Summer in the garden

Clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

It may seem strange to our northern hemisphere gardeners, and even to some in southern Australia, but summer is a time of low production in our garden. In fact, it's our worst time. This summer is fairly mild and we've only had a few very hot days so we have kept the lettuce going. That is usually the first to turn to seed. In the photo above you can see one small garden full of wax beans, bok choi, cucumbers, green onions, parsley, oregano, marjoram and yarrow. Almost everything else has been eaten and it's too early to plant our main crop.

Hanno decided to put up one of his shade tunnels to protect the seedling lettuce, silverbeet (chard) and cucumber. This is a very good protection from the sun and the heavy rain we get at this time of the year. November to March is our storm season and we can expect anything from hail to strong winds at any period in those months. Generally the storms will be on the afternoon of a hot day. The heat builds up during the day and in the afternoon, the thunder and lightning rolls in, we get torrential rain for 30 minutes, then all is quiet, and cooler.

Hanno has planted the cucumbers at the entrances to the tunnel to entice the bees to pollinate. Just behind the shade tunnel, on the other side, bush beans have been planted. The shade tunnels just slide over some small star pickets so they're easy to put up and remove.

The metal cucumber trellis at both ends are recycled greeting card holders from our shop. In fact, many materials we use in the garden are off cuts or someone else's throw aways.

Here, and in the top photo, we have more recycled metal in the form of concrete reinforcing steel that Hanno has secured with a metal star peg for the cucumbers to climb up. Garden construction can be very simple indeed.

We had to buy fruit and vegetables from the market this week. We've still got a couple of our own tomatoes but we bought a bag of tomatoes, some peaches, pineapples, bananas (ours are not ripe yet), onions, cucumbers, celery, garlic and carrots. I'm looking forward to our major planting in March, because soon after that we'll have vegetables galore in our backyard again. I'll start sowing some of our seeds at the end of January and take a lot of photos so it can be a subject of discussion at our kitchen table.

And for those of you who said you've missed seeing the chickens, I haven't taken any photos since this one just before Christmas.

And for good measure, THE pineapple as of yesterday afternoon. It's reached a nice size but it's not ripe yet. I'm going to give it another three weeks. I have four other pineapple tops to plant our when this one is ready. We'll be planting them in the front garden this year so they don't hold up vegetable production during their two year growth period.

As we are looking forward to March, I'm sure many other gardeners are too. And I know you'll all be looking through your seed catalogues and probably putting your orders in. The planning of a garden is such a joy. I hope there are many new gardeners this year. Don't worry that you have no experience, if you have some space, you are half way there. I'm sure we'll have a lot of gardening discussions around the kitchen table during the year, so if your inexperience is stopping you, don't let it. Work out what you want to plant - and don't go overboard in the first year, and I'm sure we can get you through it.

Just before I go, I'd like to point you in the direction of the long thread, the most wonderful craft blog. Today Ellen has listed 100 tutorial posts from all over the web - all from 2008. I've looked at some of them and I just know the entire list will be fabulous. While you're there, if you have small children, take a look at yesterday's post on the tooth fairy cushion. It's so cute. : - )