I have been very slack with my updates-there’s been more weekends away-staying in the city, visiting Mum at Wynnum and attempting to go camping. I say attempting because there turned out to be a wedding on at the campground we went to and it was waaaaay too busy for our liking. We just went for a bit of a scenic drive, and then had a fire at home so we could still eat outside. Shane discovered his little leaf-blower is ideal for keeping the fire hot. Lots has been happening in the garden over the last few weeks, just as well I’ve been taking photos so I can recap on things. Spring is definitely here-there has been lots of flowering. The cornflowers are all out, they look like blue, purple and pink pom poms. There's something about them that makes me think of Dr Seuss books. The daylilies, hippeastrum and orchid have started flowering and the calendulas, society garlic, freesias and iffa lillies have continued -there is some other bulb flower that has come up in the middle of them, I’m not sure what it is (the one is the last photo). All the roses have been flowering-sooooo many flowers for such small plants. We'll definitely purchase some more when they become available in April. Our plum started getting leaves so we thought it must not have gotten cold enough for it to flower-but just this week it’s developed blossoms. It may still not have had enough cold to fruit, but at least it’s showing signs of life. The apricot and nectarine are not. We are beginning to suspect they may be dead, we’ll give them a few more weeks to see if they start doing anything. The peach tree has been doing really well, and we discovered it’s both a peach AND a nectarine-it’s forming both fruits. Really hope they wont get spoiled by fruit fly! A few of the mango trees have tiny mangoes forming. Don’t expect all of these to grow (they would pull the plants over!) but it’d be nice to get a couple of mangoes. The red centre lime and lemonade tree have started forming teeny tiny fruit too. And we have still been getting blueberries, I've been freezing them to use once we collect enough. The pea plants are still getting eaten by something all the tips are missing up the trellis, thankfully other plants aren’t getting munched. We pulled out the celery that was growing in this bed, it tasted a bit too bitter to eat on it's own. Reading up apparently it hates heat, and warmer weather can affect it's flavour. I think we pulled it up a few weeks too late. It still tasted fine cooked though-I made a celery and leek soup using the leeks we have growing. The rest of the celery I cut up and froze to use in other cooked dishes. We planted some zucchini seedlings in the spot where the celery had been. One of the guys at work has just started a garden and had grown too many seeds. He's also given us some tomatoes and beans I'll plant this weekend. The zucchini seem to be growing well, though I’ll spray them with some fungicide to ward off any disease like our last lot got. I've been buying zucchini with the shopping a fair bit lately, so it'll be good to have some fresh instead. We had some more broccoli and a cauliflower ready to pick, I have now pulled these plants out, we’ve decided not to plant them again-they take up a lot of room and are slow to develop only to give us one or two heads. We were thinking of creating more beds to grow more vegetables, but decided that would really push our water usage up and become expensive, so we’ll stick to the spaces we have and focus on growing plants that produce more of a harvest. Asparagus takes up a fair bit of room permanently in the garden, but it produces a lot, we’ve still been getting fresh spears every other night, this will definitely stay. Sweet potato will also be a permanent crop-it produces well, has lots of uses and is a pretty looking plant too. The new sweet potato we planted is taking off-except I found a HUGE caterpillar munching all the leaves off one plant. It looked like he might be a nice butterfly variety so I moved him down the back. We’re considering the other plants we have now and ones we’ve grown before. Kale grows really well, but we may limit the number of these plants we have-they get big and produce way more than we want. One plant would be plenty. Brussel sprouts also get big and are slow developing-we’ve just picked the first of our sprouts, we’ll see how much we like eating them to decide if they’ll get planted again. I eat a lot of tomatoes so think they should remain in the garden-the big varieties, not cherry tomatoes even though they grow well they take up a lot of space. The plants I was given for my birthday have fruit ripening-the first ripe tomato got munched by something though-it looked really tasty too! I might put bags over the others to protect them. One bed will definitely stay for herbs. This bed really needs a tidy up-the herbs have started going to seed and need cutting back or pulling out, there are also weeds in the bed. A job for this weekend. That means I can get new plants then-yay!
1 Comment
Bridget
17/10/2015 01:27:21 pm
Beautiful flowers and photos. You take great shots. There really is a lot to learn about gardening, amazing really! Looks like you are using the produce well 😀
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