I have safely negotiated the very wet weather here and am home from work.
There are 4 days of no work stretching out in front of me and we have no particular plans. We would like to spend time in the garden but the inclement weather may well put a dampener (so to speak) on that idea. There are, however, plenty of other things that we can work on so I am sure we will not be bored.
I hope you have a relaxing break and don’t eat too much chocolate!
Our vegetable garden area has been a work in progress for several years and continues to be so. However, I feel as though we have taken a giant leap forward today.
We had a load of soil delivered yesterday.
This was the view of the area yesterday.
The three beds in the foreground have been established for some time and the top one currently has lettuce and bok choy and the bottom one has beans and bok choy while the middle one is empty after having cleared out the remnants of tomato and cucumber plants. This bed needs topping up with additional soil. In the background towards the chicken coop is a clump of sweet potato growing in a small cut-down rainwater tank. Of course, it has overflowed and is growing across the ground towards the fence.
The lower two beds in the background have a small amount of leaf litter and mulch but are yet to be used. At the top of the second row is the sixth raised bed partially built. We still need to finish cutting the iron to size and attach the sides.
We started early today and moved the soil to fill the completed beds. This is all that was left this afternoon when we had finished.
Then it was time to add the sides to the final bed. Remember the sweet potato I pointed out in the earlier photo? We dug it all up and harvested a bucketful of decent sized sweet potatoes. There were lots of small ones but we have sacrificed them for the long-term plan. I planted several pieces of vine that had significant root growth as well as numerous potatoes that were shooting. These all went into the bottom bed. The remainder of the soil from where the sweet potatoes were growing went into the base of the last bed. We then salvaged several wheelbarrow loads of leaf mulch from behind the rainwater tank and finally added the garden soil.
Here are the 6 raised beds filled with soil and I have planted some cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and kale seedlings that we bought last weekend. There is still plenty of space so I am planning to plant some seeds as well.
The other thing I did today was to trim and tidy up the basil which has gone completely rampant. I even found some new plants so I potted some and planted others in the garden bed. I have tied the clumps of basil up to the fence to stop them spreading all over the ground. The basil are in the foreground of the photo below.
Tomorrow, I am hoping to dig another garden bed along the fenceline as it heads towards the front of our property. The plan is to plant flowers in that bed. I have bought sweet pea seeds and intend to grow them using the fence as a trellis. but more about that another day.
No, I am not buried under a stash of fabric. In fact, I have not touched my sewing this week so there was no “Sew My Stash Sunday” post this week. It is easy to see how I get side-tracked and the sewing languishes. I will get back on track though.
The week was taken up with work and my weekend was spent in the garden and the kitchen.
I retrieved 6kg of cherry tomatoes from the freezer and made sauce (ketchup) as we had run out. The recipe and details are here.
The lemon cordial was made using lemon juice that was frozen from last season.
The Duke and I continued working on the garden beds and now have 5 completed and the sixth one well underway.
The bed in the foreground has lettuce as well as some bok choy seedlings that I transplanted. The bottom bed has bok choy and ‘Purple King’ climbing beans. I need to put up some trellis as the beans as almost ready to climb. The seed is some that I had saved as I think this is one of my favourite beans. They are purple when picked and change colour when they are cooked.
It is still mostly hot here but we do catch faint hints of autumn. I have bought some seeds but we will also be buying some seedlings at the Yandina Market next Saturday. We have a relatively short season for growing cool weather crops so we need to be ready and buying seedlings is one way to do it.I would love to grow all my crops from seed but it is just not practical while we are working full-time.
My other big project at the moment is sorting out the photos. The first step is reinstating all of the photos to the old blog posts. It is not finished but I am well on the way. In the process I have found plenty of interesting posts which I will share on ‘Flashback Friday’ each week. Please feel free to search the archives and see what you find. If you discover a post which looks like it is missing photos please let me know and I will endeavour to add them.
If you live in a location with a reasonably warm climate, there is one thing to grow that I cannot recommend highly enough. Sweet potato. It is a nutritious, versatile vegetable that will grow with the minimum of fuss. There is a heap of information here.
I have had them growing for a couple of years and there are almost always some available to harvest. This is my latest haul.
Sweet potato can be boiled, baked, steamed and mashed. You can make chips or soup. I grate it coarsely and stir-fry it and serve instead of rice or pasta with chicken stir-fry or bolognaise sauce. You can even use it to make chocolate brownies.
Six months ago, while we were overseas, our housesitters bought a small pot of basil as it was actually cheaper than buying a bunch of basil. When we arrived home I planted it in the ground. It is now doing its best to take over the garden!!
I took this photo yesterday morning. The rain had finally stopped and the sun was shining. You can see the ‘lake’ in the background.
I knew it was collapsing everywhere so I had intended to cut it right back and use as much of the leaves as possible. When I got closer I discovered that the bees were loving the flowers so I could not destroy their fun so I have left the flowers and just picked lots of leaves. Mind you, it is hardly noticeable where I picked them from.
I could afford to be picky so I chose only the best leaves and rinsed them thoroughly.
Then spun them in the salad spinner. As an aside, I only bought this quite recently as I had never really seen the need for one. After seeing my sister use hers, I realised that a salad spinner could be quite handy and I was delighted to find one at Aldi soon after. It cost the princely sum of $6.99.
Next step was to chop the basil in the food processor.
I had about 2/3 can of chopped tomatoes in the fridge so that was added to the mix.
Then I used a small spoon to fill ice-cube trays with the basil and tomato mixture.
Finally, I double-bagged the trays in re-used bread bags and sealed them tightly before putting them in the freezer. The basil blocks will be useful for when there is no basil growing.
It is the height of summer here and over the past 4 weeks we have been blessed with warm to hot days (27 – 32C) and intermittent showers and storms. The rainfall has been over 100mm in the last fortnight. Your can almost hear the vegetation growing and everything is green and lush.
Unfortunately, the weeds are loving the weather and thriving as much as the plants that are supposed to be growing.
Since we live on an acreage, we are never going to have a pristine garden but I do prefer not to have it overgrown with weeds so it seems to be a never-ending battle to keep them at bay. The Duke tends to use a combination of whipper-snippering, glyphosate and simply pulling them out. The glyphosate is banned from anywhere near the vegetable garden but unfortunately it has been a necessary evil on other parts of the block.
I recently received some information from my friend, S, over at My Life is A Balancing Act. Although she hasn’t posted this on her blog, I think it is worthy of a mention.
Super Effective Weed Spray – Cost: $2.50 for 4 litres weed spray
It sounds easy and even piqued the interest of The Duke.
Before I rush out and buy a bulk quantity of vinegar I decided to test it out. There is no shortage of places to try.
This is a patch of the weeds in what can best be described as the future garden bed in front of the verandah.
We have planted several hibiscus shrubs that are the beginning of the new plantings and there are some old shrubs which will need to be removed but there is a lot of bare earth which the weeds are really enjoying!
I had 1 litre of white vinegar so made up a 1/4 mix of the recipe and filled a small spray bottle.
I sprayed weeds until I had used up all of my mix so now it is just a matter of waiting. According to S, I should see wilted and dying weeds within 24 – 48 hours.
I will be back on Saturday with an update on this project. If it shows signs of being successful, I will be looking for somewhere that I can buy a bulk quantity of vinegar and also buying a backpack sprayer as S suggested because my hand is exhausted from just spraying a small area of weeds.
It is now 10 weeks since we arrived back from our overseas holiday and no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get properly back into the swing of blogging. With less than 4 weeks until Christmas, I suspect that it is going to be next year before I get things really back on track.
Apart from trying to get things done at home, I am finding that I am particularly busy at work. I constantly feel as though I am trying to catch my tail as there has been quite a backlog from while I was away. I have almost got that under control and now am trying to fit in a couple of additional projects which I will be working on next year.
Yesterday we attended our Christmas drinks celebration with all of our neighbours. The road we live in is about 3km in length with only about 26 houses scattered along its length. Some of the residents are permanent and others homes are weekenders so we see some of our neighbours very infrequently. The annual get-together is a fun evening and everyone brings theirs drinks and a plate of food to share. I took a bowl of Pumpkin & Feta Balls and some homemade tomato sauce for dipping. The recipe I used is here. I adapted it slightly as I used standard feta, chilli powder (1 teaspoon) and 1 teaspoon of powdered coriander. I rolled them into small balls rather than as fritters.
Today I picked 2 large bowls of cherry tomatoes. These grown wild in our garden – sometimes in rather inconvenient places. Here are some of them. I remove the stalks, discard any with blemishes, rinse them and then freeze them whole in recycled bread bags. I now have about 6 kgs in the freezer.
I am off to Sydney this week for 3 days for work but more about that next time.
After spending my weekdays in the office there is nothing I enjoy more than spending time in the garden on the weekend. I will start with what we actually did last weekend.
We finally finished building this raised garden bed. There are now 4 beds complete and we eventually plan to have 9 of them. The cardboard is a large carton that was the packaging from the refrigerator we bought last year. We always keep any large pieces of cardboard as it makes a great base for the beds and is very effective at smothering the underlying grass before eventually breaking down. I will cover the remainder of the base with some more cardboard before gradually filling the bed with a combination of fallen leaves, mulch, compost and grass clippings which will, over time, become rich soil. It will all be sourced from our block.
We also created a bed for the asparagus. Since asparagus grows very vigorously and spreads, we wanted to make sure that we are able to contain it. The Duke dug a trench and buried some offcuts of Colorbond steel to a depth of 320mm to form the border of the asparagus bed. Here is the work in progress.
This is what it looked like once we had finished and planted the asparagus.
The lettuce seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago have not put in an appearance so yesterday I bought some seedlings and planted them in between the corn which is growing nicely.
The other thing we did today was to start to tidy up around the citrus trees. Here is the lime tree with a new border of rocks and some mulch. You can the orange tree behind it and grapefruit to the far right which have been bordered with rocks and now I just need to finish weeding them and put the mulch down.
We decided to border the other orange tree and the lemon tree in one large area. The Duke collected up the rocks from down the back near the water tanks. We have an abundance of volcanic rocks on the property so it is good to be able to use them.
I have planted more seeds – most expired by several years – so will see how they go. Lettuce, radish, chilli, tomato and bok choy all went in today. I am determined to grow more of our own food and am hopeful of greater success now that the vegetable patch is completely fenced.
After being away for six weeks, the vegetable garden was in need of some attention.
I cleared out the remains of the broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower which had been harvested while we were away. There are now corn, lettuce, radish and cucumber seeds planted in the spaces available.
The area inside the fence that I had earmarked for a herb garden is now sporting a couple of very healthy parsley plants as well as several basil seedlings. I planted these on the weekend as they were kindly left for us by the house sitters. They commented that it was cheaper to buy a pot of seedlings than a bunch of parsley or basil.
I have previously shown you here the netting that we bought at the Garden Show and we intended to ask the house sitters to put it on the peach tree as I felt it would need to be done while we were away. That did not happen so now all of our small, green peaches are enclosed. If this is successful, in a few months we will be harvesting luscious peaches that have not been stung by fruit fly. I can only hope!
Before we went away we planted the asparagus and rhubarb in styrofoam boxes until I could prepare the areas where we wanted to plant them. On the weekend we dug a trench and set the concrete blocks into the ground to form a border for the rhubarb. I hope to plant some flowers in the small soil-filled pockets of the blocks.
I hope to prepare the bed for the asparagus in the coming weeks.
We have a long weekend coming up and I am hoping to get some more done in the garden.
After our visit to the Garden Expo on Saturday, we spent Sunday afternoon out in the garden.
Our first project was to remove the old bird netting from the peach tree and to prune it. This is what it looked like before we started.
This is one of the nets which we bought at the Expo.
The nets will protect fruit trees or garden beds from birds and pests, including fruit fly. I had been looking at them online but when I saw them at the Expo I decided to go ahead and buy 2 of them. Here is the website. We bought the 2m ones.
It is recommended that you do not put the netting on until after the fruit has set otherwise it impedes pollination. Since it is likely that the time to install the netting will be while we are away, we decided to have a trial run after pruning the tree.
While this would be sufficient to keep the birds away, you need to gather the fabric up and secure it around the base of the trunk to be sure of eliminating any fruit fly infestation. We will ask the housesitters to put the netting on at the relevant time and hopefully look forward to a crop of unblemished peaches.
We also pruned the fig tree, grapefruit tree and one of the lemon trees.
Next weekend I will be planting as I have ordered some rhubarb crowns and asparagus. I had a phone call today to say that they are ready so I will pick them up on Thursday.
organised castle 