Success!
- Yellow French Butter Bean - harvested a large handful most days. Delicious!
- Snow Pea - harvested lots, the favourite for garden snacking.
- Misome/Bok Choy/Silverbeet-Rainbow Chard - yum! Easy to grow & harvest as we cut off leaves as needed rather than the whole plant. Next time the Silverbeet will get more room to grow as it was smothered by a neighbouring zucchini.
- Sweetcorn - about 15 ears out of 4 plants, which I was happy with. Next time I will harvest sooner rather than later, as the second batch where a bit dried out by the time we picked them. Also; I meant to make a corn dolly but just forgot about it :(
- Beetroot Rainbow - the leaves where delicous to eat, as where the roots when they where eventually harvested. Next time I will pay more attention to separating individual plants so that each plant can have room to grow properly - they where sort of squashed into clumps. Yummy, but not perfect.
- Tomatoes - we grew 4 different types & did not space them apart enough, resulting in a confusing mass of triffid. Unfortunately the rain that we had in January likked off most of the tomatos, but we still managed to harvest alot.
- Black Russian - this did not look like the picture on the punnet, I think the wrong seedling was in the wrong punnet. I will try again.
- Red Tigrella - small, orange & red striped fruit, very sweet & not too bothered by pests, I think because they grew & ripened so quickly.
- Green Zebra - looks ALOT like an unripe version of Red Tigrella which it was planted next to, so a lot of fuit went rotten waiting for it to 'ripen'. Yes, we will try again with this one!
- Mortgage Lifter - this is one huge tomato. It looks gross when cut, kinda like brains. It also takes a long time to ripen, which means that it has plenty of time to become a caterpillar hotel. I wasn't going to grow this again, but as it is the only tomato plant that survived the rains, it wins by virtue of being last one standing. We have discovered if you pick the fruit very early it will ripen eventually on the windowsill, safe from caterpillars.
- Random Tomato plants pop up around the garden, probably from seeding in the compost. Mr BC nurtures them along, but most have a weird rotten spot in the middle even though the fruit looks perfect from the outside. I guess we will keep up these 'experiments' to see how they turn out.
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| We harvest a large handful of mixed greenery almost daily. |
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| Just a small amount of tomatos that where grown |
- Lettuce - frilly oakleaf/red oakleaf/boston. Boston Lettuce is a favourite in this family, but the ones we grew where not as large, full or crisp as the supermarket ones. The other lettuces where very soft. Next time we will fertilize a lot more.
- Mixed cucumbers - we grew a variety of 4 & they did fairly well, but we let them grow too large & they where full of seeds. Next time, early harvesting!
- Golden Zucchini - Major dissapointment, don't get me started. Produced a fair mix of male & female flowers so there was stuffed & fried zucchini flowers. The fruit where tiny & rotted almost straight away. It grew like nobody's business & was constantly pruned back - a wheel barrow full at a time. Powdery mildew was a problem. The best thing about this plant was that it was home to hundreds of ladybirds. Won't plant again, despite the fact that I love zucchinis.
- Capsicum (Bell Pepper to those in the US) grew 1 measly plant. ONE! It was planted next to a Jalapeno Pepper that grew 4, FOUR, mild chillis. Uber dissapoining! Later I found out that they dont like to be planted next to tomatoes so I guess the Triffid made it's point there. I have allready planted them again, in a different area.
- Purple Carrots - I was so excited to grow these, & the tops grew really, really well; so it was a major WTF moment when we harvested what look like weird demon claws. See the picture below? Strange, huh? Apparently you are supposed to make a channel for carrots to grow into, which is probably a bit difficult with a layered garden, but I'll give it a go. They tasted like a carroty beetroot, quite nice actually.
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| Purple carrots - weird enough to start with, even more bizzare when harvested |
So, this is the garden now. Those are new cucumbers growing rapidly up the stair trellis, with Mortgage Lifter tomatoes at the very top. The Lemon Grass is massive. We have planted new capsicum, basil & rocket that are all doing well. I also planted about 10 lettuce & 6 silverbeet seedlings, that have all been eaten by slugs! All this rain must have made the interior of the brick walls prime real estate for them. We caught about 20 slugs with beer traps & thought we where doing well; but them Mr BC came in one night from slug patrol with about 40 slugs in one hand! UGH!! So the next day we got some 'safe for pets & kids' Maxiguard Slug & Snail bait, & that worked a treat.
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| The garden today - waiting for more seedlings |
Sorry this post has been so long! Thank you if you are still reading!
We love our vege garden, hope you do too.
Mrs BC
xx