What's Growing in My Garden?

Given I list gardening as one of the things you might find on this blog, I thought it was about time I did a post about my garden. I seem to have finally graduated from only being able to grow lettuce in the garden. LOL. Which is nice.


I HAVE to start with a photo of my very first strawberry. And yes, I did get to eat this one myself. In fact, I ate both of the first 2 that were ripe. LOL. Don't tell the rest of the family! I've lost count of the number of times I've attempted to grow strawberries without success. At our last house the soil wasn't great and we were still very much novice gardeners. I managed to get a few growing but nothing of much value. Last year I was determined to grow some but my chooks had other ideas and scratched them all up again!

Well, this year I seem to have finally had some success. These are growing in pots on the front verandah. Away from pecking chooks! I'm not sure how clear it will be in this photo but I counted 30 strawberries on 1 plant in this pot. This is my most successful plant and I bought it as a single, more mature plant. Those that I bought as smaller plants have struggled a lot more and while those that survived seem to be going better now, I think paying the extra for a more mature plant might be the way to go.

Here is the garden bed we set up at the beginning of August. It looks a bit different now to how it looked back then . It's not easy to tell from the photo but a number of the "empty" sections have seeds in them which have sprouted. Unfortunately I was a bit slack when I planted the seeds and didn't record what went where. So being a novice gardener we may have to wait until the "fruit" appears before we can tell which plants are where. LOL. Oh well, I don't mind a bit of a surprise. :-)

This is a view from the other angle. We have lettuces and silverbeet growing like crazy to the left and some beetroot plants to the right. Some of the beetroot is ready to be pulled and eaten. Fresh beetroot will be a new experience for the family. The yellow-ish colours you can see dotted around the plot are Marigolds I planted from seeds my Grandma collected. I'm hoping they'll work well as companion plants amongst the tomato plants I've planted.


Here are some seedlings I purchased yesterday. I decided to just "go nuts" and buy a heap of seedlings. I am having some success growing things from seed but I do find with a lot of plants, it's fighting an uphill battle with bugs to get them to a healthy seedling stage. Those I've started as seedlings have thrived a lot better in the garden. The store was kind enough to give me a seedling tray to hold my seedlings while I was choosing (and to take them home in too). I think that worked out in their favour because I ended up deciding I may as well fill it up so the seedlings would make the 2 hour trip home a little better.

I bought 3 punnets of sweetcorn. DH LOVES his fresh sweetcorn so crossing my fingers we can grow a bit for him to enjoy. Then 1 punnet each of celery, apple cucumber, jap pumpkin, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, strawberries and zucchini. Now I just have to grow at least $35 worth of food from that lot to recoup my investment. Most of these will be planted in my first garden plot where the peas, lettuces and broccoli are just finishing.

I honestly never expected that I would *ever* grow much of a garden, especially a vegie garden. It just didn't interest me at all. But now that my life has slowed down a little, I'm finding the time to potter in the garden and it is a wonderfully renewing experience. I'm afraid I may be well and truly addicted to growing our food now. LOL. It's so exciting watching things grow and then being able to EAT them. The rest of the family seems to be enjoying the process as well. :-)