Showing posts with label tomato. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tomato. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

what's new in the patch?

I have been waiting for my new seeds to pop up and a few days ago, they did just that. I have been planting seeds in egg cartons, that way, there is really no transplant shock at all when they go into the garden. All I do is separate the carton into its 12 sections and the whole lot goes into the soil in the patch. By the time the cardboard has decomposed, the roots of the seedling are ready to go exploring.

As it is summer, I keep a ready supply of lettuce, spring onions and cucumber..... I am most proud of the spring onions as they are seeds I saved from the flower head of the previous crop..... yah!

cucumbers, lettuce and spring onion seedlings

Meanwhile, there are some other interesting things in my seedling nursery.....

seedling nursery
I have some micro basil, some slow bolt corriander and some mini tomato bushes, each with one single fruit on it...... how cute......

how cute..... wonder how big they will grow when I plant them in the patch?

Thursday, September 23, 2010

plotting and planning

The winter season is over. As soon as it stops raining, I have to remove all the spent growth and prepare for the next planting. There are a few broc and cabbages still to mature, but then it will be bye-bye cool crops hello warm crops.

My big decision this year - NO tomatoes. I can not win the battle against the birds and my neighbour excels at growing tomatoes.

I am going hard on the lettuce, carrots, capsicum and eggplant. These are my staples, along with parsley and garlic and chillies.

Will also soon be time to harvest my garlic... hope it turns out. There is a heap of it.

BTW, found the sneaky culprit who has attached  my purple podded peas.... king parrots, just as I suspected. Just as well they are so bloody beautiful!

Saturday, July 24, 2010

vigorous growth

The first season was particularly spectacular. With no clear idea of what we wanted to do long term, we simply planted what we liked to eat and what we thought looked nice. The result was a cottage garden mix of herbs, flowers and vegetables. Within weeks, the beds were bursting at their seems and we realised we would have to expand our site.


So in here we had: pineapple sage, comfrey, parsley, wormwood. Obvioulsy, all this went nuts living on a diet of solid chicken poop! The pineapple sage has gone and the wormwood too (although, I confess that I may have prematiurely removed it instead of pruning it hard), but the comfrey and parsely are still thriving. They seem to love being next to each other, so there they will stay.



Incredibly, I planted a pumpkin in the middle of all this. Obviously, I soon learned how much room a pumpkin needed. If you look closely, you may see that the tomatoes are looking a bit crazed... I am scratching my head in puzzlement. I am yet to master the art of growing tomatoes. Either it is the climate here, or I just don't have it in me to grow a consistent crop.