I grew this!

Home grown celery

The celery in the side garden has been fabulous, but the growth has slowed a lot. When I needed some celery for a recipe yesterday, I thought heck- why not- I’ll just harvest one! I’m happy to report that it’s delicious, although I’ve been a bit inconsistent with the watering over the summer, so some of the outer stalks were a bit hollow. The picture on the left is my bunch of celery with the outer stalks removed – impressive or what!

My pet worm

I pulled the last of the silverbeet out of the side garden yesterday and prepared the bed for more winter plantings. I gave it a good dose of cow manure, blood and bone and some lime. I turned the soil over, and wow- the soil really is amazing. I was uncovering about 4 worms with every fork. In place of the silverbeet I planted climbing snow peas (right along the back of the bed), some more baby ‘Nantes’ carrots and chinese broccoli, plus some green onions (shallots).

Preparing the side bed

I also replenished the seeds in the greenhouse. My last batch failed miserably to come up because I planted them in 100% cow manure. Apparently too much nitrogen – you live, you learn 🙂 The new batch I planted in seed raising mix, so I hope they will be a bit more successful. I sowed successive plantings of most of the winter veggies, like onions and most of the brassicas, plus some beetroot and some Zinnias. These last two were the free seeds from the Diggers Club Autumn catalogue. You weren’t supposed to sow the Zinneas till Spring, but I’m ‘experimenting’.

After my garlic and shallots order went missing in the post, it eventually came twice. Rather than returning one, I decided to just pay for the extra, and plant twice as much! Now the golden shallots are going to look wonderful along the back of the front yard garden bed, but I will admit that the garlic under the roses looks a tad ridiculous. Now that I have more than doubled the amount planted under there, I think it’ll look even crazier. I was trying to explain to P just how much garlic I had planted, but he wasn’t quite getting it. 1 clove will grow into 1 bulb, and I planted 12 bulbs worth. Given that there is about 12-15 cloves in a bulb, I’m going to have a seriously large amount of garlic on my hands. At least the roses will be safe from vampires 🙂

The white cabbage butterfly looks so innocent fluttering amongst my brassicas, but the little blighter’s babies are doing my head in! Today I gave up on the ‘hunt and squash’ method and broke out the derris dust. That’ll learn ya!

I had a really exciting incident a few days ago. Some people drove past our house, looked out the window at my veggie garden, and gave me a thumbs up. They drove back again about a minute later, parked, and came over to have a closer look! They didn’t speak a word of English so I couldn’t explain anything, but they looked really excited by my Asian veggies in particular. So happy someone likes it 🙂

Next post I’ll show you my new fruit trees, and detail ‘project lemon’. Exciting stuff!