Ahhh ... Spring!

Ahem ... yes a time of massive reproduction in the garden!

And with these phallic fellas, it's hard not to see sex everywhere ;)

Mind you, it's the female asparagus that produces the fattest spears! I have grown these babies from seed, so they are two years old (I think). I have left the cutting down to next season as it is not good to do this too early. With weeds, neglect and gardener's laziness, a number of spears still popped up. I did pinch one to taste and it was delicious - crisp and light - no tough skin.


Daffodil flowers in a pot - for sheer perfume and visual pleasure!



A polyanthus that flowers madly every year a happy escapee from a pot.




Peach blossom. Sadly my peach has been affected by leaf curl ...



and it's too late to do anything about it this season. I've just pulled off some leaves, sprayed it and fed it with seaweed tonic and hope for the best.



At least the Cercis (Forest pansy) is happy!

The trouble with Broccoli (and other brassicas)

The trouble I've had with brassicas over the past few seasons were explained by a few lines I read recently in a gardening magazine. You see, each year they take forever to grow and then bolt with the early spring warmth before heads are fully formed or big enough. I thought I kept getting them in too late, but I didn't realise that inconsistent watering and feeding (guilty!) can cause them (or indeed any plant) to bolt. Derrr! Well it makes sense now. The plants think they might die and so try to reproduce (flower).

I did however get a couple of very nice savoy cabbages (here's one below) and lots of sprouting broccoli (no waiting for just one flower head).


Bolted Romanesco broccoli - not as impressive as last year's.


Still tasted ok though :)




I've also got some kohlrabi in that I'm about to harvest as they threaten to bolt (with the warm weather this time!) and am intrigued to see what they taste like. They look rather like aliens!!

Plenty O' Pumpkins

A Japanese Pumpkin self-seeded in the patch (from compost and a commercial pumpkin we must have bought). They weren't the typical shaped Jap. pumpkin, but I heard from a veggie-wise friend that they can grow in all kinds of shapes. It is true you can easily grow them up fences, along wires and even up a garden stake! They just grow a nice thick stalk for support. I ensured that the vine could get some roots in the ground along the way to feed different clusters of pumpkins.

I got about 13 all up (I thinned out almost that many again) and they are delicious. I still have several on top of the kitchen cupboards, having given some to friends and eaten some roasted or as soup.

My beau made a pumpkin soup for my birthday and I had carved out the pumpkin for the bowl (I'd always wanted to do that!). It went down well at the party and tasted divine!

(there are cape gooseberries on the table in the background - we had a great crop off just one plant for months and months as we had a long summer this year).

Potatoes Galore!

(L - the waxy white, firm Coliban - R - the creamier, softer Dutch Cream

I tried a few different varieties of potato this season. White - Dutch Cream, Coliban, Pontiac, Nicola and Sebago; Pink - Desiree. A friend gave me some seed potatoes. I have to say after a few seasons now, the Dutch Creams are still my favourite and their flavour changes even with storage time. Fresh out of the garden and into a potato salad or steamed - they are to die for! You cannot get that rich creamy flavour from the shop-bought ones. The home-grown Desirees were pretty yummy too!



We had literally buckets of them and I weighed them to collect some of my stats :)
We lost a few (mostly Dutch Cream) due to very heavy prolonged rain and reduced drainage ( due to clay soil - still!). They rotted in the ground - bummer. Probably lost at least a kilo :(

Still, I planted 12 potatoes, most of them cut into pieces and got a total yield of just over 21kg! At say only $3 a kilo for pesticide-free home-grown delicious potatoes, that's $63 worth! The Sebago had an astonishing yield - one seed potato of about 100g (cut into pieces) yielded 5.85 kilos of potatoes. That's nearly a 59x yield by weight!



I laid them out in a dark room to let them dry out a bit after all that rain. I had many more potatoes than shown in this picture. We are still eating them now (4 months later) and had potato and pumpkin mash using our home-grown pumpkins for dinner tonight. YUM!

Tonnes of Top Tasty Tomatoes

Well, not quite tonnes. But kilos and kilos. I made two mistakes with tomatoes this season - I got them in the ground too late for our slightly shorter mountains summer and I viciously pruned them to allow large fruit to get larger - I did this too late and lost lots of baby tomatoes. But despite all that, we have extra tomatoes for sauces/pickles or soup to eat and store, with a few green ones to ripen or pickle.

Typical morning sweep's harvest:




unripe Rouge De Marmande (above) and Martino's Red Roma (below)


And of course there were some for the slugs to enjoy!


I tried quite a few varieties this year for fun. I also planted some seeds saved from last season. Most worked and one looked like it had crossed and had weird-looking fruit (a failed beefsteak).

All up I planted Black Russian, Cream Sausage, Martino's Red Roma, Roma, Amish Paste, Tommy Toe, Rouge De Marmande and some cherry tomatoes in a pot by the back door. The Tommy Toe fruited prolifically and tasted lovely but I was surprisingly more taken with the (yellow) Cream Sausage that had a firm and quite sweet (less acidic) flesh. I also loved the Rouge De Marmande - a perfect mix of firm, juicy, tasty and sizeable.


Mostly Tommy Toes (small round), Rouge De Marmande (large ones on right)


(Above) Tommy Toe (top), (L-R) Cream Sausage, Martino's Red Roma, Amish Paste
and below a small Rouge De Marmande, Cream Sausage and Black Russian.

And below the lovely and striking difference in texture and colour of these three (shown with chopped up squash)


There are supposedly around 7500 varieties of tomatoes to choose from in the world!! A far cry from the few varieties sold in stores. So far I still prefer the Amish Paste to the Roma for taste and texture, the Rouge De Marmande and Black Russian for good performance in cooler climates, juicy, tasty flesh and long-yields, and Cream Sausage for sweetness and chunky, firm texture. The Tommy Toes are good for ridiculously large numbers of large juicy cherry-like tomatoes with a slightly acidic flavour.

Honestly, you could spend your whole gardening life just trying different tomatoes!

Amusingly, according to Wikipedia, the country known for its famous pasta sauces and love of tomatoes grew only 17% of the number of tomatoes that China grew in 2008.

Rain, Hail, Blistering Heat and a Surprise

The poor veggie patch has been subjected to near 40 degree heat, two freak heavy hail storms and some thundery showers for some relief in the last few weeks. I just got the shade cloth up before this last heat-wave and I think that's helped a lot, particularly for the lettuce and bean seedlings that are just too young to survive the big fry.

The espaliered apples and a self-seeded pumpkin had some of their leaves almost shredded.





But none of this crazy weather has deterred my strawberries who have veggie patch domination plans of their own!:


And you can't keep a good plant down ... a surprise flower popped up from a bulb buried in dirt I'd dug up for a path to our studio:




We've got a couple of these in our garden - do any Blue Mountains people know what it is? I hope it's not a weed, 'cos it's a spectacular flower. We do have a lot of bulbs around the garden that were planted by previous occupants.

Where did the year go?

My favourite spinach for 2009 - Southern European Spinach

Well the year flew past and I went through stages of business and laziness with the veggie patch, still managing to produce food even when doing little. The plants that bolted in our unseasonably early warm weather are now producing beautiful seeds for me to collect. At about $2.50 to $3.00 a pack for organic heirloom seeds, the bolting plants are still worth something and then after
seed harvest, they are of course, composted, ready to go back into the veggie patch several months later. I love nature's recycling system!

I tried using toilet rolls for seed germination. I'm not convinced they worked as well as the seeds in the plastic black seedling containers that were probably warmer and germinated more successfully. Also planting the toilet rolls in the ground sounds good, but they take ages to break down. I'd be more inclined to just recycle them. They may also be glued together with something yukky, so I probably won't bother so much with them. I tried putting the seeds in toilet rolls under plastic but that didn't seem to help.

I received a red currant plant as a gift - even in its first season, it produced about 1/3 punnet's worth of currants which went into a glorious summer pudding for a New Year's Eve dinner party (thanks to my partner, a skilled cook).

Some radishes were rather amusing :)

I left the brassicas to grow as long as I could. It was a good thing, too as I was surprised by a huge head of purple broccoli that wasn't there last time I looked!!



Green Mignonette, Australian Yellow Leaf, Purple Oakleaf (not shown) and Forellenschuss (not shown) lettuces provided us with months of greens for yummy fresh salads and they are so easy to grow. The yellow leaf lettuce was the least bitter of all the lettuces, but I like bitter greens anyway - they are very good for you and the slugs and snails don't bother much with them - maybe just some of the outer leaves.

The golden-podded snow-peas continued to give us lovely crisp pods for a number of months, just from growing in a big trough along a sunny trellised wall and I have saved some of the finest peas, ready for next season. Even the neglected broad beans growing near the compost bins (not in the veggie patch) in less prepared soil still produced beans.




The patch goes through stages from partially bare, ready for new plantings, to feral (late spring).


The strawberries (Cambridge Rival) produced strawberries so sweet they almost tasted like sherbert. Sadly though, too much leaf growth, not enough flowers and enthusiastic slugs reduced the yield, but the plants have gone nuts and I will have plenty of runners for next season. I planted them in an elongated, raised mound, covered with hessian to protect from fruit rot and reduce weeds.

I did have more success with carrots this year (and beetroot), but still had trouble getting the seeds to germinate in the first place.

And sometimes the ladybirds in the garden were just having too much fun on on the bok choy flowers!