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!

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!