Merry Christmas

Wishing you all a Christmas touched with wonder and filled with joy.

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October in the Garden

October in the vegetable garden was a time to clear out the old plants, and plant the new. As you can see in the photo below I have already put shade cloth over two thirds of the garden, actually I have done it twice as a few days after I put it up the first time the weather became very windy and it was all torn down. It has been up for a week now and it seems to be fine so far.

Planting

I know the garden looks bare in this photo, but I promise there are plants in there they are just very small and they don’t seem inclined to grow at the moment. I am blaming it on the erratic weather we have had so far this spring. 

Down the far end of the garden I have planted out two Kent pumpkins, one butternut, a zucchini, two different types of watermelon, Sweet Baby and Luscious Red and a rockmelon, Hale’s Best and sown seed for corn.  

Two of the beds are for tomatoes with nine different varieties planted or soon to be planted, Lemon drop, Honeybee, Tommy Toe, Black Cherry, Sweetie, Mamma Mia, Tigerella, Rouge De Marmande, San Marzano and one store bought one that I saved seeds from because the flavour was so good.   

In the legume bed, I sowed seeds of Scarlet Runner and Butter beans.

My youngest daughters own three rabbits and they eat A LOT, and it can get quite expensive to feed them if you’re buying vegetables from the supermarket all the time, so I set aside one bed to grow food for them, mostly leafy greens as well as radicchio and some curly leafed parsley, plus I left four kale plants in the garden as this is a favourite with the rabbits. 

I had so many asparagus seedlings come up in the garden that I decided to add an extra bed of asparagus because you can never, in my opinion have too much asparagus and really you can’t pass up free asparagus plants. 

Asparagus seedling with a volunteer cucurbit growing next to it.

After two years of not having any I finally have a bed dedicated to strawberries and noticed today that there are flowers on one of the plants. 

In the two bed closest to the gate, I planted Genovese basil and Thai basil on the right and in the small bed to the left I sowed seeds of English spinach.

Growing in pots

Chillies, Italian parsley, lemon balm and garlic chives, as well a raspberry and blackberry which is just about to flower for the first time.

Harvested

October saw the garlic being harvested, I haven’t weighed it all yet, some of it isn’t quite dry enough, but so far I have 2.9 kilos of garlic.

Garlic hung up to dry, braided by my youngest daughter Samantha.

Also harvested were carrots, silverbeet and thyme and oregano.

Things to do

Cover last third of garden with shade cloth

Mulch

Put up bamboo screen on north side of garden if needed

Plant kumara, if it ever decides to shoot that is

Water, weed and fertilise as needed

Sow seeds of mixed lettuce

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This and That

Ominous looking hail storm clouds that thankfully passed over.

Flower head of the artichoke thistle that grows wild in uncultivated paddocks.

Baby Noisy Miners waiting to be feed.

We are lucky enough to have a family of Blue Tongue lizards make our yard their home, this one paid a visit while I was watering the garden one afternoon. 

A caterpillar of Phalaenoides glycinae or Grapevine moth feasting on my grapevine.

Another caterpillar, this one is the caterpillar of Spilosoma glatignyi or Black and White Tiger Moth. We were inundated with them this year, they even came into the house.

And lastly, a glorious sunset on the night of the red moon.

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Harvest Monday

The unseasonably hot weather brought the garlic harvest time forward a couple of weeks and I am happy to say that it is a very good harvest this year.

I planted 72 cloves and harvested 69 bulbs.

Some were a bit strange looking.

There were a couple of triple headers as well as a few small ones.

 But the majority looked like this, lovely big bulbs of garlicky goodness.

I also dug out the last of the carrots which have been in the ground for months and still weren't mature.

As well as some late season sugar snap peas.

Well, that's it for this weeks Harvest Monday, you can see what others have harvested from their gardens over at Daphne's Dandelions.

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Making Jam

It is something I had wanted to do for a while now but have always felt intimidated by the whole process. That all changed when I bought 4 1/2 kilos of strawberries for five dollars at the markets. I have no idea what I was thinking, but they were too good of a bargain to pass up.

I found an easy jam recipe on-line and set to work and it turns out it wasn't as hard or as scary as I thought it would be.

Hulling the strawberries was time consuming and the hardest part of the whole process.

When I tasted the jam at this point it was way too sweet, so I added more lemon juice to the mix and I am glad I did as it turned out to have just the right amount of sweetness and tartness that I like.

I didn't use any pectin so the jam is not as thick as commercial jams, but it taste so much better.

Now I know how easy it is I can definitely see more jam making in my future.

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