Gardening jobs – Weekend 22nd and 23rd August

ranunculus photos 1 — Ranunculus in full flower

Spring has sprung well and truly, and the weekends are finally fine enough to be out in the garden at least one day (preferably both) of the weekend.

I love everything about Spring. I love that the vegetables I planted in Winter have finally come to fruition, and I can pick enough fresh, homegrown vegetables to feed my family for almost every meal. This week I am picking: green sprouting broccoli, Green Romanesco and Purple Romanesco broccoli (see below), carrots, snow peas, Chioggia and Golden beetroot, onions, coriander, silverbeet, and Purple Podded Peas.

The Romanesco Broccoli is my favourite vegetable I have grown this year. To say I have been waiting for it patiently would be a lie: I have grown these babies from seed as I have not been able to find seedlings, so it has been months from start to table. These are extremely slow growing but totally worth it. They hold their colour when cooking in any way (we have roasted, lightly boiled, and steamed), and they are delicious. The best way of cooking so far was roasting with olive oil, diced golden and red beetroot, onions and garlic to make a warm salad. Very delicious.

Another aspect of Spring that I love is the flowers. At the moment the ranunculus are in full flower and they are spectacular.

ranunculus double — I love this – it looks like a ladies crinoline dress

I grow a mix of Spring flowering bulbs, including: crocuses, daffodils, Sparaxis (violet and mixed), and ranunculus, and Spring flowering annuals including my favourite Sweet Peas, pansies and violas, calendula, and nigella (Love-In-A-Mist). All have just hit their stride and the garden is looking (and smelling) gorgeous. I also grow perennial flowering plants like lavender, violets, daisies and herbs. Bees are having a field day right now.

This weekend was weeding, feeding, and planting time. I spent a couple of happy hours propagating and planting new plants for the Summer vegetable patch.

seeds This year I am trialling a few different types of tomatoes and a few different ways of growing them. Last year, I tried tomatoes from seed but started the seeds too late in the season, so they weren’t too successful. This year I have purchased a little greenhouse and I am testing whether jiffy pellets or seed raising mix leads to better results when starting seeds. I also bought punnets of some tomato plants and I am planting them out into small pots to let them grow larger before I plant them into the ground. I am hoping that giving them a little boost first will lead to stronger plants.

From seed, I am growing San Marzano, Pineapple Tomato and Moneymaker Tomatoes. These are all heirloom varieties. From seedling I am growing an F1 hybrid called Truss, recommended by my neighbour, and an heirloom variety called Rouge de Marmande. In my garden five varieties should be enough, but I do not yet have a cherry tomato in the mix so I will buy a couple of cherry tomato plants to grow in pots.

I also planted out some more strawberries, and some heirloom cucumber seedlings called ‘Sweet and Stripey.’ I am historically terrible at growing cucumbers, but I planted these on top of a trial compost trench and built a decent trellis for them so I am hoping that I have some success this year. I can grow zucchinis like a boss so why do cucumbers elude me? I should ask my Mother, who is the Queen of the Cucumbers (official title).

Finally after I did the fun propagating first, I had to do the less fun job of extensive weeding. Ragged Robin, a pretty pink-flowered weed, had taken up residence in the front yard, so I removed all of it, along with the kikuyu grass that continues to invade from next door. My Mother loves Ragged Robin and actually took some home with her last time she came to visit, but I wanted it out of there, along with some creeping weed that was having a lovely time sneaking around the Pomegranate tree and down to the Passionfruit vine. Begone!

I managed to weed only about one third of the front yard, and occasionally as I stood to stretch my back I considered the wisdom of doing this the hard way (by hand). But then I stood looking at my apricot tree and watched a lacewing and a shillion* bees hover over the blossoms and I realised that this is a beneficial bug friendly place because we do things the hard way. I can do the rest of the weeding next weekend.

Besides, my husband was doing it much harder, on his hands and knees with a Ho-Mi, weeding in between the pavers. Misery loves company, they say.

*A shillion is the largest number in the world. Invented by my daughter at the age of four.

Gardening jobs – Weekend 25th & 26th August 2018

Each week for the past eight weeks, I have checked the weather report anxiously on a Thursday, checking to see how it will be on the weekend. Each week, it has been the same: some version of raining, stormy, windy, and cold.

Not that I am complaining: parts of Australia are in severe drought, and farmers are suffering. When it rains here, I feel thankful that we have it, and hope that some of it is heading the way of the farmers and animals that need it.

However, it has meant that each weekend – the only days that that I have a chance to garden – has been scuppered by truly terrible gardening weather (good for the garden, bad for the humans that want to be outside gardening). I love gardening, but even I have my limits. I am not going to freeze my parts off to dig around in the mud and rain. I am just too old to cope with that level of rain soaking into my bones.

Last week though, the weather report was a cracker. Two perfect days: 18 degrees, sunny, cloudless. I planned to spend one day in the garden and the next painting ceilings in my daughter’s bedroom.

Sod that for a joke – there was no way I was going to waste the first fine weekend in two months indoors painting a ceiling! Instead, we spent both days in the garden, and it was a joyous experience. Our main task was eight weeks’ worth of weeding, which sounds terrible, but was actually very fun (I have been told I have a weird idea of fun, but whatever). When the soil is damp, weeding doesn’t have to be painful. It also gave us the opportunity to look closely at the garden to see what had changed lately. Answer: a lot.

I have been waiting for the crocuses we planted last year to return. I admit, I have been impatient to see them again, as these rate along with sweet peas and violets as my favourite flowers. As I had not seen even the leaves come up at all this year, I thought they were not coming back. But suddenly, here they had arrived! Most importantly, my very favourites, the Pickwick Crocus, a purple and white stunner with a bright orange stamen, had arrived in its glory. Crocuses do not make good cut flowers and you cannot buy them in florists. They have a brief lifespan of only a couple of days, so to see them you really need to grow them. I was so excited to see they had arrived again. Now that I have seen their return, I look forward to many years of lovely crocuses. I also have white and yellow crocuses. The white crocuses also came back, but no sign yet of the yellow.

Closeup of Erlicheer Daffodils

This year I planted a Daffodil called Erlicheer, which is really more of a Jonquil type Daffodil. It is a really lovely mini-Daffodil with a clutch of cream flowers on the end of a long stem. I planted ten bulbs, and I am looking forward to an annual display. I won’t cut these to bring inside, partly because I love them in the garden, and partly because Jonquils have a strong scent that make my husband and daughter sneeze.

White daffodils planted in a rockery with other flowers and herbs in the foreground — Erlicheer Daffodils in the rockery

Also in full flower were the many types of lavender across the garden, single and double Violets, Calendula, Harlequin flowers (Sparaxis), and Star flowers. The Ranunculus, Anenomes, and sweet peas I planted in Autumn are getting ready for their spring display, and the Nigella (Love-In-A-Mist) that has self-seeded from last Summer is looking like it will be lovely. The only disappointment so far is the Drumsticks (Allium), a striking bulb that I planted in Autumn, and that I cannot find has grown at all.

After weeding, we cut back the oregano and mint that was looking a bit ratty. Since we first planted a prostrate style oregano when we moved here three years ago, it has spread rapidly. We do use it for cooking, but it grows faster than we can ever eat it, dry it, or give it away. We also have a lawn that we hate – I call it a ‘lawn’ but really it is more a flat green collection of weeds. Whatever lawn variety is there was taken over by clover and other weeds a long time ago. My husband has tried various methods to weed it, feed it, mow it, and keep it going, but I think at this point we are ready to give it up as a bad job and try again. But today we had the bright idea to dig up clumps of the oregano and transplant it into the lawn. I am hoping that it will take over there and grow into a prolific herbal lawn that we can mow just as we mow the weed-lawn now.

We also decided we needed another tree in our front yard. We already have a Mulberry Tree (black English, the best kind), an apricot (Trevatt), a sad baby lemon tree that is struggling mightily, a pomegranate, and a bay (laurel) tree. We also have a large and rambling Nelly Kelly passionfruit climbing over an archway. However, I wanted something else to add more structure. My mother gave me a lemon myrtle that has remained happy in its pot, but it is a full sized tree that really should be given the room it deserves to grow. We decided to plant it in the lawn. If we don’t succeed with the oregano lawn, at least we will have a beautiful tree to distract us from the weed-lawn. Lemon myrtles are also native trees and attract bees.

Lemon Myrtle Tree planted in the lawn — Lemon Myrtle Tree

So far our little lemon myrtle seems very happy. In the background of this picture, you can see hollows in the lawn where I have planted clumps of the oregano.

My daughter came home while we were in the middle of our weeding and tidying up. She spent a little while trying all our sensory plants. We have planted a range of herbs and plants that she can visit when she wants to feel or smell or taste something lovely. We have Lamb’s Ear to touch, violets and climbing roses to smell, and fun herbs that trick the senses, like Passionfruit Daisy and Pineapple Sage (pictured below). It makes the garden a welcoming and relaxing place for her.

The next day was focused on the backyard, where our winter veggies were keeping company with a lot of nettles and mallow weeds. While my husband was on weed duty, I turned the compost and tried my hand at trench composting.

Trench composting is very simple. Dig a trench, and fill it with organic matter. I used a mixture of weeds and some of the organic material from my compost bin that still needed to break down further. Then cover with soil. I am trialling this in different spots in the garden, and then I will plant my summer vegetables there. I am going to test whether my vegetables do better in the trench composted areas, compared to my usual method of cow manure, mushroom compost and homemade compost.

Next fine weekend, it is time to start tomato seeds for planting out in October. Next weekend is predicted to rain however, so I guess I can’t put off the painting any longer.

Gardening jobs – Weekend 20 May 2018

The weather turned! And just like that, the rain set in, and with it, my ability to get outside in the garden much for a couple of weeks. I’m not complaining though – it has been lovely to have some rain on the roof and in the garden.

With the rain also came: weeds! So many weeds! So this weekend I really spend my Sunday morning out among the damp soil, hoeing weeds in my vegie patch.

Weeding is one of those gardening tasks that many people dislike, but I find it therapeutic. I think of it as an exercise in mindfulness. For my lovely plants to flourish, the weeds must be removed regularly, and we only hand weed at our place as we garden organically. I plod along, pulling out the weeds, and listening to a podcast and occasionally standing to stretch my back (boy, have I learned that lesson! A week in bed and months of physiotherapy are expensive and not worth repeating). As the weed pile in my rusty old wheelbarrow grows higher, the rows of happy plants grow neater, and I feel a sense of satisfaction that Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey called “the quiet mind.”

My friend, the things that do attain

The happy life be these, I find:

The riches left, not got with pain,

The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;

Of course it would have been better for Henry Howard if he had taken his own advice, but alas, too often we don’t.

After weeding about half the garden (the rest to be left for the upcoming weekend), I had the sad/happy task of removing the tomato and pumpkin vines, and picking the last of our very happy tomato and pumpkin crop. Look at the pile! I have more pumpkin vines than I can fit in our green bin, and more than I can cram in my compost. I think I will be discarding pumpkin vines slowly in the green bin for at least a few months.

pumpkin vines

The pumpkins were a wonderful success this year. We grew three varieties, with the Butternuts ‘volunteering’ from our compost, and the Kent grown from saved seed. I estimate over 40 kilograms of pumpkins harvested, with some now in our freezer and a couple left in storage in our pantry cellar. I gave a lovely Butternut to my sister, made some more pumpkin soup, as is the law, and cooked the smallest Butternut drizzled with maple syrup and olive oil with a roast chicken the other night. Yum!

Finally, I sowed more broad beans (I have warned my husband that this Spring will bring a plethora of broad beans!) and planted out some broccoli seedlings I have been raising. I am hoping against hope that they will survive slugs, snails and white cabbage moth caterpillars. I have more to plant out this weekend. I also thinned the beetroot and carrot seedlings. I hate thinning, but it is a necessary evil to sacrifice all those baby plants so the others can grow nice and strong.

I’m hoping for some lovely weather this Sunday so I can finish my weeding and plant out the rest of my seedlings, and then – bring forth the rain!

Weekend Jobs – Sunday March 18 2018

This was a “low effort” weekend in the garden. I prepared a whole heap of zucchini and pumpkin for the freezer and for our bellies. I swear I have never eaten so much zucchini in my life as we have this Summer. I feel very fortunate, and also a little tired of zucchini. As it is my favourite vegetable, I didn’t think it was possible to tire of it!

I made a pumpkin and chicken lasagne with fresh basil (it also had grated zucchini in it) and a lemon and zucchini cake. I grated zucchini and chopped pumpkin chunks for the freezer. We still have about five zucchini in the fridge, and more pumpkin in the garden, along with capsicum and eggplant. My husband is on curry duty this week to use up the rest of these zucchini!

I find that homegrown capsicum tend to be less fleshy and juicy than the supermarket variety, probably because I use less water. It has a grassier, fresher flavour that makes up for it. Mine also do not grow to the enormous size of the supermarket capsicums; they tend to grow to the size of a fist.

This year I grew a punnet of mixed capsicums from Bunnings, and an heirloom mini variety from seeds I saved last year. The mini capsicum are a little bit pointless (they are tiny, about the size of a fifty-cent piece, and pretty seedy), but they are cute and prolific. I am not sure if I will go to the effort of growing them again. The mixed capsicums have no name. They grow green and a dark purple, and are very glossy and beautiful. I will try saving the seeds from the purple variety and see if it grows true-to-type next year.

On Sunday I went for a stroll in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens with my friend Lisa, and we accidentally-on-purpose ended up at the Diggers Club Shop. Our stroll lasted about as long as it took to buy a latte and make it to the Diggers Shop, where we spent about an hour buying bulbs and seeds for Autumn. Whoah baby, did we have fun and spend a wad of cash on bulbs, seeds, and garlic.

I’m looking forward to Easter weekend, when I will plant these beauties. Although I mostly grow productive plants, I also love ornamentals. I especially love to grow bulbs. Poring over the annual bulb catalogues is an obsession of mine, and I love to grow unusual flowers rather than the standards. I do usually grow the classic ranunculus each year, but I also like to try something different. This year I bought Violet Sparaxis, and Allium “Drumstick”, a striking pink and green ball-headed flower that stands 90 cm tall. I am also hoping that the crocuses I planted last year (the beautiful Mr. Pickwick, among them) return for another showing.

I have planted garlic annually for the past two years, and am trying again this year. Last year’s crop was moderately successful and very delicious, but the heads were a little small. I am going to try planting three different varieties (Dynamite Purple, Cream, and Melbourne Market), and I will plant in a different place with better soil. I have prepared a spot in my backyard that previously grew climbing beans. To prepare the soil for garlic planting, I have turned it well and added Blood and Bone, a high nitrogen organic fertiliser. The combination of soil that has grown a nitrogen fixing crop like beans, plus the Blood and Bone, should provide a good start for a nitrogen-loving crop like garlic. I hope that the bulbs prefer it and we will produce larger heads this time. Garlic is a slow-growing crop, so I will need to accept that this patch of the garden will not be available until late Spring.

The rest of the items from the Diggers Shop were a collection of seeds for the Autumn/Winter garden: snow peas, pak choy, tatsoi, spring onions, coriander, sweet peas (a beautiful variety called America), Romanesco broccoli (for fun), and golden beetroot. I already have Macerata cauliflower, a sprouting green broccoli, and kale started in my seedling box. Looking forward to a lot of healthy fresh greens and brassicas over the Winter months!

Weekend Jobs – Monday 12 March 2018

It was a long weekend here in South Australia, which means an extra day for – you guessed it – gardening!

I did a few little jobs on Sunday: feeding my fruit trees with an organic fruit and citrus blend, and then watering them heavily, and picking the last of our zucchini, and some eggplant ready for brinjal pickle. We have had a very dry Summer, and the trees required some extra food and water to get them through until the rain comes (and who knows when that will be?).

I picked just over a kilogram of eggplants. We have at least another five or six coming on, thanks to a late flush of Summer heat. We are growing a standard Black Beauty eggplant this year. I have tried growing an heirloom variety from Diggers called Listada di Gandia, but as with the San Marzano tomatoes, I planted the seed too late and only one of the plants is doing well. If I end up with one or two fruit from this one plant, I will be very happy. It’s a shame; I was looking forward to the beautiful purple and white striped fruit.

That being said, the Black Beauty has been prolific, with no pest problems. Seed catalogues and plant guides say to expect 4-6 fruit per plant, but our best plant has produced at least double this. We have four healthy plants and have eaten the fruit curried, in pasta, barbecued on skewers with haloumi, and as a layered ‘lasagne’ style with ricotta and yoghurt sauce. This time we have decided to make brinjal pickle, our favourite Indian condiment.

Brinjal is just the name that eggplant or aubergine is known by in South East Asia. The pickle is of Goan origin.

Having never made it before, I just found a recipe online that looked simple enough. My husband and I started it on Sunday, by chopping and salting the eggplant, and leaving to drain overnight. Then this morning after breakfast, we got to work. I recommend the recipe linked above, as it smelled amazing and was so easy that even our daughter helped out.

Then it was out to the backyard to remove the spent zucchini plants, dismantle the bean tripods, stripping off the dried bean pods to save for next year, and pick the last of the fresh beans for dinner. I also tied up the tomatoes again. The San Marzano I planted late seem unlikely to produce the huge harvest I was wishing for, but they will yield some fruit and we may end up with tomatoes for fresh pasta sauce for a few meals at least.

Once we removed the spent zucchini vines (discovering one last, giant zucchini under a leaf!), we assessed our pumpkin situation. We are growing Butternuts (I say “growing”, but that implies both effort and intent – these self-seeded and we have let them go their own way), Kent (in Australia also known as ‘Jap’), and Lakota. The Lakota is struggling, and I would probably not grow it again. The winner by far has been the Kent.

I saved the seeds from a Kent pumpkin I bought at the supermarket last year. Normally I roast pumpkin seeds (my family love them as a snack when roasted with olive oil and salt), but I managed to snaffle some away for the garden. I was not sure if they would grow, but they turned out to be very successful. When we pick this pumpkin this afternoon, I will make sure to save some of the seeds for next year. The huge vine is still producing baby pumpkins, and I expect to leave the plant in the ground for another six weeks at least.

We took a break and had a chat with our neighbour over the fence. He is a very keen gardener, and gave me the Giant Russian Sunflower seeds that were so successful this Summer. He did not have a lot of luck with his sunflowers this year, so we gave him a head of seeds from our collection drying on the shed roof. He has pigeons, chickens, and parrots, so was pretty happy to receive it. He also discovered a giant zucchini in his patch, so we had a good laugh comparing our finds. We will save the seed and swap. He is always experimenting with different gardening methods and soil mixes, and we spent a pleasant half an hour discussing soil, plans for garlic crops, and our successful plantings for the Summer. Best of all, he promised me a bag of pigeon poo from his aviary (pigeon poo is the king of compost activators). One of my favourite things about gardening is that it creates great relationships between gardeners.

The rest of the afternoon will be spent weeding, tidying up, and feeding the tomatoes, capsicum, and eggplant with a liquid blend of organic fish emulsion fertiliser, epsom salts, and seaweed tonic.

Seaweed tonic and Charlie Carp – turning the pests in the Murray River into something useful. Not shown: epsom salts

An occasional feeding of epsom salts is good for tomatoes. The high magnesium helps to ‘sweeten’ tomatoes in the fruiting stage. It also helps to prevent blossom end rot.

A perfect, sunshiny day of gardening finished with a delicious meal of five-spice roasted pork served with stir-fried beans and maple-roasted pumpkin from the garden. Doesn’t get much better than that, really.

Weekend Jobs – Saturday 3rd March 2018

Happy rhubarb in front of our mulberry tree

This Summer has been one of the driest and hottest on record. The Talkback Gardening advice show on ABC local radio this weekend recommended that gardeners give their trees a good soaking, with a follow up feed and soak next weekend to compensate for the below average rainfall. Much of our day was spent moving hoses and sprinklers around both yards, watering our fruit trees. Next weekend we will give them a feed and another soaking.

We have a good range of young fruit trees:

Apricot (variety: Trevatt);
Black Mulberry;
Passionfruit (a fruiting vine, variety: Grafted Nellie Kelly);
Lemons (varieties: Eureka and Lisbon);
Lime (variety: Tahitian);
Apple (varieties: Early Macintosh and Cox’s Orange Pippin);
Pomegranate (variety: Azerbaijan);
Pineapple guava, also known as Feijoas;
Boysenberries.

All of these are new plantings after we removed the trees that were originally here. We have had our first crop of apricots and passionfruit this year, but have not yet had any crops from the other plantings as they are too small. We are looking forward to healthy crops, but only if we can keep them alive through long, hot Aussie Summers.

Unfortunately, some of our plants have suffered the effects of the heat (we think). A couple of our previously healthy rhubarb plants have died suddenly.

Compare this to the healthy, happy rhubarb plants at the top of this post! I am very much hoping that this is a heat and watering issue for just these two plants, and not a disease or a pest. If it is, I do not want it to spread to my other rhubarb plants. We have about seven rhubarb plants. It is one of my favourite things to grow. I love its beautiful red stems, green foliage, and the interesting decorative structure it brings to a garden. I also love the flavour.

The other task on our list today was to remove the heads of the Giant Russian Sunflowers we grew for the first time this year. My neighbour gave me some seed from his crop last year, and I wanted to give them a try for fun. Little did I know how truly these plants would live up to their name.

The smallest of the flowers grew to over a metre tall, but the tallest were well over two metres tall. They towered over our garden, and when in bloom were truly spectacular. They also attracted many happy bees to our backyard, which doesn’t have the same range of flowering plants as our frontyard. Once in the backyard, the bees were also happy to pollinate our pumpkins and zucchini.

After they finish flowering, the heads form seeds, and the weight of the hundreds of seeds in each flower cause the heads to droop. A plant that formerly looked so cheery begins to look downright mopey. By the time we reached this weekend, the heads were so heavy, the stalks were beginning to slant to the ground. My husband used our fishing knife to remove the heavy seed heads, much to the sadness of our eldest daughter, who loved the “Sunflower Paradise” as she called it.

We are now drying the heads on top of our work shed.

Each seed head weighs over a kilogram. My neighbour said that the heaviest seed head he harvested last year produced 1.8 kilograms of sunflower seeds. As he has chickens and pigeons, he was very happy with that harvest.

We plan to save some seeds to plant next year, and some to eat. My husband loves eating sunflower seeds, and although these are kind of a pain to dehusk, he doesn’t mind doing it. I will also give some to my mum for her chickens; a trade for the chicken manure she gives me for my compost bin.

Weekend Jobs – Sunday 25 February 2018

This morning I decided to tackle some garden jobs that I had been putting off: making some compost, weeding, and moving a raised garden bed that I wanted in a different spot.

The raised garden bed took a little while. We have three of them: those galvanised Stratco jobs, filled with a mix of compost, mushroom compost, mulch and potting mix. I’ll move all of them eventually, but two of them still have some plants in them right now so I will wait a few more weeks to shift them. This one only had a couple of beetroot in them, so I picked them and got cracking.

Before I could shift it I needed to dig all of the compost out and move it around the back. Unfortunately our wheelbarrow is on its last legs so it took a bit longer than it should have. Note to self: invest in a new wheelbarrow.

It took about an hour and a half all up, and once I shifted it, I transplanted a very sad little lemon tree from the backyard to the spot where the raised bed had been. I think it will be much happier there, and the raised bed is much more useful around the back where the rest of our veggies are happily growing. I am planning on using the raised beds to grow our winter greens and lettuces.

The front yard is home to our fruit trees (an apricot, mulberry, and pomegranate tree, and a prolific passionfruit vine), flowers, and many healthy herb bushes. When we moved here three years ago, it had been much neglected and overplanted with an enormous date palm and a gum tree, and a bizarre mix of vines, roses, and ferns. Even worse, the owners had made the mistake of trying to combat weeds by laying black plastic under the soil and then laying dirt and gravel on top. This does not combat any weeds (most weeds are pretty shallow rooted and just grow on top of this so-called ‘weed mat’), and it makes it difficult to grow anything useful. It has taken us a long time to dig through the stupid plastic, remove the vines, ferns, and trees, and replenish the soil and replant with fruit trees, herbs, and flowers that attract beneficial insects.

Initially to combat the black plastic problem, and because the backyard was equally weirdly planted with three enormous conifers, we installed the raised beds to start growing some vegetables. Now that we have replanted the front yard, made the soil healthy, and have slowly removed the black plastic, we can move the raised beds to the backyard – where we have also removed the giant conifers.

Anyway, once I moved the raised bed and planted out some cauliflower seedlings (Cauliflower Macerata) I had been raising, I made some compost. Or rather, I added to my compost.

Making compost

Making compost is an ongoing process. It is something I am pretty passionate about. I have been known to gasp in shock if my kids throw a banana skin in the bin instead of the compost bucket.

“What do you think you are doing?” I cry, waggling my finger at them. “That banana skin is nature’s protein shake.”

To which they walk off, grumbling about their slightly insane mother, while said slightly insane mother rummages in the bin to rescue the banana skin and transfer it to the correct bin.

Our compost bucket lives under our sink, and was purchased from IKEA for the princely sum of $8. The lid seals well and I don’t think it smells, but that is probably because I am used to it…

The contents of the bucket comprise anything that was once a vegetable or fruit (peelings, cores, etc), paper, tea leaves or teabags, coffee grounds, or washed eggshells. I don’t put meat or fat in there.

I tip it in the black plastic compost bin that I bought from Bunnings for $40. Along with the garden fork I bought from The Diggers Club, it is probably the best money I have spent in the garden (the worst was the in-ground worm farm, may they rest in peace). I have tried several different composters, and this one seems to work really well. Forty bucks, people.

You can see below the kind of things that we toss in there: coffee grounds, some carrot peels, some old watermelon, a bean.

Yeah I know, it’s gross. My sister says I should take up knitting.

You can also add other things from the garden: weeds, garden waste, trimmings, etc. Try not to put big chunks in there as it will take a long time to break down in a home composter like this.

Try to include a good mix of wet and dryer ingredients – by “wet” I mean household fresh waste, and by “dry” I mean paper or straw. Some people like to think of these as “greens” and “browns.”

All of these things are important, but they are not as important as the magic ingredient.

What is the magic ingredient, I hear you ask?

Poo.

Poo is the magic ingredient.

Or as we gardeners prefer to call it, manure. It’s a nicer way of saying poo.

Every few months my beloved Mother gives me a bag of poo from her chooks. It is combined with straw as that is what her chooks are bedded in. This gift is fantastic and frankly, I would be happy if instead of a birthday gift, she just gave me a monthly subscription to “Mum’s Poo Service.”* This is because a bag of chook poo is the magic ingredient that turns my compost bin from a slowly rotting pile of carrot peelings to a hot bed of quick activating fertiliser.

Manure activates the compost pile and helps it rot down and turn from rotting organic matter into compost. Compost is critical for gardens. It creates healthy soil, feeds the beneficial bacteria and fungi in the soil, and creates a home for the earthworms and other friendly little critters that live in the soil. Without a healthy soil, you can’t have healthy plants. You can’t have healthy humans.

Put the poo in the composter – happy days

At least every few months, the composter needs a dose of ~~poo~~ manure. My neighbour raises pigeons, and sometimes he is kind enough to pass a bag of pigeon manure over the fence. Otherwise, a bag of my Mum’s chook manure will do the trick. I could buy a bag of sheep manure from the nursery, but it is not as good as bird manure, in my opinion. Bird manure is high in nitrogen, so it activates the compost very well.

I also know that my Mum’s birds are healthy and fed very well on fresh food, so there is no nasties in the manure from there.

Composting is an ongoing process, because as the manure, straw and compost bucket contents break down, I keep adding to it. Every eight weeks or so, I upend the bin and dig it out, taking some compost from the bottom to wherever in the garden needs it. Then I dig the rest back into the bin, and keep going. This is the cycle of composting: food that comes from my garden (the zucchini trimmings, carrot tops, pumpkin guts) go into the composter and come back out again to feed the garden once more. It’s a pootiful thing.

*Not joking.

Weekend Jobs – Saturday February 24 2018

This weekend was lovely and cool after a few weekdays of bright heat and sunshine. There was a tropical cyclone in Western Australia that caused heat and humidity here (but not a lot of rain, unfortunately), and the garden responded with a sudden burst of late Summer productivity. This meant that my Saturday morning job was to pick some veggies, including some unexpected Purple King beans, eight enormous zucchini, and some green capsicums. We have about six eggplants on the way and a plethora of flowers indicating another lovely crop coming, but I decided to leave the eggplant for another week.

Patience, my pet. Another week and you will be ready to go.

My fervent hope for the eggplants is to have enough to make Brinjal Pickle, the king of Goan condiments. So far we have picked eggplants consistently, but not enough to make a pickle – hopefully by next week there will be enough to make my spicy pickle wishes come true. My rule with pickles and jams is that I only make them if I grow the main ingredient myself. This is partly because I am a tightwad (why would I go to all that effort if I have to buy the ingredients?) and partly because I want the bragging rights (homemade! homegrown! all bow before the pickling queen!!!) If I cannot pull together enough eggplants, I will have to wait for next year.

Garden bounty — Purple King Beans, Lebanese Zucchini, Green Capsicum.

Purple King beans are a fun bean to grow. This is an old heirloom climbing variety that grows a pretty purple-green vine. I have grown dwarf beans in the past, but to be honest I do not have a lot of luck with them. I have found the yield to be low compared to the climbing variety.

This year my kids helped me to build some teepees from bamboo stakes, and we planted about twenty seeds. Don’t bother to plant the bean seedlings you sometimes see at nurseries – these are a straight ripoff. Beans should always be sown direct where you want them to grow from seed, and are great value. I bought my pack of seeds from The Reject Shop for less than two bucks. Most bean seeds that you buy are heirloom varieties, but you can check the packet. If the seed packet says ‘F1,’ that means it is a hybrid and you cannot save the seed for next year.

Of course, you can make sure your seeds are heirloom by buying them from a more reputable company than The Reject Shop! If I want a very rare variety, I go to The Diggers Club, but for the traditional old bean varieties like Purple King, Borlotti, or Scarlett Runner, you can get them easily from Bunnings or the discount shops with no problems and for a low price.

The Purple King is fun to grow because the beans grow purple as you can see in the photo above, but when they cook they turn green. It’s entertaining for kids to watch them cook and magically change colour.

Flavour-wise, they taste the same as regular green beans. Try not to let them grow too big – I let these grow a little too large for my taste, because I was busy this week and I actually did not realise there were so many there. It is late in the season and I was not expecting such a large second crop. Beans love hot weather and will only set fruit after they have a few days over thirty degrees centigrade, which is why we have had a second crop. I am a big fan of green beans, so I was happy to have a big crop. I blanched some for the freezer for later in the year, and I also gave some away. All up from our two “bean teepees”, we have picked about five kilograms of beans, which is not too bad for plants that are really “set and forget.”

These plants have required minimal care, aside from regular watering. We have a dripper hose set up around them and that is it. Beans do not need fertiliser, and although they can sometimes be susceptible to whitefly, we have not had that problem here. If we did, we would have used yellow sticky flypaper to deal with it.

The rest of my afternoon was spent grating zucchini for Zucchini and Haloumi burgers (dinner), making my patented zucchini chips (baton zucchini and crumb, then bake – serve with mayo and green chilli sauce), and Zucchini Chocolate bread. Tonight it’s Zucchini and Bean stirfry with honey soy chicken. We have never grown a zucchini plant like this one. Along with the pumpkins it has taken over the backyard. I thought about pulling it out the other day, but it keeps putting on new growth and adding new flowers. Until it stops doing that, I will leave it there and we will keep eating zucchini.

By the end of the Summer we will have eaten so much green food we will all be looking like The Hulk.

Part-time Gardening

How much time do you think it takes to grow enough vegetables to keep a family of four (two adults, two hungry teenagers) fed?

Like most working families, we live a very busy life.

We both work full-time, five days a week. When I have a deadline, I work late nights and weekends as well. We have office jobs requiring long commutes – I commute over an hour each way, each day. One of our kids has a disability, and we usually have at least one appointment to attend each week. We are paying off a mortgage, and trying to save for retirement. On weekends we try to make time for our family, friends, our kids, and each other. We also try to keep the house clean, the clothes washed, and the lunchboxes full.

With all of this going on, we still manage to grow a garden that is productive enough to produce almost all the vegetables, herbs, and some of the fruit our family of four needs – just by gardening on weekends.

Productive organic gardening is a commitment, no question. We make our own compost, and propagate many of our plants from cuttings and seed. We use no pesticides or herbicides, and our main form of fertiliser is our homemade compost, seaweed tonic, and an an organic fish-based liquid fertiliser.

I might choose to spend a Sunday morning turning compost instead of, say, going to yoga. Yoga classes are a thing, right? People do that. But I don’t spend as long as you would think keeping the garden going, for the reward that we get in the form of fresh, organic, homegrown vegetables and fruit.

This blog chronicles how we manage to grow a productive vegetable garden on less than two days of work a week, in an Aussie backyard, while working full-time.

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