Tag: vegetables

Back in the garden

It’s great to be back working in the garden after a ‘gardening drought’. Once I got started, I was encouraged by my progress and have been gardening for several days. Tidying around the edges came first and led to more deadheading and cutting back the raspberry canes. I mulched the berry patch with leaves from the cherry tree.

The vegetable garden required more thought. I want to rotate the vegetables, but it’s difficult when I have no success with some things. I drew up a plan and made a to-do list, then researched the prices of vegetables packs and bark for the paths. I bought the plants at a favourite nursery (Oderings) – and added a Pink Princess daphne plant to my trolley as well. I prepared the beds and planted most of the vegetables (broad beans, and onions) until I ran out of daylight around 5pm – so frustrating, but time for cheese and crackers and gin and tonic.

Today I went to Mitre 10 for bark – and bought some pea straw and thyme plants. (I recycle used plastic plant pots here too.) I planted the remaining vegetables (rainbow chard and curly kale). The daphne required a bit more care according to my research. I measured the soil ph/acid levels, dug the hole wide but not too deep, put bark mulch in the hole to aid drainage, and added sheep pellets and a bit of acid fertiliser. The daphne looked a little sad in the nursery I thought, but it was the last they had of the variety I had seen recommended in an article. I hope she cheers up!

Pink Princess

I bought three varieties of thyme (lemon, golden and common) and put them in terracotta pots to go alongside the stepping stones which I’ve put through the centre of the vegetable patch. I’ve widened the garden by moving the brick edging further into the lawn. It felt creative, deciding to add some stones here, bark mulch there, and some old boards as edging. Pea straw around the chard and kale added the rustic look I like – and it smells wonderful!

Green tomatoes

Optimism is needed when you grow your own food. I bought a pack of six ‘Moneymaker’ tomato plants when it was really too late in the season, but my garden rotation diagram suggested tomatoes were good to plant after the beans had finished and, generally, I’m optimistic. It was the last pack in the garden centre, and the stems of the plants were bent sideways. Warning signs. However, I planted them with stakes and the plants straightened up in a few days and grew quickly.

By the end of summer, there were large trusses of fruit – all green and showing only slight signs of ripening. Since then we’ve had several frosts. I’ve been picking the tomatoes which are beginning to look yellow and putting them on the kitchen window sill. Many have ripened: good to use in casseroles and soups and in the frittata I made yesterday.

Frittata is a great way to use garden produce. This one has kale, spinach and silver beet from the garden as well as sliced (formerly green) tomatoes.

The stems of the tomato plants have turned to mush almost – as I expected the tomatoes would too – after all, it’s Winter Solstice and the shortest day tomorrow. Many tomatoes were on the ground before I rescued them today and put them on the windowsill.

These tomatoes remain after I picked up the ones on the ground.

Intermittently, over the next hour or so, we began to hear little thuds. Some of the tomatoes were rolling off the windowsill onto the bench, into the sink and one made it as far as the floor. And they’re not the variety called ‘Tumbling Tom’!

Big leaves, fruit – little.

Big hat, no cattle.

Texan expression

I am usually overwhelmed with courgettes, but this year…no such luck. The plants look healthy, but the fruit is minute and often rots at the end. Gardening seems to be a mix of triumph and disappointment.

I overheard someone describe my garden as ‘overgrown’ which sent me into a frenzy of tidying last week. It just is that kind of garden, though, as I posted earlier about being ‘hands off’.

Flowers for the bees, including flowering broccoli. Ready to eat: beans, tomatoes, rhubarb, broccoli, silver beet, spring onions, potatoes. Just planted: more broad beans.

While I’m far from self-sufficient in the garden, it’s lovely to bring what you have grown in to the kitchen. Today I was pleased to find the first potatoes I’ve grown in this garden, and to add them to this ‘still life’.

And then to use the produce in a nutritious meal.

At the garden centre today, the assistant suggested there might be too much nitrogen in the soil where the courgettes are growing, as it’s where my compost bins used to be. Knowing more about the soil is something I could work on.

While at the garden centre, I was intrigued by a sign which made me look worriedly about my feet. Fortunately, I hadn’t stood on any monarch caterpillars, and I could see them on the swan plants.

Monarchs often flit about my garden, and I’ve seen a few yellow admirals this year – and lots of white butterflies. The egg chair is a good place to sit and watch what’s going on.

Plant power

Precious Platinum and sweet peas. The edge of the raffia mat shows Felix- damage.

It’s nice to have flowers from the garden on the table, but they have to be cat-proof. Felix has broken two vases and flooded the table trying to drink the water. A flat-bottomed vase has proved successful, but a rose, such as Mum’s favourite ‘Precious Platinum’, needs a slim container to hold it upright. A solution is to put the thinner vase in the larger one. Then it occurred to me to put sweet peas around the sides. The fragrant mix of flowers lifted our spirits which were sapped this morning, pre-caffeine, by a thirty-minute search for Mum’s hearing aid around and under the fridge. I found two ping pong balls, a small pine cone, bits of cat or dog biscuits, and a lot of fluff using the find-my-hearing-aid app, a fluffy duster, a torch and a wee bit of swearing. Finally, Felix’s fishing rod toy did the trick. Hearing aids are skin-coloured for camouflage while in the ear. A luminous colour would be useful for finding them in dark corners, just saying.

Apart from flowers cheering us up, the growth of other plants is miraculous to watch. Mother of Herbs (aka Cuban Oregano among other names) is taking over the kitchen windowsill. Outside, the yellow courgette plant is growing. The green courgette (see previous post ‘Small beginnings’) is shrinking, sadly, but today another as yet unidentified cucurbit has emerged beside it. The butternut pumpkin seeds I dried and planted have sprouted and I will need to find places to plant the seedlings soon. Where I pulled up suckering lilac, interesting fungus has emerged, probably doing its job of breaking down a tree stump. While the runner beans are beginning to wind up their stakes, the broad beans are ready to eat.

Mother of Herbs
Yellow courgette
Butternut pumpkin seedlings
Stump-eating fungus
Runner beans getting wound up
Broad beans

Hope

It’s heart-breaking to think our future on earth is threatened by our foolishness when nature continues to be amazing and new life is emerging in the garden. Blackcurrants, strawberries, globe artichokes, blueberries, tomatoes, beans, apples and grapes are beginning to develop, fresh and green.

Each morning is full of promise when a garden is full of flowers.

With plenty to spare for a vase inside.

And in the nearby park, huge trees spread a canopy of new green against a blue sky.

Home sweet home

It has felt quite good to be retired (note the qualification). Being at home has always been something to look forward to, such as at the end of each working day and during holidays. Now that we have to stay home, home remains a sanctuary for me.

There was a southerly blast last night and I’m pleased I photographed the roses before they were blown about. There’s a nice autumn second – or third – blooming happening.

The abundance of Japanese anemones or wind flowers brightens the whole garden (once you’ve got ’em, you’ve got ’em). At night, the flowers close up forming lovely nodding heads.

Loads of cranberries, framed by Japanese anemones – and parsley, chives, swan plants, Cecile Brunner, pittosporum, kowhai, and lilac which is turning to autumn colours.

There are white anemones too, with one of three rhubarb plants behind.

Herbs, fruit and vegetables are doing pretty well despite, in some cases, the ravages of chooks and caterpillars.

It’s rather nice to have hens to keep me company when I’m out in the garden. Yesterday, I picked the seventh bowl of raspberries, and a few blueberries. The chooks don’t like raspberries, but love to jump up and pick low-hanging grapes. Mostly, they prefer to scratch about for bugs.

I felt sorry for the hens when it rained the other day. They didn’t go into their little house for shelter. Instead they huddled under trees or scratched about in the rain getting quite wet and bedraggled. So I found an old umbrella and tied it up over their perch. There it sits quite fetchingly under the banksia rose and behind the abutilon and fairy rose. Even Popcorn, the white hen, matches the colour scheme as she turns pink under the umbrella!

Making a “home sweet home” for the hens is calming somehow in these days of uncertainty and anxiety. My WEA course on Sustainable Living has been cancelled (with two sessions to go) but now I can practise what I have learned at home.

I’m the urban farmer, baby

As I clump about the place in my red band gumboots, smelling the farmyard smells chickens bring with them, I’m reminded of when I lived on a farm and a colleague commented that I was “playing at being a farmer”. I had numerous chooks and a goat and a large vegetable garden. A stray cat called by regularly. There were possums in the walnut tree at night. The furry beasts, with ghoulish red eyes, would screech and run along the verandah with hob-nail boots on, and I could hear rats behind the scrim walls of the old villa I rented.

Now, in my small city garden, as I toil in the service of the chooks, mixing up their mash at 6am, cleaning out the nesting box in the early afternoon, picking up their poop and burying it under the rhubarb or in the compost, fetching them greens and treats to vary their diet and marvelling at their quiet clucky chicken-ness, I feel a certain farmer-ish satisfaction.

Having solved their incursions into the garden by judicious use of the sprinkler, I am harvesting the fruits of my vegetable labours.

Home-grown tomatoes
Freshly-picked runner beans – no strings attached
Firm and squeaky courgettes. Just enough for a Carrot and Courgette Kugel.

And – drum roll, please – half a dozen eggs for a bacon and egg pie.

Bright yolks and firm shells