VEGGIE GARDEN BLOG PAGE 2015-18
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Blog Page 2018 - current
Blog Page 2018 - current
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BLOG PAGE - 2016 to 2018
Hi, this is the blog page where I can add some details about the garden that just don't seem to fit in the VEGGIES page. This page will be a running account of how the garden is going so there should be something new to see here every few weeks (except in winter).
The garden continues to be a bit patchy with some sections performing better than others. It is now early 2018 and everything has just had a feed with general purpose fertiliser and the citrus has all had a feed with specific citrus fertiliser.
We have also added some granulated soil wetter in preparation for the heat that we know will soon arrive and the compost from the bin has been spread around some of the more sandy looking areas.
The shallot tops were all browning off so they have now been harvested and a bowl full will be set aside in the shed for re-planting after summer is over.
Setting aside some shallots for re-planting in autumn.
It appears as though we have some accidental pumpkins growing where I planted egg-plant seeds. We never have much luck with egg-plants but we have bought 3 potted varieties from Bunnings and at least as I type this, they seem to all be growing reasonably well.
Three different varieties of egg-plant.
We are trying (once more) to propagate the pandan palm and have selected a small off-shoot that has been planted in a nice cool damp area under the grape vine. It is too early to say whether this has been a success yet and even if it does take, it might just give up the ghost in winter. Watch this page for more on that later.
Trying to propagate the pandan plant
Our veggies in the enclosure are still doing well. As this is the first growing season it is hard to say whether this will be a good buy or not as it is quite expensive ($59) and will have to last several years for it to be worth while.
The only problem with this type of enclosure is that it totally excludes flying insects and this would be a problem is you are growing plants that require pollination.
It is nice to see the lovely intact leaves that I know are 100% pesticide free.
Chinese greens growing well in the enclosure.
The biggest crop this year is beans. we have several varieties growing and we have added a winged bean to the mix to see if we can get something really unusual to grow well.
We are getting a bowl full of beans every 4-5 days at the moment so we will probably have to blanch and freeze the excess that we are bound to have.
Beans and basil.
It has taken rather a long time to get anywhere this year but the garden is finally starting to look a bit more like it should. We did add some lime to areas that were doing very badly and this may have helped.
The pictures below show how things have improved since late spring.
HALT THE BUTTERFLY ATTACKS! (we hope)
In an attempt to stop the ravages of cabbage white caterpillars, we have bought a 3 metre cover that will (hopefully) keep the veggies safe from attack. The enclosure is sold by Bunnings for $59 and has to be ordered specifically as they don't hold stock in stores.
Time will tell if this cover is any good and actually does what is it supposed to but if we want any leafy greens this year, we have to try something different.
BEANS FAILING BADLY
Our beans came up ok but now they are in an awful state. They have been watered properly and fed well but still they are looking like they will keel over any day now.
I am going to add some lime to the soil and hope this might help a bit but it may already be too late.
GRAPE VINE GETS A NEW SUPPORT
The old vine support collapsed last year and we were looking at getting some sort of arbour to train the vine over this season.
The cost of buying one ready made was too much and our building skills are somewhat lacking so the purchase of some nice metal grating and 4 6 foot metal stakes solved the problem and cost less than $150. The nice thing about this solution is that we can add to the frame at any time and it is easy to remove if we no longer want to use it.
All material came from Bunnings - yes we are starting to sound like and advert for the business but in truth most of the stuff we buy comes from there.
BUTTERFLIES, CABBAGE WHITE BUTTERFLIES!!!!!
The drated things are in plague proportions this year and there are thousands of them. Yesterday there must have been in excess of 100 in our front and back gardens. They are feeding on the flowers in the front and heading straight to the back garden to lay their eggs on our veggies.
We have now declared war on them and are killing as many as we can catch, plus spraying Dipel on our vegetables to try and salvage something.
Seedlings are chewed off before they even get a chance to get going so the garden is looking rather empty.
Of course I know the pests will win in the end, they always do but meanwhile we are fighting the good fight.
Ok, so it is now late October and we were away for a few weeks so I have another excuse for a late post.
The bad news is that the watering system failed while we were away so the plants have been very slow to start growing.
The lemon tree needs a bit of a prune to get it back into shape and it also needs some fertiliser and trace elements as some of the leaves are looking a bit yellow. It has been given some Sealsol to get things moving and the rest will follow shortly.
The bananas were looking dreadful and they have never flowered so they have been cut right back and are already starting to re-grow. How they progress will remain to be seen. We bought them more for the use of the leaves in cooking so we aren't too worried about getting fruit from them.
If this looks like complete chaos to you then, yes, you are right. There were a lot of old seeds in the shed and instead of planting everything out in nice neat rows, the whole lot just got dumped into one of the garden beds and now it will be a case of 'survival of the fittest' and we will see just what comes out of this patch.
Cape gooseberry bushes are coming up all over the place so we hope to be getting a good crop of fruit a little later in the year. They can be a bit of a problem as they actually grow everywhere and have to be controlled or they just take over the whole garden.
The pandan plant is now back outside after keeping warm in the laundry over winter. It has had a bit of a tidy up and seems to still be doing quite well. I would love to work out how to propagate this plant and get more growing in different pots.
The main garden bed is still looking a bit miserable, mostly due to the failed retic while we were away but now that it is getting watered again, things are starting to improve a bit.
There are beans and greens in this patch but as usual, we haven't kept track of exactly what was planted so it will be interesting to see what pops up over the coming weeks.
The grape vine got a hard prune back in winter and we are planning to put up a structure for it to climb over instead of just using the shed.
This will have to be built in the next couple of weeks and then the vine can be trained over it as it grows.
Hopefully this will improve production and make harvesting much easier.
The last picture in this blog post shows our rather poorly looking lemon grass, some emerging celery and a very dead pencil pine.
We have no idea what brought about the pine's demise but once it is completely gone, there will be a bit more room in the veggie patch to put another fruit tree.
The lemon grass has been broken up and re-planted in several areas. We lost the original clump but two others are still doing well enough.
We are still trying to cut costs in the garden as it was getting rather expensive to maintain and once costs go up too much then veggies from the shops start to look more attractive.
We are still a long way from being anything like self-sufficient but that isn't really the point for us anyway. We just like to have fun growing stuff without it soaking up too much money or taking up too much time.
Well it has been a while since the last blog post and the main reason for that has been a Long, cold, wet winter. The garden has been completely neglected apart from a bit of weeding and we really haven't got much from it over winter.
Winter casualties have included almost all our chilli plants, so getting new seedlings from Bunnings last season really didn't help much.
The non-fruit producing banana plants look like they have been hit with a large hammer. The Thai mint has all died and the ginger we so lovingly tended all came to nothing.
All things considered, it was a pretty dismal year.
The garden isn't completely empty, there are some soft lettuces and a few other leafy greens that the snails are having a great time dining on, so at least they are happy.
Cape gooseberries have come up all over the place - including the front garden - so we are just letting them grow as we haven't had any fruit from those plants for quite a long time.
We are still fighting the cooch grass - don't you just hate that stuff - it is an ongoing fight that the grass will eventually win I am sure.
The Goji plants (yes there are several of them now) are all in their usual winter stick like form but we are now confident that when (if) the sun ever returns and this bleak winter ever ends, that they will all come back to life.
Our citrus plants are all doing quite well apart from the usual leaf miner attacks but most are big enough now to withstand the onslaught until we start spraying with white oil in early spring.
Plan 'A' is to sow a few seeds in a couple of weeks and just sit back and see what happens. This year we aren't adding any fertiliser or adding soil but will just add compost. We are cutting back on costs and want to see how this compares with the years when we have put a lot of money and effort into the garden.
Watch this space around the end of September to see how things are progressing.
Time plods and some parts of the garden have done well but others are still not so good. The worst of all crops this year have been the tomatoes. You wouldn't think it to look at the photo below but we planted these from seed and they are worse than useless.
Apart from the normal pest problems that we have been fighting with tomato dust, this particular variety are hard and leathery and have no shelf life at all. As soon as they are picked they wrinkle and go bad. Unfortunately we can't remember the variety we picked or we would certainly name them as something to be avoided.
Looking very nice to start with, these tomatoes are hard and go bad as soon as they are picked.
One crop that is doing very well is the zucchinis. Despite planting the seeds all at the same time, a couple of plants took longer to come up and this has saved the whole crop. We now have male and female flowers open at the same time and manually pollinating each morning has helped ensure that most female flowers will be fertilised and we now have an over supply of zucchinis.
A few of the zucchinis we have picked with more to come. Also the first of our chillies for the year.
Since the picture above also has some chillies, I will talk about those now as well. As our old crop lasted only 1 year, we tried to grow chillies from saved seed but nothing sprouted, so we went to Bunnings and picked up some seedlings (making sure we chose varieties that weren't too hot). This has worked fairly well as almost all the seedlings have survived and are now starting to produce chillies.
You will note that we have picked these while they are still green and the reason for this is we chop them up and pickle them for use as a garnish on some different noodle dishes. They still have a bit of heat but not so much that they burn like they would if they were red.
For the past couple of weeks we have been starting to harvest some Asian greens. Mostly pak choy and siew pak choy. These were grown from seed and have grown well.
Some other Asian greens have not done as well and are still looking very weedy. Others have run to seed very quickly but at least one patch has done pretty well.
The good things about these is that they don't get attacked as badly by cabbage white caterpillars as vegetables like cabbage. We have used no pesticides at all on these plants and you can see that they are fairly free from pests.
One plant that is doing reasonably well, that we really didn't intend to grow, is ginger. We put spare ginger root into a pot to keep it for cooking. It keeps better that way than putting it in a fridge.
As the warm weather started some of the roots started to sprout so we have left them alone and continued to water the pot. It will be interesting to see how much extra ginger root has grown once we decide to dig them up.
After being pruned back in the winter the apple trees have responded by growing profusely. There are even a few decent looking apples developing so it would be nice if this accidental crop turned out to be a good one to keep growing.
Even if we don't get much in the way of apples, the apple wood is very good for smoking food and we have built a cold smoker so that we can smoke cheese, pork, sausages, fish etc. at home.
Although it isn't a garden related item, it may be worth adding a few pictures here in case anyone is interested in making their own cold smoker.
The smoker was made from plans that you can find on YouTube and the results were as follows:
The large cylinder was once a spaghetti container and the piping came from the plumbing supplies are in Bunnings. There is a small pipe running inside the larger pipe and an aquarium pump is used to push air through past the 'T' section and into the large box behind when it is all connected. There are some small holes drilled into the bottom edge of the spaghetti container so that air can be drawn through and up into the smoking box.
A hole is drilled in the top of the spaghetti container and a flange washer is bolted on top so that a pipe can be screwed in.
The handle on the container is just an old draw handle from an Op-Shop. (We knew it would be useful one day.)
The air tube (attached to the right hand side of the pipe) is run up through a smaller pipe (see below) and protrudes about 2 inches beyond the 'T' section. This is what helps draw air up through the main cylinder.
The smaller pipe fits inside the larger pipe and protrudes past the 'T' section. The air tube from the fish tank pump sticks out of the smaller tube but is not seen in this picture.
The smoke generator screws onto the side of the smoking box via a flange washer. A piece of wood was inserted inside the box to strengthen the connection and a hole drilled where the pipe attaches.
This is how it looks when everything is in place.
The lid of the spaghetti container simply slides off so that wood chips can be placed inside and lit from the small holes on the bottom edge (not quite seen here). A couple of metal racks have been mounted inside the smoking box and a few small holes drilled in the sides near the bottom to encourage air-flow.
A couple of hands full of dried apple wood chips are enough to run the smoker for a couple of hours. This is generally enough to properly smoke most cheeses and meats.
As it is a cold smoker, the food is not warmed or cooked and in the case of meat, it can then be frozen and brought out when needed.
Well back to the garden again....
The strawberry guava is finally producing some fruit and we are hoping it will develop so that we can find out what it tastes like. The goji bush is getting bigger and producing more small berries but it will be some time before there are enough to be useful. It is self-seeding and a number of small goji plants are coming up around the same area.
The goji berries are very small.
One last plant to mention is the chives. These have been growing well for a couple of years now and are getting larger. They flower and then die back a bit but so far they have been re-growing well during summer.
Updated : January 19th 2017
Well so much for 'It shouldn't be long now until there are some more posts and pictures', it has taken more time than I thought to have anything worth talking about.
To be honest we were away for a few weeks so that is part of the reason for this late post but the garden just hasn't 'taken off' this year and things are still looking rather sparse.
To start with there are some plants that not only survived the very long winter this year, but have thrived.
The Vietnamese mint and laksa plant have both done very well and have spread out. The Vietnamese mint isn't nearly as invasive as English mint but it still needs to be cut back a bit from time to time.
Vietnamese mint
Laksa plant
Other plants doing well include the strawberry guava (we are very interested to see what these taste like when they finally fruit) and the Calamondin that has more than doubled in size. It is already producing fruit and looks like being a great addition to the garden.
Strawberry Guava
Both the lemon tree and curry leaf tree are thriving and the grape vine is getting a bit bigger each year. One group of plants that have done very badly are the chillies. Usually we get two years out of a chilli plant but this year the winter lasted so long that most of the 1 year old plants have died. We did plant some seed but that failed to germinate so we have resorted to planting seedlings. We use chillies all the time and they are expensive to buy so growing them in the garden is very worth while.
Chilli seedlings
We now only have 2 lemon grass plants left out of the 4 that were growing. In order to keep generating new plants we occasionally pull out a section an re-plant it in another area. So far this has worked well and hopefully there will always be a plentiful supply.
Lemon grass
The goji berry plant has come back to life and more than doubled in size since the warmer weather started. Over winter it was nothing by a bare set of sticks.
The birds are very fond of the berries when it fruits but we don't mind as it is always nice to attract native birds to the garden.
Goji plant
We have planted zucchini again this year but we keep on making the same mistake and have to learn to stagger planting. The reason for this is that the plants have male and female flowers and you need both blooming at the same time in order for the female flowers to produce fruit. If you plant the seeds all at the same time the male flowers all come out first and then the female flowers come out later. This reduces the number of flowers that will successfully pollinate so next time we will TRY and remember this.
Zucchini
There aren't many new plants we are trying this year but we are waiting on some snake beans to germinate. We got these free from the Baldivis Seed Library (at the book library). This is a great initiative that gives people free seeds and we are donating our spare seeds to the library for them to give away to others.
As for the other plantings this year, there are tomatoes, beans, kang kong, pak choy, chives, celery and a number of assorted Asian greens.
Over-all the garden just isn't looking that good. It has been mulched, fertilised and weeded but still many seeds have failed to germinate and much of the garden remains empty.
Updated : December 13th 2016
Well spring is finally here (although to be honest it really doesn't start until September 20th) and some work has finally begun on the veggie patch.
Over winter we have pruned the grape vine, lemon tree and apple trees, cut back the cape gooseberries (maybe too much as they haven't managed to grow again yet) and generally pulled out old plants and dug the beds over a couple of times to get rid of the weeds.
The biggest problem in the garden is cooch grass. It is an utter menace and it grows into everything. While I don't like using chemical weed killer I have started to use it on this grass but unless I use a very strong dose, it seems to regard it as fertiliser.
No seeds have been planted yet but we are planning on buying some more fruit trees and planting those along the fence. The central veggie patch will be used for the green leafy vegetables in an attempt to have more control over the garden pests that attack them.
...a bit later ...
Well we have planted all our first lot of seeds and the seedlings are just pushing their way up through the soil. It will be a few weeks yet before we have any results to display and the only crop of note so far in the veggie patch is celery. It is all self-seeded from a couple of plants last year but it looks like the best batch of celery we have ever had!
It shouldn't be long now until there are some more posts and pictures in this blog, so as they say, 'watch this space'.
The different varieties of chilli plants we put in are now all starting to produce. All seem to be pretty strong, quite a bit hotter than the old variety (top right) we are more used to.
The roundish yellow variety are habanero, the two large fat ones are jalapeno, slim hot cayenne (top left), hoa lat (the small ones in the centre) and Hungarian black are all shown here. Don't let the innocent looking yellow habaneros fool you, they may be the hottest of the whole lot!
Our goji (or wolf) berry experiment seems to be going to plan so far. The plant (although rather spindly) is doing well and has flowered and now we are starting to see some of the tear drop shaped orange berries appearing.
We have no real idea what we are going to do with the berries but we assume the internet will provide enough instruction on how to use them once we have enough.
The Calamondin lime is doing well and is now flowering again. Some fruit are setting so we are looking forward to making use of these in the coming year. We have been giving all our citrus plants extra water during the hot days and all are doing well except our Tahitian lime that really has been a miserable failure. It is stunted and just never seems to get going. There are a few plants on our 'cull list' for winter and unless this starts to improve rapidly, it will be the first one to go.
Somewhat to our surprise, the strawberry plants are still doing well, producing fruit and expanding. We had thought the really hot days would have put an end to them but here we are at the end of January and they are doing very well.
They haven't produced a great deal of fruit this year but we hope we will get more next year.
Many people go to a lot of trouble with strawberries by building up mounds and putting down plastic. We haven't bothered with any of that and just plonked them down into our normal veggie patch. So far we haven't had any pest problems but we do try to keep the area around the plants cleared of anything likely to harbour pests.
With the hot weather the capsicum and chillies are all doing well. They flourish during this time of year and we collect enough to keep us going over the winter and spring months by drying and freezing them. So far we are not experiencing the pest problems we have had in the past couple of years. We can't be sure why this is but we have been using Dipel and tomato dust in the garden. Perhaps this has also benefited the capsicums and chillies too.
In previous years the red capsicums have really suffered from attack by pests but so far this year (touch wood) they are doing much better.
One mistake we have been making with chillies is to wait until the current plants die (usually at 2 years of age) and then plant a complete set of new ones. What we should be doing is to stagger planting so that some new plants are coming on each year. That way we will overcome the problem of not having any mature plants at the start of each spring.
The lemon balm (above) is starting to flower and hopefully will eventually produce some seeds. That would give us a bit of insurance against the cold months when the plant dies back. This plant doesn't seem to be anywhere as invasive as the English mint - which we are always pulling out of areas it has invaded.
Tomatoes this year have been the best for the last 4 years. Everything we have planted and plenty that were accidental plantings from our compost have all flourished and produced plenty of nice juicy red tomatoes. Everything from the heritage varieties to cherry tomatoes, Romas and some larger growing varieties, have all done very well and we currently have enough fruit to start making so lovely Indian chutney. You can get the recipe from our Lets Eat Malaysian website.
The pandan plant has outgrown its original pot so we have split it up and are hoping it will continue to do well. The main concern is still the chilly winter months so we will always bring a potted plant indoors to make sure we keep a healthy specimen.
The grapes are reaching harvest time, probably by mid-February they will all be ripe enough to start eating. We are pinching the more yellowed ones directly off the vine already but most bunches are not quite sweet enough yet. Once they turn from green to a slight yellow, then they are ready to eat. In past years we have been too impatient so this time we are waiting longer. We estimate there are about 10kg of grapes on the vine this time.
Updated : January 31st 2016
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