Gardening

The asparagus are growing nearly as fast as I can eat it:

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The wicking bed has started kicking in it's spring growth: eggplants, onions, tomatoes, and peas. I've succession-planted some beans among the peas, and also a luffa plant - hopefully some of the other vine melon plants sprout and I'll put them in there to act as a shade screen over the heat of the summer.

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The Plum-Stone bed was planted to grow over winter, and presently has broad beans (which mostly have aphids), peas (didn't take very well), sprouting broccoli (mostly went to seed the instant it started warming up), and mustard (the only thing doing well and pest-less in the photo).

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The Apple-Crepe bed is a problem. I filled it with a soil that I got as part of a project, but it was extremly alkaline (ph of around 9, when what you want is about 6.5-7 for most vegies) and likely not all that great for growing things in.

That's radish in the shade, garlic in the middle of the bed, and carrots in the sun. What you can't see are the onions and leeks, or beetroots, and the parsnips never even materialised. This bed was planted back in May, maybe June and it hasn't grown at all. That's how bad the soil is.

It's kind of heartbreaking.

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This is the Crepe-Apricot bed which is going to hold sweet corn this season. It's mostly an 'in progress' pic to show what it looks like now. Hopefully in five months, it will look entirely entirely different!

Mind you, I planted about a dozen seeds here, straight into the ground, and exactly two of them have grown. I'm better off planting corn in seedling trays and then transplanting, I think. A much better strike rate.

That big green-and-purple thing on the right side of the photo is a...brassica that I planted in winter. I don't know what kind (I'm bad at labelling) but I thought it was a brussels sprout. I suspect it might be a purple sprouting broccoli but it's hard to tell. It's doing better than the other two which I planted under the Stone fruit tree which are...pretty much the same size that they were when I planted them. Maybe marginally bigger. :/

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The Apricot-Avocado bed has...brassicas. Yes, 'brassicas'. World's Most Terrible Labeller, remember?

There'll be indeterminate tomatoes planted in front, because who doesn't love a billion tomatoes come autumn?

There are a couple of beans up the back of the bed; and I've tossed down a bunch of 'green manures' which are quick growing nitrogen fixers that will not only improve the nitrogen in the bed, but also provide some mulching bulk as the summer wears on.

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And the bed at the end of the line - the Avo-Shed bed - has more brassicas which are probably a mix of cabbages and sprouting broccoli, a tomatillo (or two, I hope, once the thing gets moving) in the front, and a row of beans along the back. Unfortunately, I managed to double-plant beans, because I planted a bunch and then forgot I'd planted them, and then planted another set, and both sets sprouted. *rolls eyes*

The stalky things along the side of the bed are lemongrass, which I may very well regret planting there; the idea was to plant something like a 'fence', but lemongrass tends to get bushy and...well, I guess we'll see. Might have to pull out all but one. At least it's not nettles, which just self-seed EVERYWHERE.

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I've mentioned a lot of fruit in the bed-naming; that's because the beds are named according to their location with regards to the fruit trees in the yard:

• Plum (two different plums grafted to a rootstock)
• Stone fruit (four different stonefruit grafted to a base)
• Apple (four different apples grafted to a base)
• Crepe
• Apricot
• and Avocado.

There's a Cherry in the upper middle of the garden and a Donut Peach in the lower middle of the garden. And two bathtub beds between them - one with garlic, and one that's a pond. Yes, that's a lot of things growing in a small area (6m x 8m), and it wouldn't be possible without the chooks, who do a lot of the cleaning, scratching, weeding, pest control, and fertilising.

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Speaking of the chooks, they're spending most of their days out in the front run, are laying, and quite happy to get in yo' face.

Interestingly, there's a section of the chook run which abuts the neighbour's yard beyond the fenceline, and I've noticed the neighbours have started throwing some of their kitchen wastes into the chook pen. Which, they're from out rural way, used to be farm folk, so I understand, so I trust they're not trying to poison my chooks. I've had a bit of a chat to them about the chickens when they first moved in (because I was worried about the noise they might make) but they've been pretty good about the occasional noisy clucking that takes place when one of the chooks wants something and isn;t getting it. (Hainan chicken is particularly noisy when she's bored.)

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The big project I want to do in the next couple of months (And really, I should have done it the last couple of weeks) is to get some bed edges in, made from heat-treated wooden pallets. But I put it off and off and off and it would be better to get the bed edges in sooner rather than later...

Ugh. Maybe I'll do them next winter...