Salvia ‘amistad’ was the first of my new salvias to make an eye-catching show in the garden. Very soon after planting, it put on good new growth through August (late Winter), and followed with spikes of beautiful flowers.
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For the past couple of months I have been establishing a Salvia (sage) garden. They seem to be an ideal plant for our conditions, and I’m hoping they will have the potential to fill the bank under the house with colour and interest. Usually with Salvias you think of the eye-catching red and blue bedding types, which are always available in punnets for seasonal colour, but the variety of forms and colours goes way beyond those two, and collections of more than a hundred types seem to be standard with…
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Using lablab beans for chicken feed is one of those happy coincidences of production and need that perfectly fits a subtropical smallholding. In this post I will outline how lablab beans neatly fit the season and can nudge chickens back into egg production. This year I tried the strategy out properly, and the hens have started laying a month earlier.
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The BEAT This to me is what growing your own produce is all about; we had some nice bacon left over the other day, and it was so easy to put together a great little sandwich for lunch with local, home baked, and home grown produce. The fresh endive and four different kinds of tomato really made it for taste and visual appeal. Instead of the BLT, here is the BEAT, delicious on home baked sourdough. Tomatoes Even though it’s Winter here, we always have plenty of cherry tomatoes, which…
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Midwinter here can be a little cool and gloomy when the clouds make an even cover all day, but it’s never long before we get some beautiful sun again. Our garden is productive right through Winter, and that includes aromatic leaves to pick for the kitchen; the June herbs. I thought I’d do an inventory of what I can pick, and maybe follow it with Spring and Summer versions. This is what I found on a walk round. Clockwise from the left, in an inward spiral, they are: lemongrass, curry…
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Biochar seems to be something worth trying here, and that involves either making a biochar kiln or building a biochar fire in the field. There are several aspects that make it seem an ideal soil conditioning process, from availability of raw material to the need to bolster our soils. It has taken a while to cut the wood, season it, and finally have good weather for burning, but we have at last made our first biochar fire, with good results.
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This Summer I tried growing loofahs for the first time. I sowed a few seeds in with the green beans and cucumbers thinking that they could share the fence and trellis, and it turned out to be a good strategy. The loofah is a rampant vine, but it is slow to get going in early Summer, so my beans and cucumbers were finished before the loofahs took over. By Autumn my few plants had spread way beyond their bed, and right along the two fences of the vegetable patch available to…
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Our friend Sue gave us this lovely wire produce basket, which she found in a local market. I think it is going to be very handy for collecting produce from the garden. It’s quite sturdy, made of hexagonal weave wire around a rigid frame, with a wooden grip where the two handles meet. I’ve been using whatever comes to hand to collect from the garden, but this is definitely the best so far. Calico bags are handy to carry but everything gets jumbled in, which means that the delicate things…
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I used to pass snake beans by in the green grocer, mainly because they weren’t a familiar vegetable, but also because I didn’t imagine that the long floppy ropes of bean could be as tasty as the standard round and flat green beans. I was wrong, and they are a great crop for humid summers.
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Zucchini flowers seem like an extravagance, using flowers now that you could pick as fruit later. This year though I have watched dozens of zucchini flowers open and fade without any fruit production at all. So I have realised that picking the flowers is actually a good use of the crop, giving possibly as much yield as waiting for the fruit.
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