Do it yourself vegetables

I want to thank everyone of you who made a comment yesterday. They added significantly to what I wrote and I'm sure many of those comments will help readers going through difficult times. I am very proud of this little community we have built here, and never more so than yesterday when I read those comments. Thank you.

I will be fiddling with the blog again today as the template is not working as it should. I may have to change it and rebuild the page again. : -|

I haven't shown you our garden for a while. The photos in the vegetables and flowers post were from many different periods in our garden, but we have a new season with us and even though we're a bit late with some of our plantings, it's coming along well. I took these photos yesterday afternoon after I came home from work. Hanno was sitting in the kitchen with a tradesman who was giving a quote on the government-subsidised insulation, so I took the opportunity to wander around with the camera.

\
Celery

We are blessed to have this space to plant our vegetable garden each season. Ours is a year long garden, containing vegetables, fruit, nuts, chickens and water catchment tanks. We use the chook poo to help make compost for the garden and the water we use is always from our rainwater tanks.

Our garden is protected from the wind by a tall fence on one side, rainforest at the back, the house at the front and lots of trees on the remaining side. We are lucky to have around 1500mm (60 inches) of rain fall a year and we catch some of that in our water tanks which hold 15,000 litres (4000 gallons).

Closest to camera are turnips, (right) tomatoes, and at the end Hanno has planted Swiss chard. In between the chard and the turnips, potatoes are coming up, leftovers from a previous crop.

March is our main planting time. It's the first month of the year when the humidity leaves us so there is less chance of powdery mildew on pumpkins, squash and cucumbers. We take the opportunity to grow Winter crops now - celery, cabbages, broccoli, kale, turnips and peas that are impossible to grow at other times of the year here.

Chinese cabbage and lettuce.

The last of the summer corn. I picked most of these last weekend, blanched them and placed them in the freezer for eating during Winter. The few that are left here will be eaten over the next week or so.

This is one of my favourite cucumbers. It's the Richmond Green Apple cucumber which is an Australian heirloom, common during the 50s, but not so much now. It has a very good flavour, and is crisp. You can see a small cucumber below. They grow to about the size of a small orange.

We had to remove all the tomatoes we planted earlier in the season as they were diseased and wilting. We planted some beefsteaks to keep us going and I'll plant up some more Brandywines, Moneymakers and Tommy Toes soon.

Next to the celery at the front, are some of the beefsteak tomatoes.

I love having brassicas growing in the garden. We can grow Chinese cabbage all year but none of the others will grow for us unless we plant them out in these colder months. Even now we choose sugarloaf cabbage, it has a short growing season and will mature into small firm heads in a couple of months. If you're having problems with cabbages running to seed before you have a change to pick them, try one of the smaller varieties.

Sugarloaf cabbages. They've been attacked by caterpillars but the hearts are firm and untouched. We leave the outside leaves there so pests will eat them instead of the heart.

We tend to do two plantings with our sugarloaf cabbage and mini cauliflowers - one very early and another one about three or four weeks after that. Usually, that gives us cabbage and cauliflower over most of the cold months.

Turnips are another one of our Winter crops. They grow surprisingly well here and I use them in soups and stews.

Ever present, our chooks wander the back yard looking though the picket fence at the vegetables. They often patrol the edge of the garden hoping for some old lettuce or cabbage leaves to be thrown their way.

In the corner of the vegie patch sits our composting area. Above you see the grass clippings harvested from the last lawn mowing. They're a valuable resource and they help kick start our compost because the mass of clippings create a fair bit of heat as they decompose. We add dry carbon in the form of shredded paper, chicken droppings mixed with straw as well as old vegetables and kitchen scraps.

So, let's see if I can remember what we're growing now: cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, chard, cabbages - sugarloaf and Chinese, potatoes, turnips, celery, parsley, chives, Welsh onions, oregano, marjoram, bay, kale, corn, green beans and mini cauliflowers. We will add carrots, leeks, tigerella tomatoes, more lettuce, peas, squash, capsicum (bell peppers) and garlic soon. We are currently picking lemons, passionfruit, pawpaw (papaya) and pecans, a small number of blueberries, oranges and mandarins (clementines) will be ready in a few weeks. We have bananas, loquats, pink grapefruit and avocados growing but not in fruit at the moment. The chickens lay year long but their output decreases in the colder months.

It's a wonderful little garden that Hanno has put a lot of time and effort into. When it's growing well, we can live off it, but it's never that black and white. There are often times we need to buy from the markets. Hopefully, in the years to come, we will eat more and more from our garden. It is one of the true joys of a simple life to be able to grow fresh organic produce in the backyard. If you have a little bit of ground in the sun but have never tried your hand at gardening, I encourage you to give it a try. There is nothing like the taste of fresh backyard produce and the feeling you get knowing you did it yourself.