The Ugly Truth About Gardening....

...isn't the floral gardening gloves or the safari hat, or even the dirt under the fingernails. Actually, it's letting things go to seed! My garden at the moment looks like it has been taken over by great giant warty stick insects - that are taller than me! But what has actually happened, is that the silverbeet (chard for those of you reading from the States ;-P ) has gone to seed. And since I am a gardener who likes to save her own seed, I have to put up with these monsters that are sprouting up everywhere.

Normally, I don't care so much for an untidy garden, after all, if it was good enough for Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (no, there were no gardeners there, were there? Yet, it's everyone favourite garden), then it is good enough for me. But some things are always the exception to the rule - scraggly gone-to-seed plants are mine.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much all I have growing in my garden for the time being too, since we had the 30 year floods hit on Christmas day - our suburb being one of the worst hit. I lost all my cucumbers, lettuces, most of my tomatoes, and anything that was at seedling stage (that means nearly EVERYTHING).

So, today, I decided it was time to clear everything out. Since I had put my hand up for the Nillumbik Home Harvest Festival, and volunteered at the bare minimum, silverbeet, then I figured that I must at least have that GROWING by harvest time in April (which is Autumn/Fall over here in the Southern Hemisphere).

Well, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only so I have a few seedling silverbeets starting, but I also found plenty of parsnip and carrot seeds to share on harvest day. I also will have plenty of spaghetti squash to contribute to the event, which should challenge the chefs and cooks on the day! I might even have a few watermelons and rock melons to spare - fruits that normally don't grow this far south, but have been the only thing to flourish with all the rain and humidity.

But my greatest find was one last Golden Queen peach, clinging to a branch. With all the Queensland weather we have had this summer, all our stone fruit have moulded as soon as they started to ripen. But I found one that is close to ripening. One that I can take off the tree now and let mature on a windowsill inside.

Hopefully, there will be one peach to enjoy this season!


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How Many Seeds are Too Many?

I sorted out all my seeds. There are now 3 containers, one is for seed packets, another is for seeds to be planted out, and the last is for the empty packets that will eventually be filled with saved seed. This organising inspired me to plant the following:

*Butternut Pumpkin
*Extra Early Sweet Corn
Super Sweet Bicolour Corn
*Hollow Crown Parsnip
*Romanesco Zucchini
*Spaghetti Squash
*Luffa
*Pickling Cucumber
*Lebanese Cucumber
*Sunflowers

If anyone has been paying close attention to my recent plantings, you will notice that if all the seeds I have planted recently germinate (actually, if only 20% germinate), then I should have a bumper crop this year. That is of course if I can hack my way through the vines at my front door and actually get to the garden.

I also made Impossible pie for lunch. If you have never heard of this, then it could be basically described as a quiche once it is cooked. The bit that makes it amazing (or impossible), is that all the ingredients are mixed together and poured into a pie dish. Due to the some strange and mysterious reaction that occurs, the ingredients actually separate out so you are left with a pastry crust and a quiche on top - amazing stuff! This one was wonderfully homegrown. It had eggs from our chooks and greens from the garden and tasted so wholesome you could have sworn it had came right out of an Amish kitchen.

And So The Insanity Continues...

It was wonderfully warm today - warm enough to wear a t shirt at 8.30 in the morning. Warm enough to lay in the grass and make pictures in the clouds. And warm enough to bury my hands in the dirt once again. I planted the following seeds today:

*Sweet delight capsicum
*Hot chilli pepper
*Dill
*Bush champion cucumber
*Hale's best rockmelon
*Sweetie tomatoes

I finally finished weeding the monster weeds down the back and planted in all my pumpkin seeds: Jen's bush pumpkin, Kent and an unknown variety that I saved from a pumpkin a few years back.

The celery seedlings got planted, so did my one remaining passionfruit and two alpine strawberries. Last, but not least, I planted out two heads of garlic.

Now I just need to hook up my greywater system to the washing machine, and I should have enough water for it all...

Spring Tides

At the moment I can feel the Spring tides rising through me like the sap is rising through our fruit trees out the back. Without rhyme nor reason, I can be found at any given spare moment digging holes, or sprinkling seeds or pulling up weeds. I actually don't think I could control myself - even if I wanted to. It's the same year in and year out, spring comes and I just have to drop everything to get busy in the garden.

Last week my daughter and I sprinkled flower seeds everywhere, hopefully summer will see sunflowers and zinnias and poppies and a dozen other types of flowers. Of course I say 'hopefully' as spring has brought about the completion of the moult for our chooks and they are now freely flying over any fence in sight to get to the aforementioned seeds

After the flower planting frenzy, I moved onto my summer edibles. I think it's too early down here for watermelons, zucchinis, snake beans and cucumbers yet, but they have been planted anyway. Ditto tomatoes...and by tomatoes, I actually planted out half of my saved seed! Corn has gone in as well. I still haven't planted all of the packets from the other week, but I have made a big dent in them.

A few days after that planting, I pulled out my seed boxes and sorted them all. As a result, the following seeds also got planted:

*Lettuce - Cos and Australian yellow leaf
*Cucumbers - Lebanese and Pickling
*Gourds - not sure on they type, maybe Bottle
*Rockmelon
*Nasturtiums
*Capsicum
*Butternut pumpkin

I also started clearing away the weeds from down where the chicken coop was last year. I can now attest to how well plants grow on chook poo - these weeds were like prehistoric creatures that fought valiantly as I hacked them from the earth. This patch is where I am going to plant the bulk of my pumpkins this year. They can just ample all over the place down there without the fear of them engulfing the rest of the garden, or any small children for that matter...

Officially it's Spring!

Although, as I have been saying, really it has been spring now for weeks. It doesn't stop that wonderful feeling of promise though. It's as if the plants can read and have watched through the window as we ceremoniously turned the page over on the calender this morning. There is a new electricity in the air that just wasn't there yesterday. I went shopping on Friday in anticipation of this feeling. This year I plan to limit the variety that I grow, but what I do grow - I will grow in bulk. Therefore I can now justify the four packets of corn seed I bought, as well as a packet each of zucchini and watermelon.

So with the new season, the peach blossom has dropped, in perfect time to plant out the mother load of seed. I'm not so sure it really is the right time to be planting corn, because even though the blossom has dropped - it is only on selected trees. It looks like all the trees that we planted last year, and have shallow root systems have welcomed in the season early. The older (and possibly wiser) trees are only just coming into bloom over the last few days. It will be weeks yet before they drop their blossom. To compensate for this, I have decided to buy another four packets of corn seed and plant that lot when my older peach trees do drop.

{cough} corn glut...

Well, here's hoping anyway...