Covered beds

We haven't covered any of the raised beds before, but I decided this year to cover a couple of them and see if it make a difference to what we are able to grow, particularly capsicums. The price of capsicums over winter is crazy so I want to grow lots of my own this summer and then slice and freeze them, but we haven't had much luck with them turning red while growing out in the open. I hope the greenhouse effect will help with that, as the green ones aren't as sweet.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

Germinating like crazy

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but that does not indicate a lack of progress. The weather isn't settled enough to plant much outside yet, but in the conservatory I have many little seeds germinating quite happily. Here's what I have growing indoors:

• tomatoes (Better Boy, Early Girl, Green Zebra, Moneymaker)
• peppers (California Wonder, Yellow Banana, Purple Beauty, Chocolate Beauty)
• sweetcorn
• lettuce
• cucumber
• and a variety of flowers, including gilia, cornflower, larkspur, swan plants, and many others that I've currently forgotten.

There are seed potatoes waiting for the current wet weather to pass before I plant them in bags outside:

• Purple Heart
• Ilam Hardy
• Red Rascal
• Agria
  

Planted outside are some slightly hardier crops:

• red onions
• leeks
• spring onions
• radishes
• lettuce
• strawberries
• raspberries
• broccoli
• spinach
• silverbeet

Those last two belong to my husband, who has his own beds to look after this year. I am taking the very organised pre-planned approach, and he's taking the approach of, "Plant what seems like a good idea at the time, wherever it fits," so it'll be interesting to see which of us produces better food!

I also spent about $80 setting out the start of our irrigation system. It'll cost us maybe the same again to finish it, but that should make things a lot easier for us this summer. The system won't cover all the plants but it'll cover the raised beds and leave the neighbours with a lot less to water for us if we go away for a weekend here and there!

Of course, not all the vegetables will fit in the raised beds, not by a long shot. I'm going to need at least eight tubs for some of the tomatoes and all the peppers. We had no luck with peppers last year because it wasn't quite warm enough for them, so I'm going to keep those in the conservatory and see if that improves things. Just need to find the space for them first!

Onions, onions everywhere

Well, not quite onions everywhere, but I have high hopes for the future. Eighteen red onion seeds, 18 white onion seeds, and 18 spring onion seeds have just been potted up in some lovely damp seed-raising mix, along with half a dozen chocolate pepper seeds just to fill up the rest of the tray. In fact I planted a whole lot of seeds today:

• red onion (sweet red)
  
• white onion (Kiwi gold)
• spring onion
• pepper (chocolate beauty)
  
• swan plant
• gilia (bird's eye)
  
• marigold
• mint
  

My Meyer lemon got re-potted too, as it's looking a bit under the weather at the moment. It was sadly neglected for the last few months, and when I finally took a proper look at it I discovered that it was infested with greenfly and most of its leaves were yellow or dropping off. Poor lemon tree. The last few weeks I've been spraying it with insecticide, feeding it, and trying to clean the sticky honeydew off its leaves (with limited success, it has to be said). Hopefully it will perk up a bit now.

First seeds planted

About a week ago I planted some winter lettuce seed in a couple of pots in the conservatory. They haven't sprouted yet but I hope they will do so within the next week or so. The tubs are filled with Mel's Mix, and temperatures in the conservatory are above freezing at night and very warm during the day if the sun's out, so I'm hoping that'll be a nice combination for the little lettuce seeds.

Yesterday I planted four Jingle Bells pepper seeds in a tub (filled with seed raising mix) which is currently in our living room. The temperatures here are more stable than in the conservatory, with less extreme differences between night and day. Hopefully they will germinate. The Jingle Bells peppers are miniature fruits on a plant suitable for growing indoors. We had no luck with our pepper plants growing outside last summer - from about a dozen plants, we got one solitary green pepper - so this year they are all going to be indoors. I've already got some larger tubs to use outside in the conservatory, and I've ordered more seeds (Chocolate Beauty, which has brown fruit, and California Wonder which should result in red peppers when ripe) so hopefully we'll have a bit of variety. Having said that, I'd just be glad to have something we can eat at the end of it all!

Oh, and I scattered some California poppy seeds along the edge of our driveway. It's not really the right time of year for planting poppy seeds but the worst that can happen is that they don't grow. It'd be lovely if they did, though, because the driveway is very bare in places at the moment. We did plant some small shrubs, hebes of various kinds, but it'll be a long time before they grow big enough to merge together. Poppies would be lovely in the meantime.