Strawberry time!

I just gathered the first strawberries of the season from our one-metre-square strawberry patch. Hope it's the first bowl of many!

Giving up on growing from seed

Almost none of the dozens of seeds I planted a few weeks ago have germinated. Our conservatory is just too hot on the hot days, and I think they baked rather than thriving, but if we put them outdoors the birds get them. So I officially give up on growing from seed, for this year anyway.

Pride put aside, I went down to the garden centre today and spent $30 on:

• nine green beans (bush, not climbing)
• six Early Girl tomatoes
• more red onions, white onions, and spring onions than I can count
• six Drunken Woman lettuce
• six Tom Thumb lettuce
• six dill
• six celery

I think I got my money's worth anyway! Let's hope they all grow and thrive in our garden.

Six tiny Early Girl tomato plants

There are reasons for my selection of green beans (which I dislike) and dill (a herb I've never knowingly used). The beans are to go in the bed between the potatoes and the cucumbers -- apparently those two plants do not like each other, but they both like beans, so I'm hoping the beans will act as a buffer zone. And the dill is also a companion plant to encourage our sweetcorn to thrive. I'm also planting climbing beans in among the sweetcorn plants, to take advantage of the natural climbing frame provided by the cornstalks, and to add nitrogen to the soil.

Green beans planted between the cucumbers and the potatoes

The onions are also companion plants, but at least I know I'll eat those! Onions benefit strawberries and make them taste more strawberry-y. Our strawberries last year were absolutely delicious, so I think onions are definitely good for them. Let's hope the trend continues.

Strawberries and tiny onions

Ho hum

The garden is ticking over. There definitely isn't the same level of activity as last year -- part of this is because we are doing other things, but it's mostly because the whole thing is already set up for us. The hard work of clearing the ground, then building and filling the beds, has all been done. All we have to do this year is add some compost and dig things over with a hand trowel. Square Foot Gardening is a great timesaver!

I've got some tomato seedlings on the go, but I've restrained myself this year and am only planting a few varieties:

• Aunt Ruby's German Green
• Sungold
• Moneymaker
• Black from Tula
• and one random bargain-rack Dad's Delight (I think it's called) from the Warehouse

I'm most excited about those and the cucumbers which are also sprouting nicely. The cukes can go outside in another week or so, and the tomatoes a couple of weeks after that.

We still haven't decided what to do with the far corner of the veggie garden. I want to make it into a bee-attracting flower patch, but I'm very unlucky when it comes to growing flowers and haven't managed to produce anything that will stay alive. Right now it contains a huge thistle, which isn't much good to anybody, some self-seeded potatoes, and a brick.

Please excuse the missing month

I was all set to get back into gardening at the start of September, which is also the start of Spring. But before I could do anything else we got hammered by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on September 4th 2010.

I'm not going to discuss the earthquake at length here, except to say that it was very traumatic, it put all thoughts of gardening out of my head, and a month later we are still getting powerful aftershocks.

The garden is now edging back into the picture and I did a little bit of cleanup at the weekend.

The strawberries are in bloom!

I dug compost into two of the beds in preparation for growing things. The tall bed will have potatoes and cucumbers just like it did last year, with some carrots in between (assuming they will grow well together -- I need to check my companion planting guide).

The low bed will have tomatoes and other salady things as yet undetermined. It already has pansies and another flower that didn't actually bloom last year, so I've forgotten what it is. Guess we'll find out later this season!

Spring is in the air

It has been a long, wet winter, but things are starting to look up at last. The mountains are still covered in snow and we are forecast some icy wind and rain for the next few days, but at least today was warm and sunny. The daffodils are showing themselves, the cherry trees are in full bloom, and the weeds are growing like crazy.

We have what I believe is a greengage tree in our garden. It is attracting bees at the moment, which I love to see. Bees are great.

We also have some variation of box tree which smells like cocoa butter when it's in bloom. Yum.

This chocolate-smelling-tree (as I call it in my head) is a real indication for me that summer isn't too far away, and if I get the chance to sit out on our deck in the sunshine and smell it wafting over me then I'm going to do just that. I've managed it for the last two years so let's hope I manage it this year as well. I can hardly wait!

Ugh

It has literally not stopped raining since last weekend, meaning we have had six days straight of rain of varying degrees of heaviness. Most of the week was made up of heavy downpours, but today we have upgraded to light drizzle interspersed with showers. I suppose that's an improvement.

Since it's too miserable to go outside, the garden has officially gone to rack and ruin. There are orange and green tomatoes still on the plants, and the last of the apples still on the tree, but I can't face going out there to rescue them. The birds are having a great time of it though! They will keep coming to the apple tree all winter, and I like to think that my laziness will play a part in keeping many birds alive through the tough times.

Regular visitors to our garden include:
Silvereyes:

Blackbirds:

Greenfinches:

Thrushes:

Goldfinches:

I did see a tui recently but can't remember if that was in our garden or in the park nearby. Probably can't claim it as a regular visitor!

The garden's a mess

The whole garden is a mess. Not just the Square Foot part of it, but the whole lot. Fallen leaves everywhere. Unkempt flower beds filled with the browning remains of summer flowers. Straggling rose bushes and untrimmed hedges. Shrivelled cucumber plants (still with a couple of remaining cucumbers) and tomatoes (still with green fruit). I don't even know what's happening with the pumpkin or the butternut squash since I haven't been out there in days.

I can say, however, that the leeks are doing well and looking healthy. The ones we planted last spring are pretty much ready to eat, and the baby leeks I put out there a few months ago are looking more like onions than grass, so they're on their way too. But the only way I know they're doing well is by looking out the window. Indoor hobbies have kept me away from everything else for the last few days. I've got to get back to the garden soon but it won't be today.

Summer ain't over yet, after all!

Much to my surprise, our strawberries are still going strong, and I picked a large bowlful of them today, including one absolute whopper. Will have to make sure we eat those tonight, as they go mouldy very quickly (which I found out with the last bowlful I picked).

I also found a couple of small but perfectly formed Green Zebra tomatoes, my first all season, and a good few almost-red Early Girls. I'm taking the tomatoes in before they're red, just in case we get hit by an early frost or a downpour of rain that's going to make them swell up and split.

Oh, and I found a lovely ripe Chocolate Beauty capsicum in the conservatory, so that has been added to today's harvest as well!

Pre-winter planting cleanup

I haven't quite given up on my green tomatoes and peppers yet, but the garden was well overdue a clean-up so we gave it one this weekend.

Out came the gone-to-seed lettuce, the non-performing green beans, and the dead sweetcorn. The purple climbing beans were harvested, as were the butter beans, the carrots, and the potatoes. I haven't weighed any of the weekend's harvest yet but we took in several large tubs of food.

The cucumbers and strawberries are still producing, so they will stay where they are. And, as I said, I'm still holding onto hope for the tomatoes and peppers to turn red.

Freaky carrots

What do you get if you don't thin your carrots properly, and let them grow pressed right up against the side of the raised bed? Freaky carrots, that's what.

Front (for reference, that's a 12-inch ruler in the photo):

Back:

I know it's probably fine, but I really don't want to eat something that looks like this. Would you?

Summer is nearly over

The weather has been getting cooler, and we're forecast to have temperatures of 2c (just above freezing) tonight, so I think our garden won't be producing its summer goods for much longer.

Cucumbers are still arriving thick and fast, and we have more than we know what to do with. We've harvested 12.5kg of cucumber so far and there are lots more on the plants in various stages of development. Not bad at all for about three square feet of bed space! Of course they have totally overrun their trellis now and are sprawling into the neighbouring bok choy and all over the path, but that's not a huge problem.

Tomatoes didn't do well this year at all. It's only now that we're getting green ones appearing, and I really don't have much hope of those getting the chance to ripen before the first frost arrives. I've gathered a handful of Golden Nuggets, three Aunt Ruby's German Greens, three or four Better Boys, six Black Krim (none of which I got to taste - they were badly split after being overwatered by accident), four Juliets, and maybe a dozen Moneymakers. Oh, and one single Red Pear. The rest of them - Green Zebra, Black Tula, Sungold, Brandywine Red, Cherry Sweetie, and Baxter's Early Bush - haven't produced a single ripe tomato yet. In fact a couple of the plants never grew more than a foot tall! If it wasn't for the Early Girls we'd have had hardly any tomatoes at all this year.

I've done a ruthless clear-out of any tomato plants in the conservatory that don't have flowers on them, and the indoor Early Girls that are persistently producing tiny, tough-skinned fruit (could be a fertiliser issue but it's too late in the season now to fix it). I intend doing the same outdoors, and after that I'll take stock. I know that this year has been a bad one for tomato growers all over the country, so the poor harvest hasn't put me off trying. At least I got to try my first ever green tomato! I will definitely be growing Aunt Ruby's German Green again next year, as they were just delicious. I'll grow Better Boy again too.

We did have a good haul of peppers this year compared to last year. Even the outdoor ones are producing well, although they're still green and therefore quite bitter. Indoors we got a few chocolate peppers and a good crop of sweet banana peppers, so I'll be growing more of those indoors next year too. I didn't have much luck with ordinary capsicums indoors but that's possibly down to the size of their (teeny tiny) tubs. Will try larger ones next year.

Hmmm, what else went well? We were thrilled with the huge amount of sweetcorn we got from our 12 squares of corn plants. Lettuce grew well, and there's more bok choy than we need. Red onions did great (I've pulled about half of them and will pull the rest at the weekend, now that the tops have fallen over on them). We've got a great crop of gherkins on the go, and I'm still getting a handful of strawberries every couple of days.

My potatoes-in-bags experiment didn't work so well. I harvested the whole lot of them a couple of days ago, resulting in about 1.5kg of spuds not much larger than marbles. They didn't have much growing medium and were rather neglected as far as watering went, but I'm not sure whether that was the only problem or if the weather/location/seed potato choice also played a part. Will try again next year, but with larger containers and better watering.

Our pumpkin and butternut squash plants are only flowering now. Since the supermarkets are now full of pumpkins for sale at low prices, I have to assume that ours should have been ripe by this stage. Bah. The courgettes are way behind too - we just have one courgette between three plants so far, and it's not even fully grown yet.

That's enough for now. I'm going to tackle the garden at the weekend and give the whole thing a bit of a clean-up, then see what I should be planting for the winter. It's all good.

A glut of cucumbers

I went to tidy up the cucumbers today - our plants are twined through netting so in theory they grow vertically, but the plants often have other ideas - and found six huge cucumbers hiding underneath the leaves. I weighed them all after picking and those six came to 4134g between them. One beast alone weighs 1.1kg!
We've been sharing and trading with the neighbours, so in exchange for two of these I now have a head of cauliflower, a posy of sweet peas, and a couple of lemons, but that still leaves us with four huge cucumbers to eat before they go off. I think I'll have to find some more homes for them!

That's the cucumber trellis in the background of this photo. Haven't they grown wild? There are three plants there - two telegraph cucumbers and one other one whose type I have forgotten. I've never grown this before but based on this year's results I certainly will be growing them again. Now I just need to find a few recipes other than salad that use the stuff so we can actually enjoy it rather than giving it away!

The sweetcorn harvest

We picked most of the sweetcorn today. It's as ripe as it's going to get, and I don't want a repeat of last year where we left the cobs on the stalks for too long. They ended up dried-out and riddled with earwigs. Yuck.

From a patch that isn't much more than a square metre, we picked 2.5kg of sweetcorn - and that is what they weighed after we'd removed the husks and I'd chopped off any ends that hadn't pollinated properly. With such a small patch of corn there was a good chance that it wouldn't pollinate at all, so I was delighted with what we got. Sweetcorn in season costs next to nothing, but it's easy to grow at home and it's hard to beat the satisfaction of eating corn that we grew ourself.

There's still a bit left outside, but what we picked today is all in the freezer now, waiting to cheer us up in a pie or soup later in the year. I'm already looking forward to it!

Chocolate Beauty peppers

Last year we had a dismal pepper (capsicum) harvest - we grew our plants outdoors, but they failed to thrive and only produced one measly pepper between the lot of them. So this year I split the risk and grew most indoors in the conservatory and a few outdoors in the garden. Surprisingly, both lots have been doing quite well, but the indoor ones definitely have the edge and today we got our first ripe ones.

These are Chocolate Beauty sweet peppers, which are a lovely chocolate brown when ripe. I've never even seen these before, let alone eaten them, but I couldn't resist trying them out. Aren't they a great colour?

Harvest totals

Harvest total update:
tomatoes: 3787g
strawberries: 4385g
carrots: 1430g
potatoes: 113g
raspberries: 41g
spring onions: 80g
cucumber: 3395g
sweetcorn: 989g
peppers: 184g

Total: 14,404g

This is not counting any of the sweetcorn cobs which are just waiting for me to go and pick them. I'll do that tomorrow, as they're going to go past their best. We don't need them to eat right now but I'll freeze them for when we do.

A big cucumber

This is what you get when you grow your own veggies - non-standard shapes. They taste just as good as the straight ones!

Changes

The butter beans have baby bean pods on them! And one of the outdoor peppers has a little pepper growing. There are tiny green tomatoes on several of the outdoor tomato plants, too - Roma, Bloody Butcher, and something I haven't got a name for. Possibly a Moneymaker.

The indoor tomatoes are looking unhappy (limp and mottled) and my research indicated that they might be suffering from mites. I bought some Tomato Dust and have given them all a liberal coating, so I hope that helps. And the three huge tomatoes on the Black Krim were too much for the plant to hold and the whole stem ripped right off. I have them on the windowsill now and one of the tomatoes has ripened to a gratifying pink colour, so maybe I'll still get to eat them, but it's hardly an ideal solution. If that plant produces any more fruit I'll have to find some way of rigging up a support so this doesn't happen again.

Harvest totals

Harvest total update:
tomatoes (all Early Girl so far): 2168g
strawberries: 4199g
carrots: 471g
potatoes: 113g
raspberries: 41g
spring onions: 80g
cucumber: 665g

That's almost eight kilos of produce so far, not counting the vast amount of broccoli that was eaten without being weighed. I'm happy.

Is this tomato normal?

This is the underside of a Black Krim tomato, and I've got no idea if this is normal or not. I've never grown this variety before but I seem to remember reading somewhere that it can be very ugly (or maybe that was the Black from Tula that I'm thinking of). If this is just routine tomato ugliness then I can live with it, but I don't want to waste time and energy on a plant that's diseased.All four tomatoes on this plant have the same issue to a degree but this one is definitely the worst.

A friend suggested that it might be blossom end rot, but I don't really think so. It's dry and clean, not mushy or bad-looking in any way. If anybody reading this knows how Black Krims are meant to look, please post and let me know!

Some things growing, some things dying

I ripped three tomato plants out of their tubs today. They were diseased-looking, with yellow leaves and soft stems, and the tomatoes weren't how they should have been on the two Early Girls. They were smaller than cherry tomato sized in the most part, and tough as old boots. Only the chickens would eat them.

The third plant was a Moneymaker which had lost almost all its leaves. It was starting to flower at the very top, but it looked awful and I didn't hold out much hope for a good crop from it (certainly not compared to the Moneymaker in the conservatory, which is covered in green fruit at the moment). I think the chickens did a lot of damage at the bottom of the plant, but it was right beside the Early Girls and may have got whatever they had. It's in the bin too, now.

On the plus side, I've got green tomatoes on the Black Krim, Betterboy, and Aunt Ruby's German Green plants inside, and green peppers too! Banana peppers and capsicums, hurrah. Can't wait till they ripen.

 

The climbing beans outside are flowering, and clinging very nicely to the sweetcorn.

And there are millions of apples (probably no exaggeration) on the big old tree at the bottom of the garden.

The strawberries have slowed down a bit but are still producing, and it won't be long before the red onions are ready to pull. They look huge but the tops are still green and show no signs of going to seed so I should probably leave them a bit longer.

A photographic garden update

The indoor tomatoes are growing really tall (and wilting in the heat despite the copious amounts of water they get):

There are little green peppers on several of the pepper plants - this one is a Chocolate Beauty which should turn brown when ripe:

The cucumbers are starting to produce fruit:

Green beans wind their way up the netting:

The sweetcorn has pollen on top and silks below:

The remaining broccoli has all been ripped up and fed to the chickens (they LOVE it) and we have a few empty-looking beds at the moment:

But never fear, there are things planted in most of those empty squares. Sorry-looking wind-battered peppers, tiny tomatoes, seeds for basil, carrots, and muk chow, seedlings for purple cabbage and purple sprouting broccoli, and also a couple of pumpkins and a butternut squash. It looks bare right now but I hope it'll fill out over coming weeks.

Got our first cucumber

I wasn't sure how to tell when cucumbers are ready to pick, since I've never picked one in my life before, but I looked online and apparently they're good to go when they're 20cm long. We had one that seemed big enough (photographed here with sunglasses for size reference) so I nabbed it off the plant. We haven't eaten it all yet but my husband and I both had a slice and it tasted great. I'm really excited about having more of these over the coming months.

I have been keeping track of our harvest totals (the cucumber was 210g, by the way) but the spreadsheet isn't on the computer that I'm writing with right now so I can't update you all. I'm sure that's terribly upsetting. Rest assured that we've been getting lots of strawberries (I made two more jars of jam today) and quite a few tomatoes too.

The size of many of the Early Girl tomatoes is a bit disappointing. They aren't much larger than cherry tomatoes and have quite a thick skin, so they're not very nice to eat in one mouthful. There are some larger ones which are very tasty when sliced, but I'm not sure what to do with the small ones. It seems wasteful to throw them away, but I don't particularly want to eat them and they're too small to skin for cooking.

There are large green tomatoes on the Black Krim and on the Better Boy, and some smaller ones on the Moneymaker (and those are pear shaped, which makes me wonder if it's a Moneymaker after all), so I'm impatiently awaiting a taste of those ones. The Early Girls are well worth it just to have tomatoes at the start of the season, but I want more than what they're offering right now.