As you may be aware I’ve recently been away camping. We went to Sydney and then down the NSW coast to Pambula. While I don’t want to bore anyone with my holiday snaps I did find some vegetables during our travels.
I was going to regale you with tales of an entirely container grown kitchen garden at a motel in Mittagong but they were full and the owner so annoying I don’t want to inadvertently promote their business in any way. (Does anyone really need a lecture on why you should book ahead or carry an accomodation guide when they are tired and hungry and have two fracitious pre-schoolers in the car?). I was also going to show you the lovely garden of a high school friend of mine who lives in Tathra but we spent so much time chatting about how annoying it was to have bandicoots eat your pumpkins that I failed to photograph the garden at all.
I do, however, have a shot from Taronga Zoo in Sydney. Taronga Zoo has an area which is dedicated to backyard wildlife and as part of that exhibit they have a kitchen garden with some nice looking zukes:
I also found the occasional edible in unusual places – parsley amidst the marigolds as a backdrop for this Christmas Tree:
But most of the best edibles I found in Sydney’s botanical gardens.
They had some nice looking eggplants:
And it was good to see their plants fall prey to predators as often as mine.
I did think it was a bit cruel to net the strawberries thus placing them out of reach of small hands….
The bamboo supporting the nets looked good though and I liked the galvanised iron of raised beds:
But most of all I enjoyed the uniformity of the rows of greens – the sort of symetry I though only Mark achieved in his Veg Plot.
Ha! I’ll take that mention as a compliment…(as I’m sure it was intended). I don’t like the galvanised iron beds. They look too artificial, and somehow too stark. I prefer the natural look of real wood.
Of course its a compliment, I have to say though I do like stark plant and metal combinations though – I guess its all about different people having different asthetics.
It does look like Mark’s garden! Ha! I like the galvanized raised beds. I pretty much will make anything into a raised bed. As long as it holds dirt, it’s good. Those would likely get too hot here though.
I like the idea that anything can be a raised bed. Have you read Dancing with Frogs blog – she has an old fridge (or is it a freezer) that she’s growing veg in?
Must admit we don’t concentrate on symmetry – some things are allowed to do there own thing. Parsley is very decorative as a border plant though. I do have a try at an ornamental kitchen garden style in some of our allotment beds but haven’t cracked it yet!
I’m not very good at symmetry either, although I do admire it in others. I don’t really have room for synmmetry – I’m more of a bung them all in and see what happens type gardener. I think ornamental kitchen gardens are really hard – either you end up with dodgy varieties of things that look great but don’t neccessarily taste it, or you have far more flowers than veg and so the yield from the space is dramatically reduced. I would love to see how you go this year.
Funny, I never thought of the botanical gardens growing veggies. I might have to take the kids and check it out!
The veggie section did look like it was a recent addition – those raised beds look pretty pristine. I enjoyed it and the kids had a good run around (although they were more interested in running ahead to see the harbour than checking out the plants)- those gardens are in a great location aren’t they.