Remember the mulberry cuttings I took back in late winter? A lot of them failed to take. They grew some lovely healthy looking green leaves but it was a trick – just the cutting drawing moisture up. When I checked, there was no real root development. But a decent number did take.
We thought it was going to be one of those super bumper years for mangoes, like 2010, when the trees were flowering, but it’s turned into just an average good season. Mangoes are biennial, and this is the good year, but it has been a bit wet around flowering time to be a huge year. Still though, we have enough that mangoes have to be one of the two fruit.
I have zucchini and their close cousin tromboncino going nuts in my garden this time of year. It is compulsory in our household to have zucchini every day, I’ve given so many away that my friends are avoiding me, the chooks have gone on strike and refuse to eat any more. This is the first year I’ve grown tromboncino (Diggers seeds) and I think they have upstaged Blackjack as my…
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…
You need real tomatoes – sun ripened, in season, varieties bred for taste rather than transportability and artificial ripening. For real decadence a few different varieties so you can savour each kind.
I’ve been mulling over a 2012 Challenge. I’ve enjoyed the challenges. The first one – 2010’s Muesli Bar Challenge, Then the 2011 the Breakfast Cereal Challenge – a year’s worth of weekly healthy and low GI recipes, based on fresh in season ingredients, fast and easy enough to make for breakfast, as a way to delete the big mostly empty packets of junk food marketed as “breakfast cereal” from the…
One of the best things about planting advanced seedlings is the head start you get. I think people tend to forget how long plants spend germinating and as babies. These seedlings are a month old already. If I’d planted them directly a month ago, this bed would have spent all that time hardly used, just inviting weeds.