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Posts Tagged ‘growing potatoes in hessian bags’

December Garden Update

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , , , , , on December 16, 2011| 53 Comments »

We’re having a wet and cool December here in Sydney, and the garden is quite confused by it all.

The Lebanese cucumbers are starting to recover, after being battered by weeks of rain…

Basil grew brilliantly in the yard last season, and the newest plants are promising to do the same.  We’ve planted several varieties this year…

Our perennial leeks in the top bed are flowering…

We’re yet to harvest any, but our asparagus patch has been growing like mad.  The Spice Girl gave us a single small pot when we started the garden, and this is what it’s turned into.  Hopefully next year we can start eating them…

Apples in Sydney?  I’m not convinced, but Pete was keen to try. The trees are producing small fruit again this year, but I’m not getting my hopes up…

Dwarf beans, on the hand, seem to grow brilliantly here…

Our onions were transplanted from a previous bed and after nearly a year, we’re finally starting to get bulbs…

We managed to grow one full sized onion!

Before moving the chickens onto the garden bed by the fence, we pulled out all the remaining perennial leeks…

…and replanted their 28 babies in the recently cleared front bed…

The potatoes in sacks have been an interesting exercise.   They’ve suffered from the wet weather, but are still growing well, and we’ve recently hilled them up, unrolling the sacks in the process…

The sacks themselves, though, haven’t held up all that well.  And these were doubled up too…

Pete is carefully growing purslane (which everyone else considers a weed), as he knows how much I love eating it…

We’ve provided our rhubarb with a little shade, and it’s suddenly doing brilliantly.  I think it’s really enjoyed the rain and the cooler weather…

Our dwarf white peach tree is growing well…

It produced several peaches this year, although the cooler growing season has resulted in slightly less flavoursome fruit than last year…

And finally, a photo of our bull capsicums, which are being grown indoors.  I think the seeds came from the CityHippyFarmGirl – thanks Brydie! The first one has just ripened…

Anything exciting happening in your gardens at the moment?

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Two Weeks

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2011| 70 Comments »

I’ve missed you all!

We’ve had a fun couple of weeks, although the weather here has been a bit bonkers. The combination of mild sunny days with heavy rains has led to a burst of growth in the garden.  The irises, which were slow to start this year, are finally greeting passersby from our front yard.

In the enclosed verandah, the tomatoes seem to have stagnated, possibly due to the lack of light and heat. Hopefully October will bring warmer days to ripen the fruit.  The plants are now eleven weeks old and festooned with dozens of green tomatoes in varying sizes.  Here are the largest…

A tiny Venus Fly Trap has taken up residence with the toms in the verandah. We brought it back from the Better Homes and Garden Show, and it’s been quite the talking piece at dinner. We couldn’t resist setting off one of the traps (just once) to see how quickly it closed!

The potatoes that we planted in hessian bags a month ago are growing tall and strong.  They’re almost ready to hill up…

The assorted dwarf beans from New Gippsland Seeds have all germinated, but no luck so far with the snake beans – I suspect we’ve been a little overambitious and sown them too early.  We’ve planted more in seedling pots on top of the fish tank to see if they’ll shoot…

Our bed of kohlrabi is thriving.  We’ve been really happy with these plants – they taste like cabbage, are incredibly easy to grow and use, and they’re not plagued with pests in the same way that other brassicas are.  They also grow well from directly sown seed…

We peel, julienne and stir-fry the swollen base, then feed the leaves to the chickens and the scraps to the worms…

We made a decision this year not to plant any heading lettuce.  This small patch was grown from scattered seed, and I harvest salad leaves with a pair of scissors every two or three days.  It grows back remarkably quickly – even though I’d given the section below a severe haircut just a few days earlier, the gap was indiscernible. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all bad haircuts grew out that quickly?

Despite our decision not to plant heading lettuce, we were delighted to find these green oaks (at least that’s what we think they are) self-seeding themselves all over our yard.  They’re deliciously sweet and surprisingly hardy…

The celery is growing very well this year.  The nice thing about having celery in the garden is that you can bring in stems as needed, without pulling out the entire bunch…

The blueberries have survived their transplant shock-free and are ripening up…

Our young lemon tree is in its second year and trying to fruit, but Pete’s not confident that any of them will grow to full size yet…

The first crop of peas are finished, but this new batch are just starting to flower.  We have an entire month of rain predicted, which will really test this variety’s claimed mildew resistance…

And some photos for Joanna of a lovely acrobatic Soldier Bird feasting on a neighbourhood bottlebrush tree. Also known as the Noisy Miner (not to be confused with the pesky Indian Mynas), both the bird and the tree are native to Australia.  Aren’t they lovely?

Please, catch me up!  How have your past couple of weeks been?

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