some worms, but a tangled mat of roots in the soil that will take me some time to clean out and build up.  I tackled one part of it yesterday and got it cleaned out and I planted spring onions to get something in!   Then I bought some blood and bone and lucern mulch.  Today I spent a couple of hours digging out what weeds and roots I could then treated the whole bed with blood and bone.  I covered two beds with lucern mulch and gave it all a good water.  I then planted garlic in the corner of the spring onion bed and tomatoes and capsicum in the far end of the bed.  The one remaining plant from last year is a rhubarb so it got a hit of blood and bone and a good water too.  It may well flourish again.

So what is a blog without images.  Heres some of the garden...... or should I say gardens!!!

Spice Girl

Well all the plans for the weekend have been scrapped.  These plans have been in the making for months.  We had to wait for niece to go to Europe for it all to happen.  And she has finally gone!  The plans were to get into Nephew no.2's bedroom and do a total reno.  But rain has stopped play.   The paint won't dry in time and he's still tucked up in bed after some horribly early starts this week.  So plans are delayed and we will attempt it next weekend IF the weather improves.

So what is a girl to do with when she is all geared up for painting and decorating???? Well take some photos I suppose.   My dining table can become a table top studio with the addition of a few flash heads, light stands, backing paper, modifiers and some rather expensive radio triggers called pocket wizards.  I learnt a long time ago and the hard way that me and cables don't work well together after dragging a brand new $4000 camera across a rough cement ledge, over the edge of the ledge and towards the ground because I had cables wrapped around my ankles.   It was only the super fast reaction of a naked woman who caught the camera by its neck strap mere millimetres before it connected with the rocky ground that saved the day.   Well that isn't exactly true, she wasn't totally naked, she was wearing a pair of angles wings at the time...... but that's a whole other story!  The event cause me to race out and buy some cheap shoddy ebay triggers to fire my flash heads, but they were never really reliable. They didn't have good range. OK for use inside, but outside it was a hit and miss affair.    So last year when a good mate was offloading some top of the range pocket wizards I stepped up and bought his goods.   And I have never looked back!  They are so easy to use, easy to store, reliable and work on three different channels and in three different groups and I can control each group individually from the camera.  I love it.

Of course it is super easy now...... but when I first got them it was a different story. Teachers will tell you we all learn differently.   I loved TAFE for its immediacy and face to face teaching and HATED uni because it lacked both.  I learn by watching, asking and doing, not by reading and therefore 3 years of uni  by correspondence was doomed to fail from the start.   So when the Pocket Wizards entered my life I was so lucky to have Josh to show me the intricacies of the world of wireless strobes.  Josh is a genius and I have mentioned before how he believes I am a dinosaur, technologically speaking!  T-Rex!

The dining table has become the table top studio many a time and this weekend the spices came out to play.  It started with chillies a few weeks ago, then star anise and cinnamon quills.  Yesterday the saffron.  Today was vanilla beans and cardamon pods.  My kitchen cupboards are filled with such photographically interesting ingredients.  So that's how I spent the day.  Not painting or pulling beds apart and building new ones. Not washing new bed linen for use and old bed linen for donation. The rain hasn't stopped all day, but I think I did ok all the same!!!

3 day weekends!!

I love the weekend.

I work a nine day fortnight so every second weekend is a long one, which I love MORE than a normal weekend.  Fortunately the planets have aligned and I am now enjoying my THIRD three day weekend in a row!  Hallelujah!!!

Being back at work after being crook is still a struggle,  I'm not enjoying it and I am finding it very draining, but these 3 short weeks are helping.  This weekend I am in a position to catch up on some of the stuff I have let slip over the last 12 months.  I don't mean just around the house, although that is a big part of it. I mean taking photos, heading out for a bit of social activity and filling the freezer with decent meals ready to nuke on those nights when I get home late and couldn't be bothered whipping up something nutritious and tasty.  So this weekend I have managed to do a fair bit in the garden, attend an exhibition opening and still found time to take a few photos.

And here are some....... oh and I grew the chillies!!!