Gardening Kris!

My housemate and I are in the process of getting a new vegie patch up and running.

I don’t know why, but the urge to renew my vegie gardening efforts always strikes in Autumn. You would think it would strike in Spring, right? But no. There’s something about Autumn that makes me want to spend my free time pottering about in the backyard.

S, the long-suffering housemate, had been through this with me last year. Last Autumn. We have a big grassy rectangle in the backyard, and we know that at some point in the past, it was a well-tended garden. The soil is rich and moist and full of worms, and the grass grows twice as fast there as any other spot in the yard. We decided that splitting it into six plots would be ideal, and I decided to build boxes, to hold rasied-bed gardens.

This didn’t go quite so well. I built one and a half boxes, but they were a lot of work. Only one box ended up in the garden, and we grew cauliflower and Broccoli in it, but I didn’t put so much effort in, and once I’d harvested from each plant, I left them there. They went to seed and were overrun by aphids.

This year: new approach. The soil in this part of the yard is great, remember? So why bother with raised beds? All we need is to kill the grass.

We’ve gone with the suffocation method of killing the grass. Layers of wet newspaper have been covered with old mown grass. Between the plots we’ve placed old fence-palings (some from the boxes I made last year) because we have them handy. Later on, when the grass under those plants is fairly subdued, we’ll remove them and plant a nice ground cover like Chamomile Flowering Lawn or similar.

Oh, and before we put down the newspaper & mulch, we laid down a weeper hose, winding it’s way through each plot. Actually it’s two weeper hoses, one for each row of plots.

 

Since we have six decent-sized plots -and between the two of us, the work in setting them up was acheivable in a few weekends -we’ve got quite a variety of vegetables either already in or soon to be planted.

Plot 1 – Top Left

This is the allium (and beetroot) bed. Since most of the allium family don’t need a lot of space -just enough to grow their bulbs, really -we can fit a good variety of plants just into this plot.

At the back there will be Leeks, which are currently germinating in a seed tray. In front of that are Spring Onions on the left and Garlic on the right. The next row forward is onions -White Onions on the left and Brown Onions on the right. The front row is Beetroot, mostly a colourful variety on the left, with a small part on the right reserved for a more plain variety which, like the leek, are currently germinating in a seed tray.

Plot 2 – Bottom Left

This bed will be primarily Rainbow Silverbeet (also known as Rainbow Chard), with two rows at the bottom for carrots. We have Roly-Poly Carrot seedlings waiting to be planted, and will also grow a colourful variety called ‘Harlequin’ from seed.

Plot 3 – Top Centre

This is the legumes bed. At the back will be peas (currently germinating in the seed tray) and at the front, two broad bean plants that S brought back from a propagation workshop.

Plot 4 – Bottom Centre

Spinach! Which is currently germinating in the seed tray. Plus -since we’re going to be drowning in leafy green goodness from silverbeet AND spinach -two rows at the front will be reserved for more carrots. We have plenty of hierloom carrot seeds, so we’ll stagger the plantings for a longer harvest.

Plot 5 and 6 – Top and Bottom Right

The two right-hand beds are for brassicas, with three rows in each plot. The back two rows have cabbages, the middle two rows (one in each plot) are for broccoli, and the front two rows are for cauliflower. S brought back a punnet of broccoli seedlings from her propagation workshop, and the cauliflower are currently germinating in the seed tray.

The oft-mentioned seed tray:

S also has a taste for herbs, so she’s taken over the little garden at the front of the house, and a little bit of earth near the back door, and a variety of pots.

Oh, and we have strawberries and rhubarb growing in pots too. The strawberry plant is one I’ve had for years and I had a strawberry off it just this morning. Amazingly delicious. Also, we have a blueberry plant. And a pineapple sage. S and I both had pineapple sage plants when we were growing up, and we love both the smell and the nostalgia. It’s named for it’s distinctive smell, which to me is exactly like lolly pineapples!

 

So, I think that’s pretty much everything for now. Hopefully soon this yard will be full of edible goodness!

The other morning I went out and discovered that two of the broccoli plants were well and truly ready for harvest -in fact, they probably should have been cut a few days earlier. Both heads were a bit loose, certainly much more loose than you see in the shops and if I had left them on the plants another week, they would probably have flowered.

What I didn’t realise until after I took them inside, was that one of them was actually really huge. The second broccoli head was about average -the size you buy from the grocer -but the first was about double that!

The two broccoli plants I harvested from have been left in the garden in the hopes of secondary heads forming. The other two broccoli plants are going well, though their heads are still quite small. The three cauliflower are also going well, with three cauliflower heads all at different sizes. Unfortunately something does appear to be living in/around them, as there were small dark droppings visible both on the heads themselves and the base of the leaf stems. Last time I grew cauliflower the culprit turned out to be cockroaches, but this time it might possibly be caterpillars. I hope to have a proper look either tomorrow morning or Monday.

Okay, so I got a bit slack and haven’t built the other raised beds. One of them is nearly finished, just waiting for the ground to be cleared so it can be put in. Maybe I’ll get around to it one day.

Meanwhile, we did plant some seedlings in the finished raised bed. We planted four broccoli, three cauliflower and one cabbage. The poor cabbage is on it’s own because my housemate eats it but I don’t.

The cabbage appears to have gone to seed, so even my housemate might not get to eat it after all. I suspect it probably has something to do with the unusually warm winter we’ve had this year. The broccoli and cauliflower are still doing well despite my lack of decent care, and the first broccoli florets are just peeking out now.

So. The compost heaps are sorted and in use already:

Now, since they have been built where the old vegetable garden was, it’s time to look at what shape the new one will take. We’ve decided to use the rectangular space in the backyard. We’re pretty sure that some previous owner of the house once had a vegetable garden here. The soil is rich and far better quality than the rest of the yard, and when I first moved here I kept uncovering the tags from vegetable seedling punnets when I mowed.

To make it easier to remove the grass from the plot, my housemate and I went out one night this past week and loosened it all up with garden forks. We dug out about 16 buried bricks along the way -we suspect they had once formed a path through the garden. This is what it looked like at about dawn the next morning (the lovely hour at which I leave for work):

We’ve decided to build raised beds. Ideally these would be 1.2 metres square (about four foot square). Apparently whoever built a garden in this yard before had a similar idea, because six boxes of 1.2m square fit into that space just neatly, with about two feet of space in between. Perfect!

We have a lot of old fence palings sitting around which were given to us as firewood some time ago, and which we’ve never gotten around to cutting up and stacking properly. These fence palings have never been treated, making them ideal for throwing on the fire -and also for using in the garden.

I sorted through them this weekend and pulled out those that were still in relatively good condition. I cut the palings to 1.2m long each, and the corner posts to 50cm each, as below. (The supervisory feline is optional, but does ensure good quality and productivity levels):

Some hammer and nails and I had two sides built. Have I mentioned yet how good my new camera phone is? This photo was taken at dusk, and I swear the ambient light wasn’t nearly as good as this picture makes it out to be!

This morning I headed out and finished putting the last two sides on, resulting in the neat looking box below. The fence palings fit five to a side, and come a few centimetres short of 50cm, so the posts are a bit longer than the sides. This isn’t a problem, since we can just make it sit a bit lower in the ground once it’s placed in the right spot. Or we could just use it as a pen for the puppy:

One box down, five to go! It’s slightly slow work, since I’ve been doing most of it by myself, but I have a bit of time off at the end of this week, and I intend to get the second box finished then. I already have all the pieces cut, so it’s just a matter of hammering it into shape (literally!). Then we’ll get those two boxes set up in the backyard and hopefully get some winter crops planted. The other four boxes will be gradually worked on, and plan to be finished before spring so we can start a bunch of crops  then!

Last weekend my housemate and I ripped out a huge weed which had overgrown my old vegie patch. We turned the resulting space into two compost heaps -one for quick compost, like grass clippings, and one for slower compost like twigs and sticks, vegetable scraps, and any other organic material.

The remains of the weed filled almost the whole green bin. We decided not to compost the weed itself in hopes of discouraging it from growing back. There’ll be plenty of grass in the fast side soon anyway, once the weather clears up long enough for me to mow the jungle down the side of the house.

Well, ok, it’s been a little while since I was seen round these parts.. and that goes for the physical garden too.

Basically 2010 is turning out to be the year of crazy-busy-ness for me, and I’m struggling to cope some days even without having to go out and look after the garden as well. So the garden is on the backburner for now. My current goal is to find the time over winter to rip out all the dead plants & weeds that are left, and hopefully get some manure or something to improve the soil before summer, when I will see if I have the time for a summer crop. I hope I do -I really want another go at Giant Pumpkins! But we’ll see.

If you want to know what else I’m up to, check out my other site at The Secret Life Of Kris which is basically everything that’s not gardening. Primarily it’s a place for me to report my running & triathlon training, but everything and anything else could end up there too.

Ciao for now!

Ok ok, I’ve been slack lately. I’ve been busy, so haven’t had much time for the garden, and worse, the powdery mildew has been taking over in a grand way, making the pumpkin patch look like a very sad thing indeed. The tomato plants are suffering a similar fate -entire branches are dying, and the only thing I can put it down to is that the rats are climbing the flimsy plants and damaging them in the process. Certainly that would be why they are falling over so badly despite being tied to stakes.

Anyhow, things have been happening, and I do intend to do a proper update soon, but now is not the time. Tomorrow, I hope. Soon, definitely. And then you’ll be able to see the carnage in all it’s photographed glory.

It’s all about the melons today.

The watermelons are a write-off. I can’t remember if I’ve already mentioned it, but as soon as I’d pollinated a female on the second plant, it too started wilting. I’ll harvest the two little fruits once the plants are dying -the fruits are still slowly gaining size, so I assume the plants are putting everything they’ve got into them to try and make some sort of viable reproduction. So I’ll wait and harvest the mini melons later.

The rockmelon, on the other hand, is finally coming into it’s own. One of the two fruits I found growing when I returned after Christmas has almost doubled in size. The other has had only minor growth: I assume this is because the two fruits are so close together on the vine, and it’s choosing to put it’s energy into one over the other. Comparing the two visually is interesting -when I first found them, they were very close to identical in size.

Hokay, where to start. The good news. Let’s start with the good news.

Counted up the pumpkins yesterday as promised: there were eight Butternuts, one Atlantic Giant, no Halloween Howdens yet, and 30 Golden Nuggets! That’s 39 all up, plus two GNs already harvested, and there’s still more flowers coming and at least another 2  or 3 months in the growing season.

Today, I harvested another 4 GNs. Two intentionally, two unintentionally (more on that later). The four pumpkins came to just over 3kg together. In the photo below, from left to right, they weighed 950g, 855g, 776g, and 483g.

I also harvested another 600g of tomatoes yesterday, bringing them to a total of 2.4kg of fruit harvested so far. Most of them showed a little bit of damage, and none of them were fully ripe, but I’m taking the stance that it’s better to ripen off-vine and actually get to keep the fruit, than to vine-ripen and lose them to those pesky rats! Also, we’ve had large amounts of rain in the last few days, after a week of me not watering at all, and I’m finding quite a few fruits are splitting due to the sudden influx of water. Ripening off-vine prevents additional moisture from getting to the fruit at a late stage of ripening.

I also spent some time on the poor neglected main garden yesterday, cutting away the overgrown buffalo grass that was working it’s way sneakily into the garden. I harvested the first two sweet capsicums while I was there, seen with the tomatoes in the photo above. I staked the capsicum plants too, as they were struggling with the whole ‘upright’ thing (I assume this is due to the horrible clay soil they have been planted into -I think they’ve struggled to get their roots going any depth at all). I seem to have lost a few beetroot in the last week or so -I swear several more of them had survived than the four or five that are now visible. Oh well.

Also, when I got back the other day the first thing that stood out to me were the carrots! They are growing very happily indeed!

Now to the not-so-good news.

I commented last update that the powdery mildew had worsened a little. Not too badly -if I hadn’t treated them with milk before I left, the mildew would have spread much further. But it had spread, so I sprayed again with the milk and water 20% mixture (full fat milk this time). I also cut away the worst affected foliage, even if this unfortunately meant the leaves from the Halloween Howden and Atlantic Giant plants. There were also a few of the older leaves from the top of the Golden Nuggets, but I am more confident of the GNs ability to cope than with the giant pumpkins.

Whilst spraying the patch as thoroughly as I could, I noticed the Butternuts that had been damaged by rats had some odd orange marks on them.  I later discovered a fourth Butternut -on the other side of the patch, had the orange marks covering about a third of it’s surface! I’ve now checked all of them, and so far only those four are showing any marks. There are no similar discolourings on any of the GN pumpkins or the AG either. After a bit of googling, the closest explanation I can find is Black Rot. Very, very bad indeed. So far, none of my research has told me if there’s anything I can do about it once it’s taken hold. I’m not even sure if I should allow the pumpkins to continue growing, or if that will place my remaining healthy fruit at risk, but for now I’m leaving them be, just in case it’s not Black Rot.

In the meantime, I’ve devised a way to get some of the pumpkins off the ground. The Butternut above is obviously affected worse where it touches the ground, and damp conditions will be conducive to any type of rot. Being off the ground will also help the pumpkins stay cleaner and allow light to reach further around the pumpkins, helping them to mature evenly. Even the GNs I harvested today have yellow skin where they were against the ground.

So I went through the recyling and pulled out two egg cartons and some cardboard tubes. I cut them into pieces and put them under some of the pumpkins, like so:

I couldn’t do it for all of them -there weren’t enough bits of cardboard/carton, and also the older GN pumpkins are drying out around the stems and not as flexible as they used to be. That’s how I managed to accidentally harvest two of the GNs -trying to slip a piece of cardboard under them, and they just snapped off the stem! Oops, what a shame. Now I’ll have to eat them.

What with rats, caterpillers, snails and slugs, powdery mildew, very hot days, and now some sort of pumpkin disease, I’m beginning to feel like it’s an uphill battle!

Additional note: Just as I was finishing this post, I went to call the cats in for dinner and my housemate’s cat Chai refused to come, even though I could see her in the backyard. Turns out she had caught one of those pesky rats! Unfortunately it wasn’t even close to dead, and Chai soon lost interest in playing with it (our cats have never been good at killing other wildlife, only playing with them). In the process of getting rid of it myself, the blasted thing bit me! Sigh. But at least it’s gone and there is one less villian attacking my tomatoes!

On the fourth day since I departed, I returned and hurried into the garden to assess the growth/damage/changes…

First up, the Atlantic Giant is looking happy. It gained 3.1cm in length, and 6.3cm in circumference. The rats haven’t touched it. It is perfectly formed and I couldn’t expect anything more from it at present.

The Halloween Howdens have grown about a foot each, except one which has grown about two feet! They are starting to form female flowers -although I don’t intend to pollinate any until they have grown well past the AG. They are an interesting shape -the flower is pointed like a typical pumpkin flower, but the fruit is almost a rounded rectangle.

The Golden Nuggets are doing well, and it appears I missed up to 4 or 5 new flowers opening yesterday and this morning. I’ll do another total count of the pumpkins tomorrow I think. The first few fruits appear to be nearing maturity: the stems are looking quite dry now.

The Butternuts are still growing heartily too. Those that had been damaged by the rats don’t appear to have been touched any further (although there were few signs that the rat poison left out had been touched either). Interestingly, the vine which has my biggest and best looking Butternut on it has put out two more fruits, within three feet. I’m considering pollinating one of them: the first fruit won’t grow much bigger than it is now, I imagine, which will leave that vine free to pour it’s energy into another fruit. And it’s not January yet: still a fair number of months in the growing season. And they’re such good-looking fruit:

To my surprise, I have found two rockmelons growing! Yaaaaaaay!! I can’t remember if I pollinated them on the 22nd or 23rd of this month -I didn’t mention them in the blog or take photos at the time because I didn’t think pollination was likely to be successful. Turns out I was happily wrong! There are two large-marble-sized fruits. Fingers crossed I can finally see a melon through to maturity.

And still on the topic of melons: when I arrived home this afternoon, I found a female had just opened today, and was still open (thanks to the overcast day no doubt), so I pollinated it. Here’s hoping it sets. Also, the fruit on the plant that has died from Sudden Wilt appeared to have swollen a little: measurements show a 5mm increase in length and 13mm increase in circumference. However, the plant has very few leaves left. I’m guessing it’s putting the last of it’s energy into the little fruit in the hopes of making it viable. Once the plant is completely dead I’ll pick the fruit.

Final note from the compost heap: the powdery mildew problem has worsened in the back corner where conditions suit it best, primarily affecting the Halloween Howden plants. I’ll be spraying again with milk in the morning in an attempt to curb it’s growth. Thankfully other affected areas don’t appear to have worsened.

Over in the back garden, the tomatoes were again attacked by the rats. Apparently the thorough chilli spray job I did the night I left didn’t have much effect. Then again, it rained the day after that, so perhaps enough of the spray was washed off. Either way, I lost another 6 or 7 tomatoes to them. Several of the tomatoes had been eaten so thoroughly that only a stem with a bit of skin attached was left. Unfortunately my memory card is having issues and the right hand side of the image where those ones were was corrupted, so I can’t show you just how thorough those troublesome rodents were! The almost-ripe and mostly-whole harvest was 850g worth still. The green tomato had split horizontally around the whole fruit!

And all thats plenty enough for one day..