Most times I do my picking walk first thing in the morning before breakfast. It usually takes about half an hour, and its the most productive garden work I do. I walk with a bucket and a basket.
This is the lettuces for April and May, planted on the leafy planting days last weekend. These are my own seed so they are free and bountiful. But still there’s no point in planting more than a pinch of them. We take lunches and lettuce is in it practically every day when it is in season, and we would have a salad for dinner a few times a week too.…
I was picking for an Indonesian style curry – ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemon grass, chili, Vietnamese mint (and I added – Kaffir lime leaves and garlic as well) and I couldn’t resist the photo. Add this spice base to an oily sauce and you have a wonderful curry sauce for fish or meat or poultry or vegetables.
I live smack bang in fruit fly territory. Bactrocera tryoni – Queensland Fruit Fly. They seem to be getting, if anything more prolific as the climate heats up, and I think over the years I’ve tried every known method of control, short of spraying, which I can tell without trying it wouldn’t work.
Chooks and vegetable gardens are such an elegant arrangement. I’ve tried lots of ways of combining them, from domes to compost making down a slope, but I’m really liking the current solution.
From late winter until now, I plant climbers – beans, cucumbers, squash and tomatoes – along the fences all the way round from the eastern to the western side, and sometimes (usually a bit more lightly) on the northern side too. The tallest beans even start to climb across the netting over top of my beds, the beans hanging down like fruit. But from late summer onwards, I start planting…
It’s such a good disguise. It looks just like a ladybeetle. If I didn’t catch it actually in flagrante eating the leaves on my squash, I would think it was a good guy.