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.

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 official gardening season begins

It is Labour Day weekend this weekend, traditionally the time that gardeners around New Zealand start to rev it up a gear. This time last year we were hit by an unexpected frost which did quite a lot of damage to our tender new tomato plants, but this year I've checked the forecast and I'm hoping that temperatures will stay above freezing for the next while. We do have frost cloth but it's difficult to get it over the fence where the tomatoes are being planted, so I'd love it if we didn't need to use any.

Today I planted out some cucumbers which have been basking in the warm temperatures of our conservatory for the last few weeks. I used a beautiful oak dibber which my father made for me (thanks Dad!) to poke holes for them - it was very handy and I'll definitely get a lot of use out of it this year and for years to come.

Check out the size of the broccoli in the background, too - it's huge! There is a very noticeable difference in size between the broccoli in this bed and the one on the other side of the garden. We did use different compost in some of the beds and I wish I'd taken a note of which was which, because I'm guessing that it was the critical factor, but really we're not sure.

Here's the cucumber up close. I love eating this so I hope our four little plants do well. We've just got to add some trellis netting to those green poles at the end of the bed, and in theory the cucumbers will vine up that rather than sprawling on the ground. It's a new technique to me, but the Square Foot Gardeners swear by it so I'll give it a go.

Our tomato plans

I love tomatoes. Really, really love tomatoes. I would eat them every day if they were more affordable out of season, but this summer I plan to indulge myself until I’m sick of the things.

Last year we were complete novice gardeners and made many mistakes, but we were still blessed with an abundance of the aforementioned red fruit. Since we were just getting our feet muddy, so to speak, we went for varieties that were common and readily available; Moneymaker, an heirloom variety with smallish round red fruit, Cherry Sweetie, a cherry tomato, and a couple of sorry no-name specimens rescued from the brink of death courtesy of The Warehouse’s garden centre for 50c each. Despite our ignorance and occasional neglect, these plants somehow thrived and gave us a great harvest right up to the start of winter when the first frosts arrived.

This year I’m ready to experiment a little more – actually, a lot more. I could well be setting myself up for a fall, but I’m going to plant sixteen tomato varieties and see how they turn out. Here are the details (photos all from the internet, hopefully to be replaced with my own when something grows!).

Beefsteak/Paste Tomatoes
Aunt Ruby’s German Green

Aunt Ruby’s German Green is a beautiful green beefsteak with vivid green and gold centres, weighing up to 500g each. It’s recommended for sandwiches and for fried green tomatoes.



Brandywine Red

This is a beefsteak tomato with a sweet rich tomato flavour, and is recommended for sandwiches.



Roma

These are the tomatoes that you find in tins, ready for cooking. We’re planting four of these plants in the hopes that we get enough to make our own tomato sauce for the winter.



Black Tula

A Russian heirloom tomato, this one has mahogany red skin with green shoulders and dark green gel around the seeds. Ugly but, by all accounts, delicious. I've never tried a black tomato, but they are described as having a sweet, spicy, smoky taste.


Mid-Sized Tomatoes
Early Girl

These round red fruits are perfect for slicing, and have excellent texture and flavour.











Better Boy

These large fruits are plump, juicy, and deep red.





Green Zebra

When this one is fully ripe, the fruits are bright green with stripes of lighter green.





Moneymaker

Another heirloom tomato with mid-sized round red fruit. We grew this one last year and it was surprisingly prolific despite being underfed and probably underwatered.


Cherry Tomatoes

Sweetie

We grew these ones last year and were very happy with them – bunches of sweet cherry tomatoes in what almost looked like a blister-pack arrangement, as if somebody in a factory had arranged them that way. Delicious.











Yellow Pear (and matching Red Pear)

Charming little yellow (and red) pear-shaped cocktail tomatoes.



Sungold

Sungold is an English hybrid with super-sweet cherry sized fruits, perfect for eating straight off the plant. They are a golden orange when ripe.



Juliet

These sweet grape-sized tomatoes are recommended for salad.




Sugar Plum

This grape shaped variety produces large red clusters of fruit with exceptional flavour.




Gold Nugget

These round golden tomatoes, one inch in diameter, are sweet, seedless, and ideal for salad.



Baxter’s Early Bush Red

These orange-red salad tomatoes are a cherry type and keep for up to a month in the fridge.




That’s the lot – for now, anyway. And really we don’t have space for any more varieties this year – I’ll be restricted to just one each of most of these as it is. But we’ve got high hopes of a good tomato harvest if I can persuade all the seeds to germinate and grow up healthy and strong, enough for both of us at least and hopefully enough to share as well. I’ll keep you updated!

Garden bed layout

It occurred to me that I haven't updated the layout of the garden beds since we finished constructing them. Here's how it's laid out now:


The pale green beds are mine and the blue ones are my husband's to lay out as he chooses (although I have earmarked three of his squares for my tomatoes). He isn't as committed to the Square Foot Garden way as I am, although he's happy to go along with it for as long as it's working.

There is a tall fence along the right-hand side, and a low picket fence along the bottom. We have set up trellises on the fence edges of the bottom two beds (Beds 1 and 4), and on the bottom edge of Bed 5, to support tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans. These trellises are north-east facing so they get plenty of sunshine.

The pink square at the top right is currently just a weed patch. I hope to plant some bee-attracting flowers over there to keep the fuzzy little pollinators in our garden. We already have a family of bumble bees living in the compost heap but it's good to encourage all kinds of honey bees as well. They are always welcome in our garden (unlike wasps, which seem utterly pointless as well as nasty).

There's also a tall fence along the top edge of the layout, which casts quite a lot of shadow over the garden. I'm hoping that our potatoes thrive in their bags with a nice mixture of shade and sunshine, but if they don't do well then we'll carry them to some more suitable location.

Here's roughly what's in, or planned for, each bed:
Bed 1 - tomatoes, basil, various lettuce types, marigolds
Bed 2 - garlic, leeks, onions, strawberries
Bed 3 - not sure what is planned for this one. Right now it has broccoli and spinach.
Bed 4 - not sure what is planned for this one. Right now it has broccoli, marigolds, and some dead broad beans (the frost got them). I'm swiping three squares for tomatoes, and will plant some butter beans to replace the dead ones.
Bed 5 - not sure what is planned for this one. It has some carrots that are hopefully coming up (this bed has straw and chicken compost in it, and we fear that a lot of the little seedlings are actually weeds that were imported with the compost) and there will be cucumbers planted against the trellis.
Bed 6 - sweetcorn, pole beans, lettuce, raspberries

As well as the raised beds, we'll have lots of tubs with tomatoes and peppers, a row of Roma tomatoes against the edge of the back lawn, and a tub of herbs. We have loads of rosemary already, planted last year and still thriving, and some coriander, so I'll add a couple of others like thyme and parsley. It's always good to have fresh herbs.

Making the most of a sunny day

We've had some mixed weather recently, with a very cold snap and a lot of rain, so I haven't been out in the garden much. However, today was a beautiful warm sunny day so we took advantage of that and got some work done.

I've finally planted out the potatoes into their plastic bags. This is the first time we've tried this technique, but if it works then harvesting the potatoes will be very easy indeed. I forgot to take a photo of them when I was outside earlier, but right now they just look like a row of plastic bags full of compost - not very exciting really!


The strawberries are coming along quite nicely, and I can see the beginnings of berries on a few of them. These will have to stay covered up with wire netting to keep the birds off.



The silverbeet is thriving, as is Skry's broccoli. I don't know what he's going to do with it all if every plant is ready to eat at the same time! And I've got plenty of lettuce on the go and have been eating that regularly. It's so easy just to go out into the garden with a bowl and a pair of scissors and snip off all the leaves I need for that meal.


You can see that we haven't finished landscaping the garden yet. There is one corner which is still thick with weeds, and we haven't done anything about covering the weed matting. The irrigation system hasn't been finished either, but at least we've made a start on it. Hopefully we'll get the whole thing sorted out before Christmas and it'll all be fairly easy from then on.

I've got to say that Square Foot Gardening seems to be a real labour-saving technique. The only tools that I need are a trowel and a pair of scissors. I've pulled a few weed seedlings from the raised beds from time to time, but way fewer than we pulled from the ground last year. They're also easier to pull out because the soil is so loose, and of course it's easier to spot them early because I know exactly where I should find plants in each square of the grid. If something is not where my spreadsheet says it should be, out it comes!

Salad for supper

I should have taken some photos, but all the food is in my tummy now. I had a garden salad with my dinner tonight - lettuce, baby silverbeet, and radishes. Covered with dressing, of course - who likes bare lettuce? Not me, anyway! Still, it was lovely to go out there with a scissors and come back with enough to fill my plate (and accompany my crumbed fish fillet). Can't wait till we have tomatoes in the garden, but that won't be for a good while so I'll enjoy the lettuce and radishes while we have them.

Another bed laid out

Baby steps, but I'm getting there - I pulled up loads more weeds today, raked the ground level, and assembled another raised bed. We have nothing to fill it, but at least it's in the right spot now!


This bed is one that we bought pre-sawn and ready to assemble. It cost $129, which probably wasn't worth it compared to how cheaply we bought the materials for the other two (I think they cost something like $20 for the wood and $5 for the screws), but it certainly was very easy to slot together. It's going to take a lot of material to fill, though, and I can't see me being able or willing to buy enough individual bags of compost and peat to do the job. I think we need to find a bulk supplier somewhere...

Making a start on the veggie beds

I made a real start on the back garden veggie beds today. It's still only early August, but the weather has been just glorious, warm and sunny, so it's perfect for gardening.


We only had a few bags of compost to hand so I just filled one bed with Mel's Mix and the other one is still empty. The 2m x 1m bed took three 40 litre bags of compost, half a big bag of peat, and half a bag of vermiculite to fill nearly to the top, and I've still got to top it up to the brim once I buy more supplies. It was hard work lugging all the bags around, but at least I only need to do it once for each bed! After that they'll just need topped up with a little compost every time new plants go in there, which should be easy to manage.

The rest of the garden still looks a mess, but already we can see how fantastic it's going to look when it's all done up properly. We've got another three beds planned for this area, and some free space in the back corner that might be used for an asparagus bed. Haven't quite decided yet.

Our first raised bed

Here's the first raised bed. It's made with fence palings screwed together, about six inches high, four feet deep, and five feet wide (approximate measurements), and filled with compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. Underneath the soil mix is a layer of weed mat to keep the grass and weeds at bay. Hope it works!

This bed is destined for flowers, which is why it's in the front garden rather than the veggie garden. It's in the gap between the chicken run and the garage. After being in the house nearly a year, I think there's nothing much going to come up in that area that I'll miss. The only thing apart from grass that grows there is a whole lot of Solomon's Seal, which I don't particularly like anyway. It'll be interesting to see if the weed mat can keep that particular plant at bay - the roots seem to be all over the place under the grass.

The bed needs to be topped up with compost and have a grid made on it (with string or wood laths or whatever else comes to hand), and then I'll be ready to start planting things out as soon as the weather warms up enough. Oh, and I need to wrap some chicken wire around it to keep our three little birds on the outside rather than scratching up the inside!

How many beds?

How many raised beds should we have? Our back garden is fairly spacious, maybe 7 metres wide by six metres deep, with a 1 x 4m chunk taken out of it for the compost pile. We also have a large front garden with a lot of bed space, but the beds are fairly irregular and have trees and shrubs here and there, so I don't think that will work for large containers. Having said that, there is one patch of bare grass beside the chicken coop which would fit a 2m x 1m bed and allow plenty of sunlight at the plants.

This is the layout that I'm currently considering for the back garden. Each 2m x 1m bed will be divided up into nine 33cm squares, allowing for 18 different plantings per bed.

The bottom edges of beds 2, 3, and 5 will have trellises to support tall plants (most likely tomatoes) and allow them to get sunlight without shading the rest of the bed.

Beds 1 and 4 will be partially shaded for most of the day, because of the tall fence and trees which belong to our neighbour. I expect we can put something like lettuces in there and protect them from the worst heat of the summer.

How to build our containers?

There is a garden centre down the street from us selling lovely pre-made wooden containers, two metres long and one metre deep, and about 50cm high. They come apart for storage and easily slot together once the garden is ready for them. They cost $129 each, but for the convenience and neat appearance I think we should get a couple. My husband thinks we can make our own but I think they'll just end up looking slightly crap (like the "compost heap" I can see through the window right now, which is a pile of dead leaves surrounded by decrepit pallets and rotting sections of picket fence). I'd much rather pay for something that looks like a professional put it together!

Having said that, Mel's book says that for all but the long root vegetables a six inch depth of soil is all that's required, so those pre-made containers are deeper than we need for most of the garden. Mitre10 sell fence palings for $5 each which could easily be nailed together to make a low container, but they're also treated and I don't know what they've been treated with. It wouldn't be good to have chemicals leaching into the soil, then into the vegetables, then into our mouths. I've emailed Mitre10 to ask them how the wood is treated, so we'll wait and see what (if anything) they come back with.

Welcome to Grid Gardening

So here's the thing. I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and I want to try Square Foot Gardening, but we use the metric system here. No square feet for me! But I'm going to use the same concepts anyway and just convert my grid to slightly different measurements :)

The concepts of Square Foot Gardening are simple:

• build above-ground containers
• fill them with a special soil mix
• create a grid on top, breaking each container into one-foot-square mini plots
• fill each mini plot with as many plants as it can support

Sounds simple, doesn't it?