Garden Share Collective – September 2013

Another month, another In My Kitchen (to follow) and Garden Share Collective post. Doing these monthly, only reminds me how fast time is flying by. It’s spring!

The Garden Share Collection is just that, a collection of vegetable patches across Australia, New Zealand, England and the US, hosted by Lizzie at Strayed from the Table.

I encourage you to view my previous posts HERE to follow my garden progress throughout the last couple of months.

Regular readers would know, my husband is a horticulturist and works at a busy garden nursery. The first weekend of spring is the busiest of the year. Garden enthusiasts come out in their masses, stocking up on seeds, seedlings, punnets and pots. Compost and fertiliser are sold by the tonnes.

He comes home exhausted, often forgoing his lunch break to serve customers and water plants. I know while the days are getting longer, more hours of sunshine and warmth, I can’t rely on him much to help around our own backyard. This baby’s all mine to manage.

Working from home on my new job means I’m tied to the computer and phone indoors so during my lunch break and once 5pm hits, I’m itching to pop on my gum boots and head outdoors.

I do however have a little apprentice. She too likes to don her gumboots and grab her shovel to help Mummy

Our Kipfler and Pontiac potatoes are quietly multiplying in their hessian home, it’ll be another month or so before we unearth them and marvel at our crop

Our purple kale plants are in overdrive, producing so much kale we can’t keep up! Kale is on the menu daily and no one’s complaining.

Our brussel sprout plants we sowed from seeds don’t seem to be doing anything! I don’t know if they’re not happy or they’re just taking their sweet time. They’ve been in the ground for 3 months now and were in punnets another 2 months earlier.

Our sweet peas and broad beans continue to chase the sun.  They’re started producing flowers, peas and beans to follow!

Our broccoli continues to produce broccolini, never quite forming one large head, instead producing masses and masses of broccolini stems. They seem to multiply overnight and like our kale plant, we can’t keep up.  Fortunately the white cabbage moth seen circling the neighbourhood is yet to discover the plants and my crop is completely organic, spray free. Hoots cousin Hooty watches guard.

The pesky possums and bandicoots discovered the silverbeet like I knew they would, munching my crop right down to the stems. Another net was purchased and now protects my patch.

I had a tray of carrot seeds going in my laundry, basking in the suns warmth by the window. All 200 of them survived the cut, turning into seedlings. I planned on planting them out stage by stage over a week but my crazy girl had other plans, tipping the tray upside down. I was on my knees scavenging and saving as many seedlings as possible. They all had to go in the ground, pronto.

It took 4 hours but they were saved! I planted a carrot in pretty much any spare bit of soil I could find.  In the beginning, I ensured they were planted correctly, spacing them out and lowering the plants roots down into the earth as straight as I could to ensure we get correctly shaped carrots. By the 30^th or 40^th carrot, I was just shoving them in. My back was breaking and I had another 150+ to go. I just hope it was worth the effort and we get a great crop in 12 weeks time!

Along with the carrot seeds, we planted some Grosse Lisse tomatoes seeds. We never expected all 32 plants to take off. I couldn’t help but laugh and think of Glenda at Passion Fruit Gardens and her glut from 17 tomato plants. What are we going to do with 32 plants? I think we’ll give some plants away to family and only plant 10 or so plants in the yard. The seedlings are still too young to be transplanted into the ground so we’re still babysitting the tray for now.

Another throw out from my husband’s nursery was this Stevia plant. The main branch had broken and there was no way this baby was going to sell.  Mr Wog brought it home, fed it and within a couple of days, new leaves had emerged! I will be planting it in my original garden bed over the weekend. I have no idea what to do with the leaves or how to use it. Any suggestions welcome!

Our rocket and baby spinach plants continue to reward us daily with their leaves. We enjoy a rocket, spinach and lettuce salad daily with our dinner. Our coral lettuce plant however has started to go to seed, no matter how many times I snip away the flower stalk, it produces another one overnight. Time to replace the plant with another. They lived for 3 months and provided us lettuce leaves daily so a well-earned retirement is in order.

Our grape vine has started to leaf up well, I reckon another month and I’ll have enough leaves to make some dolma 🙂

I bought a Diggers Club punnet of 6 heirloom Romanesco broccoli plants for $1 at Bunnings recently! I couldn’t believe they were marked down. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the plant, they were only wilting from lack of watering. Surely it would’ve taken the staff less time to just water the plant then write up a sticker with a new price tag and flog it off? My gain! Even more surprising was that Bunnings is selling Diggers Club seedlings. I was under the assumption that this was an exclusive members only club and only available for sale directly though subscription.

Thanks for joining me in another Garden Share Collective series, see you in the garden next month

xx

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