It's been a while

Well, after weeks of being super busy at work and letting Jani look after the garden it was my turn today! However, the rain gods thought differently and decided to send showers every 30 mins or so until mid afternoon.

I cleaned out the garage & workshop in the morning and then about 11am, since it was still raining decided to run some errands. Of course it stopped raining the minute I left the house. Sometimes it's not meant to be, but I got into it when I returned so at least the day wasn't a dead loss.

Today was a weeding day. I have a bunch of seedlings to go into the ground tomorrow (if it stays a bit dry) and so I had to weed out all the beds where they would be planted. Quite a job!

That's what it looked like when I started. Yuck!

First bed done!

Halfway through the second:)

3/4's through! 

Finally all done! That was a hell of a job. About 130 minutes of tedium.

So with that out of the way let's look at the plants:) Here's the rainbow chard. It's quite happy and will be getting some friends tomorrow:)

Here's the spring onions and the radishes. Look at those little beauties go!

And here's the last cavalo nero and the last arugula that we are collecting seeds from:)

Here's the spinach with our own home made hay as mulch.

Garlic and lots of it!

Wombok cabbages grow like crazy.

And here's the rest - brussel sprouts, rainbow chard and probably something I've forgotten:)

Small Things

Some grasshoppers like Chamomile :)

Some birds like grasshoppers!

Our Dinner

How to plant Garlic

1. Break Garlic bulb apart into individual cloves.
2. Plant cloves with the pointy end up about 8 cm deep, keeping a space of 7 cm between each clove.
3. Make sure you sow in well drained soil in a full sun position.
4. Fertilize with a well-balanced fertilizer.
5. Once foliage begins to brown off, cut back on water and fertilizer. (Australia: around Oct-Nov)
6. Harvest Garlic when there are 4-5 green leaves left, or leave it in the ground until it is all brown.
7. Hang dry in a dry place for 2 weeks to harden the skin.
8. Store in dark, dry place. Then it will keep for around six months.

Note: Garlic needs the transition between short day lengths (winter) to long day lengths (summer) in order to form bulbs.

A day of work and joy

It's been days of work - sieving, pruning trees, sieving some more, cleaning up around the garden beds - our backs hurt with pain telling of fulfilled work and many achievments! We've eaten spinach out of the garden yesterday, it was intensely flavoured, and had our first salad and rucola today - it is great to harvest the first fruits. We learned a lot during our first season, and all of this will fo into our further efforts to make us semi-self-sustainable out of the backyard at some point in the future.


The clear winners of the autumn's germination project are - who would have guessed - the radishes - who looked up into the light in just under 48 hours. They were closely followed by the rainbow chard, of which 2 of 7 plants are looking into the sun already.






Another great joy today was to see our first two chili plants which have been hidden in the soil for the past two weeks - two in one day! It is an undescribable feeling to see those things grow and wake up in the morning making a new plant-   discovery! (But then again, I get excited quickly.)

Last but not least (contrary!) my beloved Passion Fruit Plant has grown two leaves in three days after being stagnant for two months. There is hope! :)

Autumn Projects

Autumn is approaching (time flies!) and  to get the best out of it we are about to start germinating seeds and getting two new garden beds build. The outside structure was done in two days, today was dedicated to sieving the soil (my poor back!), we're about to give it a good fertilizing and in about a week or two the seeds will go in the soil (or in the punnets for that matter).

Those are the two new garden beds (yet to be sieved):

But impatient as I am and also quite keen on testing propagating out of water bottle bottoms cut off, I couldn't resist starting to germinate some seeds already...

The bottoms:



Adding Propagation Mix:

Rucola, Spinach, Flowers

 Our Rucola Salad (or one of the many we tried to propagate...) has started to flower! After picking all the aphids off for a couple of weeks it is now officially aphid-free, too. :)

Our Spinach has exploded in growth, too:

But the most beautiful thing in the garden at the moment are those flowers (which had to undergo an de-aphiding, too), which have started blooming recently with much more to come: