Oh Ange, I was devestated when we lost 2 cucumber plants to the sun. SO i can't even imagine how you're feeling
I feel such a part of our efforts in the vege patch.If something dies, I feel like a part of me dies too. Corny I know, but we have invested so much time and love!
FWIW Ange - if you rebuild, the soil will be AWESOME after the fire. the ash will help to make it fantastic and fertile. we grow our pumpkins over our fire patch each year just because it's the best area. when treating hard soil, they suggest turning it over with ash to help aerate it... you'd have to dig out the remnants of anything that you were using the melted if it's obvious, but even if you clear the area and bring in some ash to turn over in your soil from the plantation area or something.
our vege patch is going great guns. we're starting to harvest bucket loads of tomato every second day, so i'm off to source some recipes for tomato sauce, tomato paste (if i can) and spag sauce. we've been lucky in that we have been able to create an awesome vege pasta sauce just using tomato, zucchini, onion and a couple of spices - tastes awesome! we then extend and use that as a spag bol sauce with extra veg, but thinking i might look for some different sauce variations that can be frozen or put in jars for later...
corn is to be harvested today i think, then blanched and frozen. not sure how that is going - was awesome, but the last one we picked was a little dry so not sure if it was cooked a little in the heat and fires seeing the flames came close to that garden bed. DH planted more seeing we seem to be having a late summer this year - hopefully all will go well with it!
kaz, i checked out diggers club but potatoes arent in until May! grrrrr
Well I just put on my first pot of pasta sauce. I dont have any onions though and Im not impressed about that, but I reckon double the amount of garlic should cover it! lol
The smell is awesome. Combined with the fresh parsley, it smells like a restaurant in here.
Now i'm in the mood for cooking...I gotta go find some other things to cook
Our potatoes are self sown, just throw some in that have sprouted, cover and they will grow, cause Iv'e said that they won't.
If you want clean ones just keep covering them up with straw.
About half of our veggie garden is self sown, seeds grown from the compost soil that he puts on the garden.
Keep an enclosed patch for potatoes as they will keep producing and they do seem to roam, we find them in all sorts of places in the garden.
If you grow kiwi fruit you need a male & female or a grafted one. They do best on a pergola structure or grown like grapes, hope that makes sense.
Ange, sorry to hear about everything that has happened. Nelle kept me posted as to your safety.
Its so sad when you loose your garden when you have put so much effort into it.
Danni, grow spring onions, they take no effort and produce really well. Let one go to seed and you will have them growing all year. Ours sometimes look like leeks cause we forget to use them.
We either collect the seeds and place in an airtight container or let them fall on the ground. Our lettuce does this all the time, that why we have lettuce everywhere and all year. Silver beet will grow all year this way also, that's if you can take silver beet all year.
Our garden usually gets dug over properly once a year, we rotate, plant what we want and the rest turns up wherever it pleases.
We are trying raised beds this year, getting to old to keep bending down, and apart from the horrible soil we got its doing OK. Will really have to feed it mid year.
If you have pumpkin and a slow cooker its a great way to make soup. Have also made potato & (large) spring onion soup this way.
We finally got our Strawberry tower happening this week! It's not as big as I had originally planned, the BIG pot got a little busted up, so we couldn't use it. I think DH managed to get 15 plants into the pots/tower, though. Hopefully it isn't too overcrowded once they take off.
Thanks for the suggestions about a no dig garden. I will have to do some more in depth research into this.
Danni, we got our seedling from bunnings too!
We have done ours as a tower, so we got a big pot (biggest we could get at the time) half filled it with some potting mix, then sat a smaller pot inside the big one, filled the 2nd pot with some mix, then got a 3rd, even smaller pot, sat it inside the 2nd pot and filled it as well. Then we filled the rest of the pots, readjusted them a bit and planted the strawberries.
I have seen them planted in those herb containers, you know the ones that have the little holes all around the outside of the tall pot and you just pop a herb in (or strawberry plant) in the holes.
DH has a friend who has heaps of the white polypipe stuff, and he cut the pipe in half, filled it with some mix and planted the strawberries. They have it going down one side of the fence. I thought it was such a cool space saving idea. you could even hook up a dripper hose to the inside of the pipe for watering. But DH wasn't too keen on the idea.
Forgot to add, my inspiration for strawberries was watching a segment on 9am with dave and kim. If you check out the, sweet things in the recipe section, and look for Self Serve Strawberry Surprise..yummo...don't know if I'll get enough strawberries for this one though.
Danni, sorry for taking so long to get a pic uploaded. I took the photo with DD's camera and have managed to get it on the computer...somewhere?? but am trying to find it to resize it before I put it in the gallery. Will sort it out though..
My veggie garden died over the hot period I didn't have a lot of energy to go out and water all the time either so that didn't help. I am going to try and grow a tomato plant in my new little greenhouse and see if it grows over winter. I just planted some Roma seeds today. In my greenhouse I have a Jalapeno plant, one Thai chilli plant, some chives, a pot of Parsley I bought from Coles the other day. I planted Basil, Corriander, Parsley, and Oregano seeds the other day as well.
I do have 3 raised boxes that are 2 x 1 mtrs each, I did plan on having 12 but I might just stick with the 3 for now. I will put shade cloth over them next summer as well to protect them from the searing heat.
I was able to harvest 5kg of Broccoli and .5kg of Peas before my garden died so it wasn't a total loss this year.
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