Still in the summer garden

Good morning from Lulubelle and Martha!
Clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

This first bare patch is being prepare for potatoes.

When I had a look back on yesterday's post I realised it doesn't give a true picture of our garden at the moment. I showed only the bits with plants growing and most of the garden is empty right now. So here it is from both angles, so you see for yourself that abundance is worked for and in every garden there are periods of standing still.

In the photo above you can see the garden from one angle, in the photo below it's from the opposite angle. Note the black plastic compost bin, you can see it in both photos. Please excuse the washing LOL!

Our garden is fenced off from the chickens, although we do let all of them in there at certain times of the year. We set the garden up next to the chook house because we feed the chooks from the garden every day and didn't want to walk too far to do that.

I'll try to answer some of the questions in yesterday's comments. Emma, tomatoes stop setting their flowers in high temperatures, and by that I mean the flowers stop turning into tomatoes. I think the cut-off point is around 35 C. So if you're planting tomatoes and the weather is very hot, don't expect them to give too many tomatoes.

Kristi, we have problems with things like pumpkins, grapes, melons etc in the high humidity. We've been experimenting lately and found that a dose of copper oxychloride or copper hydroxide (it's organic) when planting helps quite a bit. Don't over do it though as copper stays in the soil for a long time.

Melanie, how exciting! I hope the house offer is accepted and you get your garden.

Donetta, we always ripen our tomatoes off the vine. We wait till they're a good size, pick them, and put them in an open bowl on the kitchen bench. They ripen beautifully.

Nikowa, we have a very unorthodox way of planting. We decide where to put the potatoes and everything else gets put in wherever we have room. We do a big planting in March, then as we eat our way through the produce, we have little patches that we fill in with whatever we need to grow or whatever has just come into season. The only problems we have when doing this is with tomatoes. We sometimes get wilt if we plant the tomatoes in any area the tomato family (potatoes, eggplant, peppers etc) has recently been planted in. However, the addition of a lot of new compost and old chicken manure, mixed, often lets us get away with it. Here is some information about crop rotation, and here.

Monkey Funk, you just want the beds raised slightly to give that extra help with drainage. We have clay soil here and needed to raise our beds but we've had this garden in for almost 11 years now and we've never had any problems. Over the years, the addition of lots of compost, manure and decomposed straw mulch has given us perfect soil.

kmaree warren, I'm sorry to hear about that storm wrecking your garden. Can you rig up something to protect your new seedlings? Maybe a small shade tunnel? Jerry Colby from Gardening Australia talked about protecting plants by surrounding them with hay bales recently. Maybe you could try that. Jerry's home is in Brisbane and he has a very good blog, you might find some good ideas here.

As a gardener, you need to think about how to modify the conditions in your garden to prevent loss of valuable growing time. Shade cloth structures, cloth and glass cloches, hay bales, bamboo poles with cloth skirts are all ways of protecting plants that don't cost a lot but do help. I'll post about these later.

Christine, one pineapple per plant. When we harvest THE pineapple, we'll pull that plant out.

Tricia and Dani with empty water tanks, I hope you get rain soon. Hanno will be doing a post about small water tanks soon. Maybe you could look at adding another small tank. It's such a worry, isn't it.

Good luck with the luffas, Laurie.

Joyceann, Dani, Mindy, and everyone wondering about the upturned pots - traditionally, upturned pots on top of garden stakes are used to stop people taking out an eye with a stake they don't see as they bend down. We use ours for that but I also love the look of them. Yes, it's a bit of whimsy and adds interest to the garden.

Mindy, I haven't hear of the Abraham Lincoln tomatoes. What are they like?

Sandra, I'll write about soil preparation in the next week or so.

I want to give my friend Lyn Bagnall a plug. Lyn wrote the best book on Australian vegetable gardening that I've ever read. It's called Easy Organic Gardening and Moon Planting and you can buy the book on her blog. Lyn's blog is well worth a visit, there is a lot of information about vegetable gardening there and she will answer questions. Lyn owns a small organic farm in NSW.

Happy gardening everyone!