Got some Garlic

It wasn't a good season for garlic. An early warm spring and no rain for months did not help the bulbs form to a good size before bolting. Still, I have enough for  next year's planting:

And I have some small, medium and tiny bulbs plaited loosely or tied together in a cool, dry part of the house.

Home grown garlic has a lovely 'zing' to it and I know what it was sprayed with: only water!

Strawberry Success

This is year's thinned out 'patchy  patch' with raised strawberry mounds and no weed mat or straw. I thought I'd try to give the slugs and snails fewer places to hide and it seems to be working.

Even with less plants (too lazy to replant the runners) I'm still pulling out a punnet's worth every 3 or 4 days. It's so good not to worry about how much they cost and eat big handfuls at a time, especially as I know they have not been sprayed with anything. Strawberries are one of those commercial crops that get a lot of pesticide treatment: http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy-eating/eat-safe/strawberries-pesticide-residue#slide-11. This variety is seriously sweet - Cambridge Rival.

But wait ...there's more!

With an unseasonably warm early Autumn, the tomatoes are still going and the strawberries are having a second flush. We just leave the apples on the tree until they drop.

Juicy and delicious

The espaliered apple trees continue to increase their productivity each season. Got about 60 Gala apples off one tree about 2m wide by 3m tall and the Granny Smith is finally getting going with about 10 apples this year. Meanwhile the rhubarb merrily ticks along repeatedly producing most of the year round...

Nothing is certain ... except death, taxes ... and change

After a lazy late winter/spring/summer! when I was too busy with my million other hobbies, the patch became weedy and difficult to get around. Plus I'd never netted it properly from our resident female bower birds and the occasional possum.

So after a dedicated weekend, I netted the patch, cleared the weeds off the path and used some scoria over newspaper for the new paths. I have used sawdust in the past and this works really well and you can scoop it on the the patch after it has rotted (takes a year or so!), but the little path around the patch is too small to do this easily, so the patch has gone a bit 'house and garden' :)

I found a use for some old ladders and trellis, providing a visually interesting climber for the peas:

Some crops left over from summer:
Rhubarb (Organic John gave me this healthy plant - I think it's had a bit too much nitrogen!):

Celery - I didn't know you could just pick the stalks as needed - bonus! I Haven't bothered blanching it (because I'm lazy - :)), so it's a bit more 'green' tasting than what I am used to (ie. more chlorophyll and more bitter (which is supposed to be good for you).

The Apples of My Eye

The Dwarf Gala apple tree, espaliered against the south fence of the veggie patch (but facing north) had babies for the first time this year. There were five crisp apples and on two occasions I had a hunch to pick them on a certain day, left it that night and the bower bird got in behind the netting against the fence. It's at least nice to know my instincts are in tune - just need to act on them sooner!

So she got the best looking apple and ate half (how nice that she left me some :^))



And the flavour? Delicious! Not quite as sweet as I'd expected, but not bitter and very crisp and juicy. In fact, I don't recall eating any apple that crisp and juicy. It just shows you how much is lost, the further away from 'fresh' that it gets.

Strawberry Delight

The strawberry patch went well this year, though the slugs ate quite a few. I used some garden-friendly snail-bait in a tube to tempt them away. But there were so many, I didn't worry too much about it.



I'm not sure if this is a biennial variety. They didn't do too much last season. It's a variety called "Cambridge Rival" and they are so sweet, they are almost like sherbert sweets - possibly even too sweet for me! I might get another variety that fruits at a different time to extend the strawberry season. I replanted some of the newer runners into a different section of the patch and used black plastic as a weed mat for the next season.