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.

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!

It's starting to come together

A couple of weeks ago we managed to acquire 46 concrete pavers on TradeMe, for the total price of $200 (which was a great bargain - most of them are seconds, but that hardly matters in a veggie garden). They're going to make a lovely path between the raised beds.


They're not in their final location just yet, because the ground needs to be levelled a bit in places and then the gaps will be filled with stones and pebbles (I would prefer bark, but I lost that battle) to finish it off. Right now the pavers are just holding the weed mat in place, because it can get very windy at times.

My husband built some more raised beds for me, and I have been gradually buying material to fill them with. It's a real nuisance lugging heavy bags of compost and peat moss from the shops every time we go out, but I'm getting there slowly. The purchase of a small trolley last weekend has made things a lot easier!

A friend donated three raspberry canes to our cause and those are now in situ against the tall fence (they're not really visible in the photo, but they're there alright). This fence gets plenty of sun but also shade in the morning, so I'm hoping the raspberries will enjoy their location. My friend already gave us raspberry canes a few months ago but they were mistreated, overgrown by weeds, and ultimately met their demise, so I have promised to do better with these ones!

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.

Mould!

I just noticed that the five tubs of seed mixture that I have in the living room (pansy, lavender, and sweet pepper) have gone MOULDY and are covered in white fluffy stuff. Yuck. I've never seen this happen before! I've got no idea what's going on - I'm pretty sure I haven't been over-watering them, but I can't think of what else might have caused it.

For the moment, I've moved them all to the sunny windowsill rather than the rather darker corner behind the curtains. If it persists, I'll probably have to throw them out. The first casualties of summer 2009 and they didn't even get a chance to germinate. Bah.

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.