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. :-)

My New Garden Bed

My new garden bed is finally ready to planted into. Hooray!!!! Lot's of excitement here (as much from my 3 year old as anyone lol). It's just been an empty frame for about 6 months or so.

We have made this bed a no-dig bed using compost from a supplier in town. It cost us $75 for a cubic metre - basically a small size trailer full. With the price of vegies I'm hoping that it'll pay for itself eventually. Not that it matters. I'm committed to growing as many of our vegies as I can manage more for health reasons than anything else. Not to mention freshness and taste. :-)

And it's turning out to be a very therapeutic hobby for me too. Can't say as I'd ever imagined myself gardening for fun (in the past I've always found it a drag - just done enough so our house doesn't look derelict). Now that I'm home more, I think it's easier to enjoy a few minutes here and there in the garden. :-)







This is what the finished bed looks like. The squares are basically a foot squared in size, as suggested with square foot gardening. It's not exactly a traditional "square foot garden" though. They recommend keeping beds to a maximum of 4x4 squares. We already had the actual garden bed built and it ended up being 7x8 squares, so I've simply marked off a row in each direction through the middle to use for a path. I think the reason for keeping beds small is so that you don't step on the compost and compact it too much. So I'm hoping having a path through the middle, I can still achieve a similar thing. Unfortunately that will take up some of my garden though. But it's easier for now to work with what we've got.

I didn't really follow any formula in filling it. I did line the bottom with cardboard boxes a while ago and also dumped some old hay and grass clippings in there. Then we just filled it in with the compost. Might have been a cheaper way to do it but at least it's done and I can use it now. Fingers crossed my own compost will be ready when it comes time to replant.

In the Garden

DH comes home the other day and says to me "so what are we going to plant next in the way of fruit and vegies because they're saying they're all going up again". Apparently he heard something on the radio about there being a shortage of potatoes due to problems with water allocations at planting time.

I really hate predictions like this. About half the time the dire predictions of things going up in price or supplies running out don't even come to fruition. And the other half of the time they do but worrying about it in the meantime hasn't made a scrap of difference. Perhaps it's to give us time to hurry up and get our own gardens planted. Then again, if they already know there's a problem due to planting, maybe it's too late to plant something just to avoid the price increase.

Most of the time I think I'd rather not know and just deal with any problems that arise as they arise. I am working on growing stuff in the garden and finding it quite a challenge and a large learning curve. So in some ways I don't really need any more pressure trying to make this garden produce any quicker - especially when so far all I've managed to grow (despite numerous attempts) has been lettuces. LOL. Which reminds me, I took this photo a few weeks ago to show you my lettuces (just cos I can lol) but I've been too busy blogging about other things to post it.



So there you have it. Proof that I can actually grow *something* even if it's all I can grow so far. These lettuces are quite significant in a way though. Because I think had I not been successful in at least one thing, I would have given up by now.

Anyway, back to DH's dire predictions conversation. In this instance I think I might have used it to my advantage. You see, we have no problems with space in terms of acreage (you'd hope not living on a farm) but there is a problem with our soil. Around the house area it is very heavy clay soil and not so wonderful for growing things in. We tried to plant an orange tree I was given for my birthday last year but it really didn't like our soil. So we have a bit of work to do before too much planting can happen and a lot of it is stuff that I really need DH to do. So I told him if he wanted me to grow more, he needed to do blah, blah and blah. Fingers crossed this might actually spur him into action (in his defense he is a busy man and has been getting some great around the house type projects done in recent months - it just all takes time).

In the meantime, we'll keep eating lettuce. LOL. Which reminds me, I think it might be time to sow some more lettuce seeds. :-)

In the Garden

These past couple of months we have been making our first attempt at vegie gardening. Actually it's technically not our first attempt. We did try to grow some tomatoes and herbs at our last place with very limited success. This is however, our first attempt here and our first attempt at "serious" vegie gardening.

It took him a little while but in April DH finally built and filled in a small vegie patch area for me. He's built a frame for the second area but our soil here isn't real good and so we plan to buy in some compost to fill the second plot. We do have our own compost heap but I think it might take me a decade to make enough compost. LOL. With chooks the compost is only growing very slowly - especially at this time of year when growth of lawn and weeds has slowed down considerably. I have started to fill in the bottom of the plot though. Started with some cardboard boxes (recycling) and have shifted a pile of grass clippings and some partly decomposed hay that I found around the place (outside of our house yard). When it's done I actually want to try square foot gardening in that plot (rather than planting in rows).

I would love one day to be able to grow most of our own fruit and veg. That has to be a long term goal as we only have one struggling to survive orange tree at the moment. Babysteps, babysteps. No point in buying any more fruit trees until DH has the chance to dig up some of our clay and add gypsum or whatever he plans to do to give the soil better drainage. I also like the idea of using the chooks to help compost and fertilise sections of the garden. That will require some more building by DH though so I guess it'll be a while before we get that happening.

So far I have discovered that I can grow lettuce!!! Well, it's a start but we can't exist on lettuce alone. LOL. We've been using on the lettuce for about a month now and it's been lots of fun to actually eat something from the garden. I changed the menu plan tonight to have Tacos while we can still eat the lettuce from the garden. It was quite funny to have DH pop out in the middle of dinner to pick a bit more lettuce as we'd eaten all he picked before tea. Mmmm...freshly picked organic lettuce. Don't think we can get much healthier than that. It's so great the way you pick some leaves of lettuce and the plant just grows more. I've heard you can only do that a certain number of times before the leaves start to get bitter but so far so good. As soon as the frosts set in though I think that will be the end of the lettuces until the end of frost season. My lettuce seeds cost me a whole $1.10 to buy and so far we've saved ourselves buying at least 3 heads of lettuce at $3.50 each. So at least we're well ahead there.

Unfortunately lettuce is the only thing we've managed to successfully grow so far. There's no problem with getting the seeds to pop out of the ground. In fact, I've had a lot of satisfaction seeing those tiny seedlings emerge from the soil. I never imagined that gardening could provide such a buzz!!! But we are fighting a losing battle with BUGS - they keep eating my seedlings! :-( I have found some organic methods for deterring bugs (and shhh - did use a bit of poison stuff we had on hand - so much for my organic gardening) but with all the drizzly weather it's hard to keep up. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to keep fighting or give up for now. I know my grandmother (who was an avid gardener) used to say she couldn't be bothered with winter vegies because of the amount of bugs around.

Our peas started off well and they haven't been consumed by creepy crawly things. But they have developed some kind of disease that's affecting them from the ground up and so they are growing very slowly. Some of them are flowering so *maybe* we'll get a few peas yet. Whether we'll get enough to make it worth our while remains to be seen.

Well, I'm not giving up yet. We're new to this and we're still learning. Gotta expect a few hiccups along the way. I must admit it's been a lot more fun (despite our setbacks) than I ever thought it would be. :-)