The soil in my vegetable beds could do with a lot more organic matter, so I’ve been on a compost mission in preparation for the next warm season planting. I had dug in some alpaca manure (very like sheep manure) for my beets, tomatoes and tomatillos, but wanted something more like a soil conditioner for the next bed. Another task was clearing some of the dam. It is very overgrown, and in order to launch our little boat to get out and fix the pump I first had to clear a…
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Three sisters
Now that I have space and chickens, I thought I might try growing the traditional North American trio of maize, beans and squash. A handy website Renee’s Garden outlines a planting scheme for a ten foot square patch, so I doubled that to 6 m x 3 m rectangle. The bed is up by the chicken coop, on a bit of a slope and well drained, so rather than using mounds I have made level patches with some cut and fill. The three sisters legend says that maize, beans and…
Read MoreLast of the winter lettuce.
My first sowing of lettuce grew to be a rewarding first crop. From a couple of June sowings and a slow start, they did well through the dry, cool weather and provided more salad than we could use. I got three types for Winter sowing; Australian Yellow, Lollo Rosso, and Marvel of Four Seasons, all from Eden Seeds. The idea was to get a variety of shape and colour to mix in a salad, and it worked well, although I reckon you could mix any 3 different types from the catalogue and…
Read MoreBorage
One of the first herbs I planted back in May, borage is an old favourite. Here it grows through winter, spreading to a rosette of hairy leaves, then in spring it sends up shoots that bear the blue flowers. The bees love it, but for us the flowers are also the useful part, to put in salads. The flowers and leaves taste of cucumber. For picking the flowers,the blue petals are easy to separate from the hairy calyces, just hold the central dark part and gently pull down. The leaves are…
Read MoreGrowing carrots; not the easiest vegetable
Maybe carrots are a veg that some people grow easily, but I’m having trouble with them. At least the few that I have pulled have been nice ones, but it would be nice to have more. The local ones at the community market tend to be gnarled, with as many arms and legs as a ginseng root, so I was expecting something similar. These are the ‘All seasons’ cultivar, which, according to my seed merchant is the most common commercial variety in the region. I also planted ‘Little finger’, which I…
Read MoreGrowing orchids in trees
We don’t have a lot of shade in the garden yet, as all the big trees are sensibly well away from the house, but there are a couple of small rainforest trees above the house, and I’ve used them to house some of my orchids. The Dendrobium nobile is looking quite happy way up in this fork, and has started to flower. I’m afraid I don’t know yet what the tree is, but it is quite common in the region, and holds a lot of lichen on its bark, so…
Read MoreHow do you know your daikon is ready?
With carrots you feel round the collar, same for beetroot and turnips, but daikon turn out to be easier to tell when they’re ready; they stand up out of the ground. I had no experience with them, and harvested some small ones a while back, but these, planted quite densely on a small terrace, left no doubt when I pulled the leaves back. It was good timing, as I have plenty of wom bok (chinese cabbage) to pick, although it isn’t in classic heads, so I included most of the…
Read MoreCymbidium on tree stump
This is a good climate for having orchids out in trees. Our Summers are warm, wet and humid, so many orchid types like to have their roots in the air or under a light cover of leaf litter. The driveway down to our house has a few old standing stumps and a couple of trees which get a good dappled shade. This Cymbidium had its pot broken in the move (or it might have just burst out of it, they have massive root systems), so I just wedged the root…
Read MoreSeeds for Spring.
I’ve just done an auto sum of the seeds I have. Seems it’s 150 varieties, so little wonder I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. The biggest whelm is of course digging plots to house them, or getting them in seed trays, but even just filing them is becoming an issue. Most of them have been from Eden Seeds, a local supplier, and their germination rates have been great, on the whole. This means that I can probably blame poor-shows like Mitsuba on my planting conditions (which just makes me want to…
Read MoreNative bees.
Spring came right on time this year, today was beautifully warm and the insects were out in force. I will have to look up what some are, including the biggest ladybirds I have ever seen. But it was nice to see these old friends, native bees (Tetragonula carbonara, I think). We used to get them in Sydney, although it is a marginal climate for them there, but here they were swarming around some Bok Choi and Pak Choi that have gone to flower. There are plenty of european honey bees…
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