Lessons learnt

These are the lessons that I have learnt so far this gardening season. I am recording them here for posterity and so I don't do the same thing next year!

• Do not plant any silverbeet. It quickly grows too large for salad and I don't like it much after that. If my husband wants some he can plant his own.
  
• Stagger the lettuce plantings for a constant supply, rather than (as I have now) ten beautiful big heads of lettuce being eaten by insects because I can't keep up with it.
• Plant more strawberries. (I may revisit this at the end of strawberry season, but right now it seems like I don't have enough.)
• Don't bother with radishes. It's nice to have something homegrown right at the start of the season, but neither of us like them enough to make it worthwhile.
• Don't plant anything behind broccoli. Broccoli plants are enormous, way bigger than one square each, and their leaves completely block the sunlight from the soil around them.

I'm sure there'll be lots more lessons learnt as time goes by. This'll do for starters!

The indoor plants

It occurred to me that I haven't blogged much about the indoor plants. We are lucky enough to have a fairly large conservatory (it would feel a lot larger if it didn't have a hulking great defunct spa bath taking up most of the floor space, but we just have to work around that until we have the money to get it ripped out and the floor rebuilt) with glass on three sides and a clear plastic roof, so it is very bright and sunny in there. For the last few months it has been my greenhouse as I planted seeds and pampered seedlings.

Right now it is home to 17 pepper plants, eight tomato plants, a tub of lettuce, a small lime tree, and a number of seedings and germinating tomato seeds.

 

Most of the tomato plants are very small still, but the Early Girls have lots of flowers and a good number of baby tomatoes on them so I have high hopes of an early harvest.

It's coming into summer and the weather is warming up, so it gets very hot in the conservatory during the day, and it won't be long before it's too hot for the tomatoes in there. I'm moving some of them out onto the deck to see how they fare.

The green tubs are great, aren't they? They are relics from before Christchurch got a wheelie bin system for rubbish and recycling, and we got them all for free. They've got built-in handles and drainage holes and are a really good size for planting things into while still being light enough to lift.We've got seven of them so far and I'm still scouting around for more.

Mmmm, strawberries

The garden's going great. I just gathered a bowlful of strawberries for dessert:

There are lots more ripening on the plants outside.

 The broccoli is enormous, taking over the whole bed and dwarfing the poor little tomato plants in the back.

 

The silverbeet has grown completely out of control and I doubt it's fit for us to eat now - it's going to seed - but the chickens will enjoy the leaves.

 The sweetcorn and purple beans are getting there, slowly but surely.

And the onions and leeks are doing well too.

Even the spuds are coming along nicely in their plastic bags of compost (as are the weeds running rampant behind them).

We have had almost no weeding to do in the raised beds, which is fantastic - weeds only grow in the soil that we haven't yet levelled and covered with weed mat. The only problem so far is that the plants (broccoli and spinach) in one of the beds are not thriving, and some weird fungus has been growing in that soil. I think there was something funny about the compost we put in that one, but unfortunately I have no idea what it was. It's annoying, and honestly I am not terribly keen on eating anything that comes out of that bed because I'm not sure what it's growing in. Fortunately I do no not eat green leafy vegetables anyway so I don't have to worry about it right now!

The good and the bad

The good:

• there are green tomatoes on both the indoor and outdoor Early Girl plants
• most of my other tomato seeds are germinating quite well
• the strawberries starting to ripen in the beds outside (and in fact I just ate the first one - yum!)
• the potatoes in their plastic bags are growing nicely, and I'm particularly taken with the purple ones, which turned out to have purpley-green leaves as well
  

The bad:

• my Roma tomato seedlings all baked to death, in the conservatory on an unexpectedly hot day
• the lemon tree has shed almost all of its leaves, and will have to be planted outside somewhere - anywhere! - before it expires completely
• something has chewed holes in a lot of the lettuce leaves
• we still haven't finished ripping out the weeds from the veggie garden and putting down the last of the weed matting, so I have no new photos

Maybe this weekend we'll get to grips with the last of it. I will update if we do!