Spring time happenings on the block

Finally spring is here! After receiving over 50mls last week, everything is growing before my eyes in this balmy 25C weather :) 

Thought I would give a picture tour of the happenings in our food production area.

The veggie garden as of this morning. The red dirt piles are the posts for fencing off our veggie garden to the chooks and the fat resident bunny who keeps popping his head up from time to time.

Broad beans in flower

More broad beans and snow peas in the foreground (the broad bean felafels were a hit last year!)

Savoy cabbage which I am hoping will come to a head and not bolt.

Our newest addition - rhubarb

Plenty of seedlings, herbs and trees to plant out in the next month. I'm keeping the milk cartons to make cloches and maybe some wicking pots.

This morning's harvest - silverbeet, cauliflower and eggs

Carrots found hiding in the weed infested salad garden. They are now in my belly!

The strawberries are going ridiculous since the rain

Blueberries in flower with strawberry plant companions...and weeds

3-way pear in flower

Cherry tree just starting to come into bloom

Our mulberry tree - all baring late frosts we should get a decent crop this year! (You may need to squint hard to see the fruit but they are there)

The almond tree - with almonds already!

The peach tree with tiny peaches forming

and same with the apricots.

Happenings around Murrumbateman

Floriade is on again in Canberra and I have been helping out at the Urban Agriculture Australia stand enticing people to grow more edibles on their balconies, courtyards and backyards. If you are heading to Floriade, check out the display and also their website which has some very useful fact sheets www.uaa.org.au 

Murrumbateman Field Days is gearing up again for 19/20 October. Check out their website for more details  http://www.mfdays.com/ 

Suffering Citrus!

Geez! If the plants could talk around here....they would be screaming out for help!

 

I'm getting better at gardening, but I'm still not very good, still learning, and 'winging it' most of the time. But really, to be honest, you've got to be bold and do something drastic before you really get my attention.

 

Dropping all your leaves in a slow but deathly downward spiral will surely do it for you!

 

 

This is the lime - those spindly stick things are the branches that have been doing the leaf shedding.

 

The lemon isn't as bad as the lime, but I was reading a book the other day that characterised lemons as having 'glossy dark green leaves'...hmmmm....

 

Given this display, it was time to move them to a more sheltered position. This has been a bit hard up until now, as we haven't really had any safe 'pockets' to shelter plants that little bit more. But after the lime has up and lost 70% of its leaves (it did do something similar last year and recovered - so fingers crossed it will come around), Hubby and I started scouting around for another position. Interestingly the oranges and mandarins are OK and aren't suffering as much as the lemon and lime are.

The old position. They were too far away from the wattle wind break and were in a quite exposed position.

So we settled on the little garden near the kids play area that is protected a bit more from the severe winds and more protected from frost. This spot will allow us to cover the trees better for frost season as well. Being closer to the house and near the kids play area, I'm hoping the boys of the house may be able to 'tinkle' on the trees a little more regularly than is currently occurring.

 

 

After preparing the soil with some of the mushroom compost we picked up at Yass, we re-planted the trees in the area that I am hoping will be a bit kinder to them. I am not entirely sure I have transplanted them at the right time - there is no new spring growth yet, so I think I am OK, heck there might not be any new growth! - although some books have suggested that I move the trees at the end of spring. I'm taking a gamble and hopefully it will work and we will get some more fresh lemons in the near future.

 

 

 

Oh and as an aside, I need to apologise for the quality of my pictures lately. Our kids destroyed our camera with some icky sticky goo that has stuck the lens cover shut and has also seeped its way into the internal mechanisms making it highly unreliable. So we are relying on our phone cameras...which just aren't very good. Hopefully we will rectify the problem shortly :)

Projects and Plantings

School holidays are over and we are into Term 2 - and May! - already! The weather is getting decidedly colder here, and Mother Nature kicked it up a notch just around ANZAC Day. We held out until the night before ANZAC Day for the heater (the 'rule' around these parts is the heater doesn't come on until ANZAC Day) but we were pretty close! On the heater issue, I blogged previously about wanting a wood heater - well council approval is in, heater has been ordered and picked up and due to be installed in a couple of weeks! I am so excited at the prospect of sitting in front of the fire on a cold winter day and curling up with a book - I'll keep you all updated.

During the school holidays, Hubby and I decided to tackle a job that's been on our 'To do' list since we moved in - build a fence between the house and shed to block off the kids play area so the little kidlets won't run out into the driveway and garage. Handy hubby did all the work himself and I was the go-fer and sometime painter. We are very impressed with how it turned out :)

Who's that good looking hunk of a spunk :)

OK, only half finished the second coat of paint here but looks good!

Quick paving job

Look at my passionfruit vines! We built a trellis for them as part of the new fence. We have had one frost already this season - so far so good!

Here is the current state of my veggie garden. It looks even more bleak today as its raining. Starting in the bed closet and going clockwise we have one bed of garlic; red onions, celery and some lettuce, pak choi and parsnip seeds that haven't come up yet; a bed full of peas with a row of snow peas and broad beans; last bed in this row is brown onions and shallots filling in some gaps; next bed is empty at this stage as we just moved the chook pen onto the next bed; some old leeks that have started resprouting; and in the final bed is shallots, cabbage, broccoli, Wong bok and cauliflower.

I have plated some more veggies in the greenhouse. Now we have some mignonette and cos lettuce, rocket, some silver beet seedlings that haven't come up, carrots (in the long terracotta pots at the front, bit of an experiment), tomatoes in the round pots at the back, some strawberry off cuts growing for the kids school fete in a couple of weeks and some oregano, parsley and zucchini seeds which have yet to come up. I am also attempting to grow ginger for the first time (completely wrong season I know but thought I would give it a go) and I also have some potatoes in bags which are behind me in this picture.

So if all goes well this winter, we should have a good veggie haul to get us through :)

As I write, the rain is bucketing down on our tin roof - love it! - good for the veggies and water tank!

Bare rooted fruit tree labels say the darndest things

A couple of weeks ago the family and I headed out to the Urban Homesteaders Club at Eat at Dixibelle's place. It was a great afternoon to see around her garden and chat with like minded people. This was the first time I have taken my kids and they seemed to have a ball playing with all the other kids that came this time. Next get together is at our place so we are busy preparing to have everyone around!

On a tour of her garden, hubby and I were admiring her nectarine tree with lovely ripe nectarines gracing the branches, when I turned to hubby and said " You know, our nectarines don't look like that - they are....fuzzy", hubby agreed. After we came back home and checked the tree, we realised that the bare rooted tree we planted two and a half years ago and only bared fruit for the first time this year, was not in fact a nectarine like we thought, but actually....a peach tree!!!

I guess it is just lucky we planted another TWO peach trees this year as didn't think we had any!

Update on Operation 'One Last chance'

Previously I have blogged about my troubles with growing passionfruit in our climate. Well here they are two months on - one has gone absolutely crazy and the other is only just finding its groove. They are exactly the same type and had the same soil preparation so I have no idea why one is bigger than the other.

They are both still alive and growing, even taking into consideration the cool summer weather we have been having. You gotta be happy with that! :-)

Parties and 'To-do' lists

Phew! What a weekend!

First, my eldest daughter turned 7! (that went by crazily fast! Hubby pointed out she is almost halfway to getting her licence! Crap!). We had a Star Wars party and thankfully the rain held off (we had 3 inches in the previous 48hrs leading up to the party). I always like to make the kids' birthday cakes and although this one was a compromise (she wanted a light sabre but I just wasn't creative enough for that one) I think it still turned out OK. My hands are still stained black from the icing though.

So with the party out of the way and a couple of hours of sunshine we were able to mow the forest of weeds that we affectionately call 'the lawn' and didn't get the mower bogged in the process - double yay!

Sunday, after a leisurely breakfast of fresh homegrown scrambled eggs (yum!), we were out to cross some jobs off our 'to-do' list. First was to net the fruit trees as the birds had already gobbled up all the cherries  (grrrrrr). We we were too slow getting around to those ones. So netted at the moment are the three apple trees, plum, nectarine and almond. HOPEFULLY we will win against the birds this year :)

Next I finally planted out the beans I have been meaning to do for weeks, and am trying to grow red kidney beans for the first time.  I also planted the tomatillo plant that a friend gave me, along with a great salsa recipe for the fruit. It looks much happier now it is in the ground and out of the greenhouse.

Next we finally strung up the onion and garlic harvest that had previously been sitting on the shed floor. The onions were substantially heavier than what we thought, so hubby came up with this idea to use the trailer frame to hang them off. Works pretty good I think! Just as long we don't need the trailer frame in the next little while I guess!

Then we made some more paper bricks but I'll do a more detailed blog about that later.

Kids were still happy playing outside at this stage so we thought we would finally start planting out our mountain of dirt left over from the pool excavations. I picked up some native tube stock a while ago for a couple of dollars each but they have been sitting in the bottom of the greenhouse waiting to be planted. Poor plants must feel neglected in there! Anyhoo still have a long way to go - like some edging and mulch would be good!- but its a start. We planted grevilleas, bottlebrushes, banksias and some westringias that I had left over from the hedge around the pool.

I know I blogged previously that we were going to plant the pumpkins on the hill this year but I didn't feel that the soil had been prepared right so we decided to plant then on the front bank and let them grow down towards the tank. This year I have planted QLD Blue, Kent, Butternut and a vegetable spaghetti. I planted the watermelon and rockmelon seedlings here as well but they are sort of behind me in this pic.

(OK pic is not the best, and we need to mulch here again too, but you can just make out the bamboo stakes!)

After that we had a BBQ dinner with salad from the garden - and the kidlets got to have the first cherry tomatoes of the season.

Hubby and I were both exhausted but happy we were able to cross some things off our very long 'to-do' list.

Once last chance.....

I may be a glutton for punishment, but this time, is the last time....I promise.

After killing countless passionfruit vines  - some with too much love, some with not enough love and others just plain freezing them to death in our cold winters - I have decided that these will be the last two passionfruit vines I plant on our place. If these two don't survive, then that it is it. No fresh passionfruit for us.

So here they are. The last two passionfruit. I have decided to encroach on a small part of the kids play area and plant them up against the north facing shed wall which will hopefully keep them warmer in winter, and the kids trampoline which normally sits in front of them on the grass, will protect them from frosts. If they grow big enough, they will also help cool the shed as well.

Fingers crossed .......

Whats happening on the fruit front

One of the first things we wanted to get cracking on when we finally moved out here was to start the orchard, given we knew it would take a couple of seasons before the trees were to start producing fruit. As we get strong NW/W winds here, we also planted a wind break of local wattle trees to help protect our fruit trees in their infancy. We dug all the holes (OK well my hubby dug them all as I was pregnant with the twins then. It was convenient I'll give you that!) and planted our first row of fruit trees, starting off with apples, pear, almond, mulberry, nectarine, apricot and cherry. How exciting!

We have expanded on this each year until this year where we have now three rows of fruit and nut trees (can't see the third row in the pic above), which in addition to the above mentioned, we have added hazelnuts, pistachios, another cherry, peaches, more apples, plums, oranges, mandarin, lemon, lime, and some olives as well (but they are in a different spot).

We have also added four trellis' which include a LOT more raspberries (I was sick of not getting any raspberries last year as the kids would fleece the vines!), grapes (although it appears I have lost one), kiwi fruit, and this year I have also added a thornless blackberry, blackcurrant, and a boysenberry as well (with the sole ambition of making boysenberry ice cream! Is there any better reason for having one of these vines?).

OK You might have to squint and look pretty close, but there are raspberry canes there somewhere. And I obviously haven't finished the irrigation system yet. But its a good pic of the wattle wind break in the background.

Here is the said boysenberry bush in flower - yay!

This is our little blueberry patch. It has been moved around a bit as the last place was a bit too hot in the afternoon summer sun. I have also mulched them with pine needles as I have read it increases the acidity of the soil which they like. Anyway they seem  pretty happy here nestled between our garden shed and soon to be photinia hedge on the other side, and they have heaps of blueberries coming on!

Here are some other pics of what is currently happening in the garden:

This is the strawberry patch I have going on underneath the rose bushes just outside the house. My goal is to have the strawberry bushes as a thick carpet underneath the roses. The netting is so my lovely chooky girls are kept out while the plants are getting established. The strawberries are just coming into season - yum!

And check out the almonds on our tree! They are massive this year!

We have two young orange trees - a Washington navel and a Valencia - can't remember which one this is but I noticed that we now have buds! I have companion planted them with lavender. All my citrus (lime, lemon, mandarin and two oranges) were looking a little sick over the last month so I mulched them with compost (hence the netting as the chooks thought it was great to scratch in it!), fertilised with dynamic lifter (special fruit and citrus one) and gave a couple of hits of seaweed solution. They were a bit slow on the uptake but I have finally started to see some new growth on all the trees.

And the good news is we had 20mls rain on Saturday which was brilliant as I didn't have to water all of these fruit trees!

MM xox