Last week in the garden

A quick upate of what's new in the garden ....

The veggie patch has been looking decidedly sad recently, so it was time to pull out the old and try something new. We harvested what must have been the world's smallest carrot crop - after months in the ground we pulled out around 15 teeny tiny carrots, the biggest of which could possibly be called a baby carrot, the others even smaller! At least the kids enjoyed pulling them out and we all had to laugh at the size of them. We ended up eating some of them raw- a mini-snack (!) and the chooks got the really tiny scrappy ones.

I think they hadn't had enough water, as deep down the soil was quite dry and no worms. (Together with the 'chooks in the patch' experience) Oh well, mark that one up to experience!

I had some butternut pumpkins (5) and a sugar-baby watermelon that our kids had germinated in containers, along with a couple of capsicums and tomatoes. We dug over the ground again, added a bag and a half of cow manure and few handfuls of blood and bone, and planted the new round next to a few eggplants.

They've been in a week now and looking good - survived the heatwave we've been having and still standing.

Oh, I did find out what has been eating our green stuff - bowerbirds. I had suspected them but caught 3 in there last week, tearing away at beans, silverbeet and the new pumpkins. So now we have the chicken fence all around, and a bird net over the top. I stopped short of putting a lock on!

The other side of the patch will be planted out when this lot germinate - also last week (can you tell the kids have started preschool ??!!!) I started off some cauliflowers, purple king beans (to replace the bowerbird-eaten ones), cherokee wax beans, rainbow beetroot, and the parsley seeds I saved earlier.

I wasn't sure about the cauli's so just sprinkled loads of seeds in.... at last count there were 50 germinated seedlings! Oops! I might be looking for cauli recipes later ......