Starting the vegetable garden

The garden is overgrown with flowers and herbs and the soil is rock hard in places. Hanno has the sprinkler on to make digging easier.

Every day that passes by brings our 2019 vegetable garden closer to reality. There was a time when we'd (mainly Hanno) get stuck in and the set up was fast and efficient.  Now that we're older and slower, we do what we can, usually one big job a day, and that is inching us towards our gardening goals. Yesterday Hanno pulled out weeds and raspberry runners under the big trellis next to the chicken coop. We're going to plant beans and cucumbers there this year. We'll save two healthy raspberry runners for a life in pots. Having the raspberries transfer from the garden to pots takes them into my realm, but more on that when I actually have them in my clutches.  Hanno also weeded a couple of smaller patches, pruned the potted roses and watered the soil to make it easier to dig, which will probably happen in the coming days.

When you're preparing sweet potato slips, don't cut the shoot off the tuber.  You'll have greater success with heel cuttings - as seen above.  Just gently pull the shoot from the tuber in a downward motion. It takes a small amount of the parent plant off at the base of the cutting which gives the shoot a better chance of forming roots.

One of my tasks yesterday was to prepare sweet potato slips. We have purple and orange but will probably only plant the orange because of the space issue. I waited for a very good tasting sweet potato and when I found a beauty a few of weeks ago (from Aldi), I cut the end off and left it in the kitchen in a small bowl, with a tiny bit of water just touching the cut end, in the hope of developing shoots.  These shoots were removed yesterday and placed in clean water to develop roots.  When the roots have grown strong and true, we'll plant them out.  You can save money if you know how to propagate plants and you don't always have to buy what you need at the garden centre.

Above is the enamel baby bath planted with butter lettuce seeds.  We also have Welch onions and long white icicle radishes on these benches. 

I also planted out two grown from seed jalapeño chillies and a large container of butter lettuce seeds.  I'll pick them when they're quarter grown instead of allowing them to fully mature.  They taste good as immature lettuces and we don't waste as many because the plants will grow again once cut.  When we grow lettuces to their right size, we waste a lot because it takes us a week to eat one lettuce and the others sit in the garden and often end up as chook food.

We harvested our garlic last September and saved the best for planting this year.  I cleaned them all and stored them in a glass jar in a dark cupboard. Yesterday they saw light again when I brought them out to the back verandah. In the coming days, I'll break the heads into cloves, save the largest ones for planting and take the smaller cloves back into the kitchen to use.  We use Glen Large garlic which is suitable for warmer climates. 

It won't take long before we're in full swing again and spending most mornings planting, tying back and watering.  There'll be morning tea in the shade of the umbrella, conversations about flowers and bees and yet another year of growing herbs, fruit and vegetables will fill our days.