We ate all the outside leaves of the young pak choi, mostly in won tons but also in soups and stir fries. Then I left them to flower and the tiny, stingless native bees feasted on the flowers, giving us tiny amounts of absolutely delectable light champagney honey. Then I let them set seed before feeding them, mature seeds and all, to the chooks.
The grasshoppers love kale, but that’s ok, because the chooks love grasshoppers…
Every year a few garlic plants manage to escape harvesting in early summer. The leaves die off and I lose them in the garden. Every…
I’ve just moved the chooks into a new bed, and they are feasting on broccoli that is well past bearing human food. They like the cabbage white moths and grasshoppers on it the best and have lots of fun hunting them.
t’s a nice planting day today and I’m sort of ready – which is just as well because I have to go out and I’ll only get an hour or so in the garden today. I have advanced seedlings of carrots ready to go out, and places to put them, and seed raising mix for another batch of seed using my standard method for carrots. And the same for beetroot…
Tromboncino is my new favourite vegetable. I got my seed from Diggers and I think they will displace zucchini in my garden. They grow like a very rampant cucumber, and by using lots of vertical space they conserve my precious intensively fenced ground space.
This is a good time of year for planting perennials in my part of the world. We are past the frizzle days of high summer, but still enough time left for things to establish before going into winter dormancy, and be really ready to take off in spring. We are also coming into what is traditionally our wet season, though in this La Ninã year, that really isn’t a factor.…
The mice have been a pain this last year. They got all my pea and snow pea seeds for the first planting last autumn, and all my corn seeds for the first couple of plantings this year. With most plagues of anything, the populations of predators will immediately start building up in response to the increased food source, but the higher up the food chain you go, the slower the…
The exciting crop this week though is potatoes. I plant potatoes in August and February. The autumn ones planted this time of year do much better than the August planted spring ones. Potatoes originated in the high country of the Peru Bolivia border area. They like cooler temperatures, especially cooler nights, than we get here in summer.
It’s an in-between season for fruiting annual seed planting – too late now to put in more seed of eggplants or capsicums, too early for peas or broad beans.