Monday Harvest – 17th November 2014

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Liz

My first harvest this week was something of a bonus, coming from self seeded broad bean plants.  My lethargy last Autumn was so great I sowed nothing but happily my failure to effectively clean up last years plants brought these.

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I ate them all myself double podded and sautéed with green garlic and feta sprinkled on top.  Healthy decadence.

And now for some more intentional plantings:

Before we left on holidays I did manage to plant a few things, one of which were carrots.  I thinned these today and shared the results with Mr 5 and the guinea pigs (Mr 5 and I ate the orange bits, Mr 5 and the guinea pigs ate the green bits.)

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The other thing I sowed before we left were radishes.  They grew a lot more quickly than the carrots:

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This will be my lunch.

Note: my son’s wrist is not injured – the bandage is a fashion choice…..

My only other harvests this week were herbs – mint, parsley & oregano.  But before I go two other items.

  1. Check in to Daphne’s Dandelions for other Harvest Monday posts
  2. Can anyone tell one of my readers what is wrong with her tomato plant?  I’ve given her general advice like watering, but not over watering, and to ensure the plant is well fed with the right nutrients etc but I’m not sufficiently well versed on diseases to know what is wrong with this plant.  Any ideas?

Tomato disease

The reader posted this on my Facebook page:

I am a beginner tomato gardener and I have some issues with my tomatoes that I cannot figure out and thought that you might be able to give me some advice. My tomato leaves are drying and breaking off. They are not turning brown but just getting dry and breaking off. They are getting only morning sun and are not too exposed to the sun. 

 Thoughts?

 

 

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Posted in Spring Harvesting | Tagged | 13 Comments

Parsnips – A crop too many?

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Liz

I’m having a rethink about what I should be growing in my garden.  Sometimes I think I like the idea of a vegetable more than the reality of it.  Take parsnips for example.  I like parsnips, I enjoy them roasted, I enjoy them in soup…and that’s probably it.  They are… fine, enjoyable to eat but not something I crave and that is the essence of the problem.

Last year I grew parsnips over winter, harvested them (except one), managed to make a couple of batches of soup with them and promptly forgot all about them.  Then this year parsnips appeared in my garden, self sown from the one I forgot to harvest.  This is what they looked like in mid September:

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By the time I got back from holiday in October they looked like this

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So I harvested them.  I pulled one, I pulled two, soon I’d pulled the whole lot.  Some were perfect(ish if a little small), others were those weird shapes that don’t make it to the supermarket shelves.

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They filled my basket.

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Then they sat in that same basket for 3 days, looking at me accusingly until they started looking too wrinkly for me to bother to do anything with them.  So I composted them.

This happens to me quite a lot.  And not always with parsnips.  It’s fine when I’m growing cut and come again type crops, but when its something that needs to be dealt with then and there, and I don’t truly love it, the motivation slips and the harvest is wasted.

So with this in mind I’m going to be more selective about what I plant.  From now on I’m only going to grow things that will motivate me to cook, rather than things that require motivation to cook.  I need to finally admit to myself that my garden simply isn’t big enough to grow everything that I might like to cook.  I’m better sticking to the things I know I’ll use.  For me that’s not parsnips.  So instead I’ll just wait until the mood for soup strikes and buy them from the Farmer’s Market.  Or better yet knick them from my dad.

Sound familiar, do you grow things only for them to end up as compost?

 

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Posted in Planning | Tagged | 30 Comments

Monday Harvest – 10th November 2014

Posted on November 10, 2014 by Liz

It’s been a long time since I wrote a post and even longer since I wrote a Monday Harvest post.  In a nutshell we’ve been away, mostly to spend time with my partners relatives in the UK but also to Amsterdam, Paris and Shanghai.  I get a bit paranoid about posting about holidays on the blog so I figured silence was better than burglary (of course this might also be a convenient excuse for lethargy…..).

6 weeks is a long time to leave garden, even if you have a very helpful next door neighbour to water and generally keep an eye on things.  When I left I planted out a few seedlings and just left the perennials to reappear after their winter hibernation.  This is what I had to eat upon my return.

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Lots of herbs (not all pictured).  The parsley was bolting but still had lots of edible leaves. Ditto the coriander.  The oregano and tarragon had started growing and were looking great.  And the much abused mint was happy in its what would be its 6th, and counting, home.

The lettuces and silver beet I planted out pre departure had reached edible size.

Trip 2014 156 (1024x678)But most interesting were all the things that I hadn’t planted that were starting to appear.  Beans, lots of them, tomatoes (to be expected), flowers – Cosmos in particular, coriander, the occasional pepper and these parsnips that germinated during winter but were now ready for harvest.

 

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I will try and post more regularly now that I am back and gardening again.  In the meantime I will reply to all the comments that I have had since I last posted.  Apologies for the delay but I will try and respond.  In the meantime check out what others are harvesting by visiting Daphne’s Dandelions and following all the links.

On an administrative note: Due to the number of spammers registering on my site I am having to delete all the sites users.  If you registered to receive email updates by registering as a user then you will need to click on the Subscribe icon to ensure you continue to notifications about new posts.

 

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Posted in Autumn Harvesting | Tagged | 17 Comments

The product of neglect

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Liz

Regular readers will have noticed the sporadic (read non existent) nature of my posting of late.  This has mainly been due to a lack of inspiration although I prefer to blame work commitments, family, kinder committees and a raft of other excuses.  The real truth is that my garden has been less than inspiring to write about, which coupled with my transient creativity has produced,  well…nothing.

Normally the things in my garden effectively write their own posts, Monday Harvests, end of month round up of growth rates, seeds sown, seedlings planted and so on.  The problem is that with the exception of parsley and the last of the chillies I haven’t been harvesting much of anything.  Had I planted anything in Autumn this could have probably been avoided but I didn’t and I think you can probably imagine the rest…..  A weed infested chaos with the odd over ripe capsicum rotting quietly on the plant.  Not attractive and certainly not inspirational.

I finally got round to cleaning all the mess up last weekend ( a big thankyou to my sister in laws for her excellent broom work) and guess what I found…..

…..

along with the mass of weeds, dead plants and tomato stakes which ceased being useful quite some months ago, I found inspiration.

I hadn’t gardened but fortunately nature often takes care of itself.  Under the debris I found broad beans, parsley and parsnips:

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More surprisingly (it being winter and all) I also found beans and a single, remarkably healthy, tomato plant.

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I had run out of traditional plant guards but figured some glad wrap may help protect it.  I don’t really want to grow tomatoes in this spot again this year but when a plant is happy to withstand single digit (Celcius) temperatures it hardly seems appropriate to lecture it on the importance of crop rotation.

I hope it survives, if nothing else so that I have something to blog about……

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Should a gardener keep chooks?

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Liz

When we first got our chooks (they were day old chicks at the time) in February last year the answer to that question would have been a resounding yes!  In fact I wrote a glowingly romantic Top 5 post about the highlights of keeping chickens.   A year in and I’m not so sure…

You see chooks are very, very destructive.  As soon as your silver beet seedlings go in they will be dug up, pecked over, trampled on, and then ceremoniously buried, as the chicken spies the possibility of a small grub somewhere just to the left of where you planted.  Mature plants are not much better off, their leaves shredded and then finally removed as the chook gets every last little morsel of green.

Not only that but they poo….everywhere!  We have a back door step coated in dried droppings, the trip to get eggs is akin to walking through a minefield and I have lost count of the amount of times I have had to tell my 4 year old not stop throwing the stuff at his sister.  It’s all quite unpleasant really.

All of this would be manageable, with a bit of fencing and good natured humour if it weren’t for one simple fact.  Chickens can fly.  Higher than I thought.  Before I got chickens I thought their main flying efforts would be a little flap which got them not much higher than I can jump, (which, incidentally is embarrassingly low according to the jumping test thingy they have at Melbourne’s Scienceworks museum), but no.  They can get higher than that.  Higher than the 80cm plastic fencing that I put round the garden to secure parts of it.  It may not be normal bird high, but it is still too high for my liking.

So what to do?  I have decided on segmenting off a part of the garden as theirs.  I have filled it with my potted plants as they can’t dig around them as much, and I have erected a new 1.2m fence around it.  (I say “I” but actually it was my partner, but his work counts as mine doesn’t it?)

Just in case the birds are Olympic athletes in disguise I have secured the fence panels with star posts that are taller than the fence, enabling me to increase its height if necessary.  Will this be enough?  I hope so because despite their generally messiness I love them really.  Just like my children.  And unlike my children they give me eggs pretty much everyday.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 28 Comments