The Not-So-Quiet Winter

If you believe the gardening books, winter is supposedly a quiet time in the garden. A time for rest and reflection, maybe planning ahead for the following year. Are they kidding??!!! I have been busier than ever this winter working in our garden.

I posted about building our veggie patch a few months ago after we moved here. I am pleased to say that although it was a fairly rushed job, with me desperate to get something (anything!) into the ground before winter hit, it has done extremely well and has fed us many greens over the colder months.

 Plenty of kale, spinach, silverbeet, rocket and lettuce through the winter

Following that, in the past 2 months I have :-

• Planted a row of 6 bare-rooted rose bushes, outside our main front window (as a bit of a privacy screen from passing bushwalkers and locals walking their dogs!)

I have since made this into a long strip of 'rose bed', with mulch to keep out competing grass



• Planted a hedge- row of  5 hazelnut trees I bought 2 years ago. see here   for the original post. Somehow they have miraculously survived living in large pots (thank you) and hopefully will thrive now they are in the ground.

• Planted over 500 flowering Spring bulbs throughout the front, back and side gardens, and in pots which can be moved around to suit our window view when they flower. Some of the daffodils are just starting to flower now. I also planted tulips, freesias, jonquils, muscari, anemones, ranunculi, ixias, snowflakes, dutch iris, chincherinchee.... so many more!

• Established a small garlic patch of both Australian Purple and White bulbs (around 30 plants) and a separate potato patch (around 30 seed potatoes) including Sebago, Nicola, Desiree and Ruby Lou.

• Planted 2 varieties of blueberry bushes -Northland and Anna- in the back garden. The area I chose to plant them in is a sunny spot but has pine trees hanging over the fence from the property behind- this means the soil here is naturally acidic which blueberries love, and the pine needles that fall create a natural acidic mulch. Ideal conditions for them, less work for me!

• Planted a variety of dormant berry canes- thornless blackberry, boysenberry, and 13 raspberry canes. All are against fences where they can be tied up when they start to grow (hopefully profusely!)

• Started transforming the side garden into a mini orchard (we call it the side garden, its the equivalent of a normal front garden but our house is long and sideways on a corner block). In there we have planted 3 apple trees- (Granny Smith, Red Fuji and Gala), 1 nectarine and 1 peach (all dwarf varieties) along with rhubarb and the raspberries. I am thinking of buying a double-grafted pear as well, if I can make a space! The garden was already quite full with deciduous trees and a few other random trees, including a huge cypress which is beautiful but creates a lot of shade Luckily this is a sunny North facing garden so the fruit trees should do well. Our daughter has claimed the Gala as her tree, and our son has always loved Granny Smith apples and wanted his own tree since he was 3, so it was a happy day when he got to plant it :-)

This corner was not even visible when we moved in- covered in overhanging trees
• Oh and of course not forgetting our feathered friends! We put up a brushwood fence along the back boundary to hide the tangled mess of ivy and other weeds in the property behind us (after lopping off several huge pine tree limbs that were overhanging our garden). We then built the chook pen similar to the first one we made. Chicken wire and star pickets, old gate, A-frame inside for shelter, sleeping and nest boxes. It is approx 25 m2 so plenty of room to scratch around in.

Our hens were so happy they immediately started laying again! After our egg-less winter, the very next day 3 of our 5 hens had laid! And they haven't stopped since. we are now getting over 20 a week from the 5 chooks which is great.

It is exciting to see my vision coming into reality, although I can be a little impatient at times (!) and the vision is a pretty fluid one, and often morphs into other ideas.
Our ultimate aim is not to be self-sufficient here, but to provide as much as we can for ourselves of fresh, healthy food, whilst enjoying our garden and also living in a practical and beautiful space.

Achievable?

Watch this space.

:-)

What a difference a day makes ....

.... 24 little hours..... since yesterday- this is how my patch looked today!

Snow came from nowhere, extremely exciting for kids, beautiful to look at. But I hope my veggies survive!

My New Winter Veggie Garden

I think its about time I showed my new veggie patch- it is still very young and new but showing lots of promise! I picked this area as it receives sun most of the day and is very sheltered. Our back garden is much warmer than the front (open to wind) or side (shady) which is important in our cold climate. The colorbond fence at the back and the shed to the side make a little microclimate, which I am hoping will equate to more food in less time!

We roped in my in-laws to help while they were staying here (hey, no such thing as a free lunch eh?!!) which made things take shape pretty quickly. We used whatever materials we had for borders- some timber offcuts and old timber posts, short star pickets and even an old sign was cut in half! Hopefully one day they will be replaced with handsome hardwood sleepers, but for now I was happy to just get something to hold the soil in. A few bricks are makeshift 'steppers' so I can get in to the middle without crushing the plants.

My helpers and the newly filled bed.

Only these few herbs were plants, the rest raised from seed.

The main patch is a raised bed as the garden is kikuyu lawn, which truly is like digging into carpet. Much easier for quick results was to put down cardboard and thick newspaper layers (to block the grass growing through), then heap up with around 30cm deep of good soil. We bought our soil in from a local nursery and it is a rich mix of animal manures and mushroom compost, a specific product for vegetable beds.

The main bed pictured here is 6 metres long x 1.2 metres wide, and used about 2/3 of the 2 cubic metres soil we bought, so cost around $70 to fill. I think it was worth doing for the quick results and less back-breaking for us :-)

....and yesterday, starting to look a lot greener

So what did I plant? Well here in the Blue Mountains winter choices are pretty limited for this season. I chose things that we will actually eat, that don't take a lot of room and that work in our climate.

English Spinach
Silverbeet
Curly Kale
Tuscan Kale
Rocket
Italian Lettuce

Broad beans

Sugar Snap peas
Massey (shelling) peas

Snow Peas

Leeks

Broccoli (Di Cicco)

Broccoli (Romanesco)

and various herbs- parsley, thyme, oregano, lemon thyme, lemon balm, coriander

English Spinach

Trying to coax my peas to find the string!

Each has its own section, but given that I had my kids 'helping' some of the the seeds were broadcast thickly rather than sown in rows, such as the curly kale which germinated fantastically, possibly because a whole packet of teeny tiny seeds was spilt! I'm working on the permaculture principle of having no gaps to block weeds :-)

I have used no fertilisers other than a couple of waterings with diluted worm juice from our worm farm. I think the soil has enough goodness to last quite a while.

Curly Kale- enough to feed the street!

We will certainly not have enough to feed our family, (unless we live on kale!) but even supplementing our shop-bought groceries is a great start. It is a great on-going project for the whole family, our kids have learnt so much and now get really excited when they see the huge fat worms in the patch because the soil is so good!

Leeks in recycled poly-pipes to blanch the stems

I have just started another section as well, up to the shed, to plant my garlic and potatoes into, but I will leave that for another post.

Happy gardening!  :-)

And now.... exhale.

Well it has taken me a long while... but I am finally ready to do an update! We were very busy for a while moving to our new home (and all the usual dramas that brings!), then within a few weeks we were busy again with family staying from overseas, but I am very pleased to report we have all settled in to our new surrounds beautifully.

Early morning mist in the valley

We love the house - which is much larger than we are used to but strangely not too big at all - it still feels cosy in the right places! Our kids now have a very large open playroom with lots of tables for creating, and shelves for their books and games. They just love it! And we love not tripping over toys and standing on lego in the lounge room.

We even get to watch the sunset from our dining room, or upstairs out on the balcony, something that always stops us in our tracks.

Sunset from our balcony

We love the area too - very peaceful and beautiful, friendly people and the village is perched on an escarpment overlooking magnificent valleys, which provides us with fabulous bushwalks!

Our local bushwalk/ dog walk- only a couple of minutes away

All animals made it through the move too. At the time we had 2 chooks broody and the other 3 moulting, so they looked a bit rough for a while, but are back to normal now -fat, feathery and happy! We are even getting a decent egg supply, 10-12 a week which is great considering the colder weather.

It didn't take me long to get a food garden going- I was planning it within 2 weeks and building shortly after! With nothing in place to start with, we picked a sunny area across the back of the garden, and built a long garden bed 6 metres x 1.2 metres, using whatever we had to hand, and bought in 2 cubic metres of 'veggie mix' soil to make a raised bed. Excellent stuff, full of manures and mushroom compost! I will post some pictures of the patch soon when its looking a bit greener, but already everything has germinated and so we have a bed full of little green sprouts, ready to provide us with winter goodness. I planted lots of winter greens, peas, broad beans, broccoli, herbs.... and am waiting on my potatoes and garlic to arrive, though I'll have to extend the patch as its full already!

This house has also inspired me to try something new in the garden- flowers! I've always admired others gardens that burst with glorious colour, but to be honest I kind of thought flowers were a bit frivolous, after all isn't this the age when we should all be turning our land into something more productive? Well, I'm not sure exactly what changed, but you know what? For the first time, I think I deserve some frivolous flowers!! Of course, when I've waited this long, I'm not doing things by halves, so I bought 2 bulk packs of Spring bulbs from Garden Express, a total of a whopping 405 bulbs!!! Sounds a lot, but some of them are really small ~ lol ! A bit crazy, maybe. But we have space on all sides of the house, with lots of deciduous autumn trees (which looked amazing when they turned) so some will go under the trees, others will be planted outside our windows and some in pots.... I'm sure I'll find a place for them. Watch this space and see how I did!

Its all a work-in-progress of course, there is always more to do in the garden and inside, but it feels like we are home again at last, and I can finally exhale.

:-)

Sowing & Growing List

I've been meaning for a while to make a list of all the food plants we have on the go, including those currently in our 2 patches or in pots as well as seeds I have sown.

I have just finished the list and put on as a side 'widget' to the right ... ---> you can find it under my 'followers'.

I am amazed there are over 40 foods on there- particularly as it seems we have hardly anything to harvest! There might even be more as I'm going from memory (it's nearly midnight!) and previous blog posts.You would think from reading it that we were fully self-sufficient, but actually far from it.

The reason is that a lot of the foods are at different stages - things like the herbs are almost always growing and really hardy. However others like potatoes, leeks and garlic have been in for a while but won't be ready for a couple of months yet, and a lot of the others I sowed the seeds recently so are either seedling stage (no food!) or yet to germinate (no food!) Also some need a lot of time and patience, like the hazelnut trees which are just showing their first leaves of Spring, or the Cherimoya fruit seeds that I just started today. Both of those won't produce anything edible for a couple of years. Hmmm... long wait.......!

The bean seeds and some mesclun salad leaves have germinated, and both produced really well last year, lasting us for months.

Until then .... well we are going pretty well in eggs with 12 a week average, and have lots of parsley, (my seed saving  from January worked!) so scrambled eggs with parsley is a popular option!

 :-)

Stocking up on market goodies!

How's this for a burst of Spring colour? I don't usually go for these kind of potted annual flowers, but these were just so cheery!
We went out to the local market today, and it was brilliant. I usually enjoy the markets anyway, but this month there seemed to be so much more 'good stuff' (and less scandalously priced rubbish!)

I filled the tray above with 15 decent size pots - for $22, which I think is a bargain! I could have had any combo of veggies/herbs/flowers. This was my choice today:-

2 hot chillies
2 Black Russian tomatoes
2 curly parsley
1 lemon basil
1 pot of celery (about 10 plants in it!)
 and 6 lovely flowering annuals.

(I don't even know what flowers they are, I let our children just pick what they wanted!)

I thought the flowers can go somewhere in the centre of the back garden, so we can see the lovely colour from our lounge room doors, and they will be near to our second patch, so hopefully attract some bees.

Also at the market today - a new stall which sells vegetable seeds from the local seedsavers and small amounts of herbs/plants/veggies that local growers have excess of. It is such a great idea, I hope it takes off. I bought 5 packets of seeds from there, at only $1 each !!!
Ruby Chard, rocket, New Zealand spinach, curly kale and marigolds (for beneficial insects) are now added to my ever growing seed collection, but not for too long - they will be potted /planted this week. There is info on every packet including the harvest date and where it was grown. Brilliant!
I also bought some beautiful lemons there, and bay leaves (can you believe just 10c a sprig?) so I was very happy with my purchases.

I also picked up a handful of seeds yesterday from a Cherimoya, which is a kind of cool-climate custard apple. Never had one, but apparently it is the fruit of the Gods, a mix of beautiful fruit flavours! I guess it tastes better than it looks ....... !

I got them when went to a talk given by the Cooerwull Plantsmen from Lithgow, about growing fruit and nut trees in the Blue Mountains. It was a great morning, loads of info & tips, nice friendly crowd of about 20 people, and it was in the community gardens in Katoomba which I hadn't been to before, so it was really interesting to have a look around there too. Oh, yes, and of course I got the Cherimoya seeds from a generous man who had brought a bag to share around!

Speaking of nut trees (and yesterday we did!) our hazelnut trees are starting to wake up from their winter sleep. The buds are bursting open with beautiful tiny green leaves, looks lovely. It was good to see some mature hazelnut trees at the community gardens, to get an idea of what our will look like in around 5 years. For now they are in large pots until we build and move, but I was told that they will be fine like that, even for a couple of years.

So lots of planting and seed-germinating ahead for me this week, although I never feel like its a chore, I really love getting outside into the garden and having lots of plants at various stages of growth. Hopefully we will have lots of edibles soon!

:-)

All is Good in the Garden

Today was one of those days I walked around the back yard and thought "yeah, actually things are going pretty well". The sun was shining and things are growing again.

The seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago here are coming up great - all 4 types of beans, 2 types of tomatoes, beetroot, vegetable spaghetti, basil and peppermint. Even one of the watermelon seeds is peeping out early.

The potatoes are showing through the mulch in my trial-spud-sacks .......

And the second 'patch' we started a couple of weeks ago in our bare centre of the garden is looking ok, instant green at the front with lots of herbs that were outgrowing their pots, and a few new ones I bought from the Gardening Australia expo including this Chocolate Mint .....

I don't know what I will use it for, but doesn't it sounds great? And it smells exactly like one of those after-dinner mints!

I also put in 2 rows of mixed lettuce and a row of parsley from my saved seed. Parsley is slow to germinate, but hopefully there will be a mass of green by the summer!

And these new plants in our old patch - some rhubarb kindly given by a lovely friend who was moving house, they have settled in nicely and I made rhubarb muffins the same day I planted them in! I'll give them a rest now to grow a bit before harvesting again.

We planted this beautiful wax flower years ago as a tiny plant, its now taller than me and about 2 metres across, and fills the garden with a lovely scent. Luckily for us, it is one of those plants that thrives on neglect! It is an aussie native and has never been watered other than the rainfall we get. So pretty.

Even the chooks are happy ..... although their needs are few .....warm safe house, bit of space and exercise, food and water ..... and they are giving us around 12 eggs a week between the 3 of them (although one is laying as much as the other two!) They didn't even stop laying all through the winter which most chooks do. They are such great pets.

All was good today in the garden of Mountain Wildlife...... :-)

Spring Seed Plantings

Maybe its the lovely weather we've had lately, or maybe I just need a bit of optimism in the garden, but today was time to start off my vegetable seed plantings for Spring.




I have a lot of seeds left from last year so no need to buy any more yet, and I enjoyed picking through and seeing what I could start off now. We have quite a mild climate here, mostly it is safer to wait until the soil is a little warmer before planting in the garden, however most veggies can be started off in pots now ready for planting out in 4-6 weeks. (Its only 9 days until Spring officially starts anyway!)

I prefer to grow from seed than buying seedlings for a few reasons - it is definitely more economical to grow from seed, depending on what you buy and the company you can often get 200 seeds or more in a packet costing around $3, whereas a punnet of just 6 seedlings of most things will cost around $4. Even factoring in a few failures you are still way ahead with seeds. Also you can choose non-hybrid, non-genetically modified, open pollinated and organic seed much more easily than finding seedlings of the same. By growing these types of food, you can then save your own seed if you wish for the next year, with a much greater chance of growing true-to-type plants. These types of seeds are also more disease resistant, hardier, produce over longer seasons, have more nutritional value and are tastier !!! (Have I convinced you to try yet??!!)

Some good online companies I have seeds from currently are --- The Lost Seed, Cornucopia Seeds, Green Patch Seeds and Diggers (Check out their websites by clicking on my links.) I have found The Lost Seed (based in Tassie) to be most generous and have loads of helpful info on their packaging including germination info and seed saving tips (do you know any other industry that tells you how to NOT buy their product again??!!!!)

I also have a few odd packets from swaps I have done with other seed-savers, and some seeds I saved myself from last year.


I use commercial seed-raising mix, and whatever I have for containers. The best I found (from many experiments last year!) are the containers from strawberries/alfalfa/cherry tomatoes etc, they already have the drainage holes and have their own little lid, which is handy until the seeds germinate.


So today I planted -----

Bush Beans -Cherokee Wax
Climbing Beans - Purple King
Climbing Beans - Blue Lake
Broad Beans (only 2 left from last year)
Vegetable Spaghetti/Squash (never tried it, but looks interesting!)
Butternut Pumpkin -Waltham
Watermelon - Moon and Stars
Beetroot - Rainbow Mix
Tomato - Grosse Lisse (full size)
Tomato - Tommy Toe (cherry size)
Cape Gooseberry - Golden Nugget
Peppermint
Basil
Echinacea



I have some more to plant but ran out of time today, lots of lettuce varieties and some more herbs, but will do that another time .... they will go direct into the soil.

So hopefully in a few weeks I will have a whole load of seedlings ready for planting into warm soil. Until then I will keep them covered on my back deck, and for the containers that don't have lids I will show you my incredible germination greenhouse-system ......

Yes, its a plastic bag. Came as excessive packaging from something or other. I think if I can't avoid plastic bags at least I can reuse them!

Works well to keep heat in without drying the soil out, with a few little breathe-holes. (If you use these, remember to take the pots out when the plants germinate or they can rot).

I always like to know what others are growing, and what works for you, so let me know!


:-)

Shameful gardening update ...

I haven't blogged about any gardening for a while ... and if you continue reading you will understand why!

I wrote about the state of our backyard recently HERE after the chooks had 'moon-scaped' it, I am thinking I will put a mulch-type pathway through, going around the middle section, and up to the top corners where we go a lot (washing line one side and chook pen on the other) which sections off the centre. Still thinking of what I can put in there, as it is shady and has lots of tree roots, but need to do something fast as the soil is turning to dust..... any ideas welcome!

That leaves the front rectangle to become grassy again, and the fence sides ... well, not sure about them.

On the food garden front - well that has been somewhat shameful too. Practically nothing grew over winter, even though we didn't get frost. The patch is looking very sad :-(

The little bits of green that are growing are parsley, a handful of lettuces and a few silverbeet.

My cauliflowers didn't work at all, the few that survived long enough to transplant into the patch have just sat there providing food for the odd snail, but not displaying anything that looks like a flower.

My leeks, which I grew from seed in April, still look like skinny, spindly grasses sticking out of the soil. I was dreaming of leek and potato soup over winter- no chance!

I have about a dozen or so garlic plants in, which seem to look ok (above the ground anyway) but when I sneakily dug one up yesterday for a peek, there was just lots of roots.

Times like this are so disheartening! I really thought we could have a patch full of healthy, organic produce over each season, but instead it is depressingly empty.

:-(

Ho Hum, life goes on. Spring in a couple of weeks, and the weather is warming up already, so I will simply get my box of seeds out and sort through what can go in next. Its does seem that leafy greens do fine in the patch, but root vegetables and fruiting ones don't, so I wil bear that in mind. Perhaps the soil has lots of nitrogen but not much else? Nitrogen produces lots of green growth but not so good for fruiting or flowering, although by composting our chook manure it is supposed to stabilise all the nutrients ...... oh, I thought this was going to be easy - so wrong!

Oh, almost forgot, I did do something today! I found these in the back of my veggie cupboard .....

Oh yes, the shame again! I couldn't believe the enormous shoots on these potatoes, (my children thought they looked like 'aliens' !!) and decided they would be great for planting. Certainly not going to eat them anyway!

I read recently about planting them into sacks, with compost and mulch, a bit like the potato-cage idea. As they grow, you just roll up the sack a bit more and top up the compost to cover the stems (so you don't get poisonous green potatoes!) We have loads of big sacks from the produce store (they give them away, used to have bulk chook grain in them) and also loads of compost to use (2 compost bins full) so with my 2 little helpers we planted the wrinkly spuds into a sack each.

We spent quite a bit of money and effort last year on certified seed potatoes, only to yield -nothing. So, this time ....

If they work - bonus! Lots of free spuds!
If they don't - well, we will have neat sacks of compost ready for the next experiment!

:-)

I'm finally back in blog-land!

Trouble in blog-land ..... I've been meaning to write an update for ages now but haven't been able to sign in. Every time I try my computer/modem gives up and goes to sleep :-(

So, I'm finally in today (via some ridiculous route!) so I'll try to remember -in a quick update -all the things I was going to post ......!


PLANTING - cauliflower seedlings (started from seed, tried twice in the patch but every one was eaten by slugs, so now in polystyrene boxes!), tatsoi, mixed lettuces (also in boxes) and herbs bought from Blackheath Farmers market -sage, tarragon, chives, celeriac and dill. Ok, I don't actually know what to do with some of them, but I wanted something different and my 3 y.o. son was helping me 'choose' and potting them himself! They have this great 'pick n mix' system for veggies or herbs, where you pick whatever seedlings you want and put them into a 6-8 pack planter. Great value!


HARVESTING - not much now ..... some purple king beans, cherokee wax beans, silverbeet. Plenty of herbs and of course, the eggs. I think the chooks are slowing down with the colder weather, last week only 14 eggs from the 3 of them.


BAKING - Mmmmm ..... made biscotti recently, as our Easter treat instead of choccy eggs. Turned out beautifully- crunchy, nutty, perfect with coffee .....

BISCOTTI

2 cups plain flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

rind of 1 orange, finely grated

1 cup caster sugar

120g blanched whole almonds

80g hazelnuts

Preheat oven to 190c. Line 2 baking trays.

Sift flour and baking powder into large bowl. Make a well in the centre and
add eggs, orange rind and sugar, stir. Add nuts.

On a lightly floured surface knead mixture gently until combined. Divide into
4 portions, shape each into narrow loaf shapes, place 2 on each tray.

Bake for 30 mins, allow to cool, then slice with a serrated knife.

Return to oven and bake for a further 30 mins at 150c, or until golden brown.
This second bake gives biscotti its crunchy texure.

Also made a gorgeous Autumn Crumble (also now known as 'oh-my-god crumble', it was THAT good! We had 2 big bags of apples and pears, again from Blackheath farmers market, they are so cheap at the moment as are in season - perfect. So I decided to make a nice hot dessert for our cooler weather. Unfortunately I don't have a photo as it went too quickly! Will definitely make it again soon though so pic will follow next time .....

AUTUMN CRUMBLE

(serves 4-6)


150g butter, cold and cubed
1 cup plain flour
140g brown sugar
¼ - ½ cup oats
¼ tsp cinnamon, and powdered ginger if desired

4 apples
4 pears
juice ½ lemon
1 extra tbs sugar

Crumble –
Mix flour and cinnamon in bowl (and ginger if using)
Add butter, rubbing in with fingertips until resembles coarse breadcrumbs
Add sugar and oats, mix well

Fruit filling –
Peel and cut fruit into large chunks
Mix in bowl with lemon juice and sugar
If using hard fruit (eg granny smiths or hard pears) can be poached for 5 mins to semi-soften

Spread or layer fruit into buttered dish
Spoon crumble on top, flatten down lightly
Bake at 180c for approx 40 mins until golden on top and fruit soft

Serve with custard or ice-cream


Variations –
may need less butter/ more flour- use texture as guide
Brown sugar 100g + white sugar 40g worked well when not enough brown
Finely chopped almond slivers added to crumble mix before baking
Cinnamon and/or ginger could be added to fruit mix instead of in crumble mix

I'd love to know how you go with these recipes if you try them, let me know!

Backyard Revolution

I was pleased (and quite surprised) to see 'Backyard Revolution' aired on '60 Minutes' last week. Surprised because its not their usual type of sensationalised story, and pleased because it seems the general population is waking up to the benefits of growing your own food!

Peter Cundall appears with his usual 'chuck-it-in-the-ground-and-it-will-feed-you-for-months' approach (I love him! He makes it look so easy and is always inspiring. Can't believe he is 82!)

If you missed 'Backyard Revolution' or for those overseas, you can watch it by clicking HERE

Its only about 12 minutes long so no excuses!

I have been wondering whether this really is a 'revolution' that is sweeping the country, or whether it's just that my eyes are opened more now and I'm mixing with different people (real or online) that have the same interest .... but I'm starting to realise that yes, people are getting out and getting into their gardens and growing more than lawn!

The show just touched on some of the reasons why growing you own food is beneficial, and mostly talked about the benefits of fresh food over processed food, rather than home-grown over supermarket fruit/veg. I would have liked to see a little more talk about food miles, genetic engineering of food and how huge corporations like Monsanto are taking control of our food future, but hey, its only a 12 minute slot! and for this type of story to be covered at all on a mainstream show is progress.

Viva la revolution!

I can't believe its been 2 weeks since I blogged last! I've been so busy with other things .... at the moment I'm cleaning, sorting and organising things for a market stall this Sunday at the Baby and Kids Market I haven't been before so I'm hoping to convert some clutter into cash! It is hard to let go of baby things but really we don't have the space and they're all just gathering dust, I'm sure someone could use these things, and of course cash is always welcome in return!

Other recent happenings .....

Well, this has got to be the smallest egg I've ever seen .....! One of our superchooks laid it last week. Only 35mm long and barely registers on the scales. The kids thought it was hilarious and enjoyed playing a 'trick' on Daddy telling him he was going to have an enormous egg for his dinner ....... :-)

Other news from around the home... veggie patch looking green and healthy again, though not much edible at the moment. The big greens here are eggplants and pumpkin plants - looking great now (however I doubt whether there is enough warm weather left to grow and ripen anything on them). Still, I'll leave them for now, the weather is so weird you never know. Also planted out a little basil patch in the front, and since the photo was taken also planted out my flat-leaf parsley that I saved seed from a couple of months back. Very proud that has worked!

Also recently planted out some more Cherokee Wax beans I had germinated in pots, the last lot didn't do well so I've tried a different spot and these ones are happy! They are supposed to be bush beans so I'll see how they go without stakes.

Yesterday I caught the bowerbirds back again (those who demolished much of the patch before I surrounded it with wire and netting!) I have about 15 or so pots on the back deck with various herbs and plants in them, and I caught the bowerbirds eating our chilli plant! They've been eating the ends off all the chillies and banana capsicums then leaving the rest (gee thanks) for us. Well at least I can stop blaming the chooks now! I can't believe we spent years encouraging the native birds into our garden, and now I'm chasing them out with a broom !

Tried my hand at baking bread from scratch recently too- in a readmaker but all I've used so far is the ready made breadmix. First I tried a wholemeal loaf as thats what we usually eat, which was ok but a bit sweet, so when I made my first white loaf I tweaked the recipe and hey presto! Perfect! White bread is a rarity in our house, so the kids thought it was great. I was pretty pleased with it- tasted good, quite dense and heavy but baked perfectly. Might get a bit more adventurous witht recipes later, but it does feel good to achieve another of my goals for this year!

:-)

Yes, we have no potatoes .....

Garden update for this week...... some good - like the tiny grape tomatoes, not many of them but they are so sweet .... and some not so good - we decided to see what potatoes have grown since we planted them way back in Oct last year (see here )

The cage method revealed - nothing. Not a thing. Not one spud! We did have a few healthy looking plants for a while, then waited until they died back as we were supposed to. But there was nothing at all going on in there other than a worm-farm in a cage. Today I dug through the larger no-dig spud-bed down the fence line and again found nothing except decomposing straw. Hmm. Disappointed :-(

Luckily we have a lovely neighbour 2 doors down who gave us a bag of hers last week as she has just grown sooooo many she can't use them all! Of course she left with some fresh eggs ;-)

On the up-side my trial-seed-saving parsley has germinated! (And it only took 2 weeks which I think is pretty quick for parsley) At rough count I think there is at least 20 seedlings which is great. I'll pot them on in a week or so (just a pity there'll be no lovely potatoes to put the parsley on!)

Other planting - 6 purple king beans plants into the patch to replace the ones eaten by the bowerbirds. Pumpkins and eggplants settled in well, happy with the 8 days non-stop rain we've had. Rain also responsible for rotting a few of the tomato plants, being constantly wet does not make them happy :-(

Edibles this week - few tomatoes, various herbs, rocket, chillies. And 24 eggs last week :-)

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 ......

Invade and destroy mission...

OK - not happy about 'the patch'. Actually, what I'm not happy about is our chooks destroying the patch.

On Monday they managed to find a way in through the netting we have around the outside (by ripping a great hole in it). They have not been interested EVER until now so I was shocked to see them in there. By the time I saw them they had obviously been in there a while, and as anyone who has kept hens will know, they just LOVE to scratch and dig.

They managed to uproot ALL the beetroots and capsicum plants, squashed and trampled the carrot tops flat and dug around a couple of tomato plants down to expose the roots. So after a firm chook removal from the patch, I tried to recover what I could and replant them.

This may have worked ......... had they not returned to do the same thing an hour later. AARRRGGGHHH !!!! Of course I thought I'd make it chook proof, but apparently not.

So in all, after managing to save only a couple, we have lost 12 beetroots, 3 capsicum plants, 1 tomato plant and not sure about the carrots. They ate a fair amount of silverbeet and some lettuce, but just the leaves, so they will grow back.

This comes after our purple king beans have been pretty much destroyed by ?? something last week. I had 5 healthy plants growing up a bamboo tepee, about 2 metres tall and just flowering, until something decided the leaves looked nice and juicy and munched them all away. I made a spray from molasses and pure soap, (supposed to stop caterpillars in their tracks) and set up a few vegemite/sugar slug traps. This seems to have stopped the destruction, but there's hardly anything left on the plants now so I'm not sure they will make it.

The toughest part is that I have grown all of these from seed this year, so it has taken a lot of time, effort and care to get them this far. I suppose this is another part of the lesson? I thought planting more than you need was so you could give some away to friends!

So, all in all, not good news on the gardening front. Oh, and for those non-locals, the last 3 days here have reached almost 40 degrees, so everything (including me!) is suffering from the heat too.

As for the chookies, I am back on speaking terms with them (!) the 4 of them are laying every day to ensure their place here remains! The patch now looks like Fort Knox, although I don't think Fort Knox was secured with holey bird net, old boxes and wheelbarrows .....

Weekend task - putting a proper post & chicken wire fence around the patch.

Weekend gardening update

Well I hope all you blog-readers had a lovely Christmas, I have been out of the blog-osphere the past week but we all had a great Christmas, lots of excitement with our children on the big day and enjoying some family time off together.

The summer garden however, stops for no-one! So after a few days neglect it was back into the gardening ... actually never feels like a chore as its always enjoyable.

Firstly, we collected a wheelbarrow full of compost from our first compost bin - it was the really slow type, cold as we filled that bin before the delights of chook poo! Since then we have a second bin full of hot compost (the holy grail of gardeners!) almost ready, and have re-filled the first bin which is also now hot too.



For those non-gardeners amongst you, our compost is made up of garden waste (grass and tree clippings, dead leaves and bark etc) some kitchen scraps (veg peelings, tea bags, eggshells etc) and lately whatever gets cleaned out of the hen house (newspaper, woodshavings and manure).

The kitchen scraps are becoming less as scraps go to chooks and the worm farm, but at least we hardly have any rubbish going out each week.

The resulting compost comes out as a fabulous nutrient rich soil, great as potting mix, topsoil for the veggie patch, seed raising ....

If the carbon : nitrogen mix is right, it will heat up and be ready in a couple of weeks (and no it doesn't smell!) If its cold compost, it takes forever but gets there eventually when the worms move in.

Other garden news - planted out into the patch a row of capsicums and row of beetroots I have been neglecting in small pots for a while. Also a couple of tomato plants to replace the ones that gave themselves up. Zucchini plants are HUGE- now with fabulous flowers which look glorious in the mornings. Purple King beans now are growing up a teepee frame made of bamboo stakes, and Blue Lake beans doing well in their box.

Over Christmas we used our own salad greens for salad with lunch and dinner (can't get fresher than that), and used some of our hot chillis for garlic and chilli tiger prawns on Boxing Day..... OOOOH, YUM !!!

Veggie garden December update

Just realised I haven't posted about the patch/pots etc for a while - other general life stuff taking up my time! So here is the latest with some new pics ....



Strawberry seeds germinated and growing well in their lovely blue pot- just need some juicy red strawberries in there now - C'mon!

Zucchini have grown enormous, no flowers yet (so no zucchinis) but this big in just one month ... hmmm... thinking now that 5 plants may be far too many!

Chilli plant is doing well, ripening from green to red. Either colour- they are HOT !!!

Potatoes growing really well, 'hilled up' against the fence. With all the rain and heat lately I am 'hilling up' every couple of days. Need to just trust though that there are actually some spuds under all that straw.....

Tomatoes, like nearly everything else, growing lots of lovely green leaves, but nothing edible yet. There are some little yellow flowers though, so hopefully soon.... I have 12 plants in these pots, if they all fruit at once we'll be living on salads and pasta sauce! The black crate is full of my 'rogue' tomatoes - ones that just turned up by accident from old seeds in the compost - will be interesting to see what comes of them!

And lastly 'the patch'. Fabulous salad greens at the front- we have salad with dinner most days (all 4 of us) and there is always more again the next day. This has been my most successful and reliable crop.
Also growing here - carrots, silverbeet, zucchinis, beetroots, capsicum, eggplants, more tomatoes, cherokee wax beans and purple king beans.

So happy with this new hobby! Slugs have gone elsewhere too- thanks to a few tips from others. Broken eggshells and wood shavings (we use as chook litter) work well between plants, and traps made from vegemite /sugar get them in but not out ..... like the beer traps but cheaper!