urban vegetable patch

10 days after the first flower appeared, I see pea pods!! You can only imagine how excited I was. Snow peas are currently selling for $14.99/kg in the market! $14.99/kg,  are you kidding me?

2 Pea Pods

On the upside, I’ve now got peas! On the downside, I got only 2 peas. I don’t think I can do much with it. Oh well! Before I get all excited and all, I thought I will jot down some points for future reference.

My maturing Snow pea plants

So these are my notes:

• They are a cool climate vegetable. Plant either early spring or late Autumn
• They are really really easy to care for. I will even go as far as saying you can plant and forget about them.[link to previous post]
• Pea seedlings are really susceptible to bugs. I am not sure what bugs (my guess is earwigs) but I lost 2 seedlings due to their ferocious appetite.
• Good in fixing nitrogen in the soil. Plant them after harvesting hungry crops (Eg: Brocolli, tomatoes)
• It takes about 2 months to grow from seedling to flowering stage. Once they flower, pea pods will appear shortly, usually within a week.
• Not all sweet peas needs trellis. I bought a dwarf sweet peas from Diggers that are advertised as “No trellis needed”.
• I do not intentionally fertilise them except for the occasional left overs in my watering can of fertiliser.

Things I have read about but have not and will not want to experience

• They are susceptible to mould/fungus known as powdery mildew. This has not happened to me, but I try to only water the roots using the spout of the watering can

Well what can I say, I have been slack!

And now I find that the year is marching on and I am sooooo late putting in this season’s crop of vegetables. So off I trotted to the garden centre and I begrudgingly purchased some seedlings.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against the planting of seedlings and I find them very convenient and a great way to get a vegetable garden off to a flying start. It’s just I feel that seeds give me better bang for my buck! Even when I factor in the other costs such as seed raising mix, I still feel that seeds give better value. Plus you get to see a mature plant develop from scratch.

But in the “for’s” for seedlings, you only pay for what has sprouted and you don’t need to thin them out, they are just ready and waiting for you to pop into your vegetable patch.

So because I am running so late this year and have only just cleared out my vegie patch, I have decided my plan of attack is to plant some seedlings to get crop 1 started and then some seeds to get the second crop going so that I have a continuous crop of vegies such as cucumbers, lettuce, bok choy and beans…. hope my plan works and if it does it should keep me in vegies for a while…

But  what is your preference? Seeds or seedlings?

Absolutely love it. No longer do you need to feel guilty about washing your vegetables twice or thrice for that matter – you can now reuse the water and put it back into the garden. Beauty! I bought my sink at an Eco exhibition sometime ago and have never since looked back.

Hughie Sink. Notice the pail at the top right corner? Yup, use that to temporary capture water from the sink

My garden runs purely from greywater and no, I do not have a greywater system. I collect water around the house, that would otherwise go down the drain, to reuse it in the garden. Hughie sink just makes it so, I repeat, so easy. You fill it up, wash your vegetables and empty it directly to the garden. I usually empty mine into a pail and then later transfer it to the garden; this saves me the trip of walking to and fro to the garden while cooking.

Pro:

• Australian made
• Water saving. Duh!
• Made with good quality study plastic. Not the flimsy kind
• Inexpensive
• No need for any ‘special installation’. Just buy and use it.
• Sits nicely in the kitchen sink. Works even better if you have a 2 bay sink.
• There is a plug at the bottom to make releasing of water really easy!
• Can be used anywhere (not only kitchen) where water needs to be captured and later used on the garden
• You can even use it as a basket to carry your harvest!

Con:

• Its somewhat ‘chunky’. You cannot collaspe it, making storage a problem in tight spaces.
• When its almost filled with water, its hard to carry to the garden without spilling some along the way
• Due to its rectangle shape, you can’t fit it in a circular sink. (but of course)
• Looks ……. raw. If only it looks more ‘urban’ (you know what I mean)

You can get buy yours today from Bunnings ($29.95) or through these websites
Hughie official website
Todae

Snow peas flowers!!

I thought I would never see the flowers from my snow peas but the day has come. After buying some seedlings from Bunning in early August, I stupidly realise that peas are more of an Autumn – Winter plant then a Spring – Summer plant. Oops! That would teach me to read before buying.

I did not really tend to them much after transplanting except for watering and the occasional splash of leftover liquid fertilizer. No surprise, some died, others eaten by bugs of unknown species.

So there I was, minding my own business and doing the usual gardening type things and ‘Whoooo, is that…..?’ Oh yes. Surprise indeed. I am now like a praying hawk (more like a mother realising the potential in her long neglected child), waiting for the emergence of the sweet, sweet peas.

Yellow Zucchini - before the dreaded leaf mildew set in

Well after years of fiddling around with lettuce in pots etc, 3 years ago I took the plunge, got my act together and organised 3 garden beds. Each measured approx 2 metres long by about a metre wide and yes I am in the suburbs of Melbourne. In the past 3 years I have managed to grow some awesome tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini, broccoli, chilli’s, spuds, a random eggplant or two and some other odd bits.

But it has not all been success, last year the zucchini went mouldy, I tried everything but nothing would help those poor little things, so out they came. The hot summer knocked the stuffing out of my garlic and it died, but to my surprise it has come up again this year.

I also have a large possum population that enjoys a nibble on the odd leaf or vegetable, so I have driven stakes into each corner of each bed and hung bird netting over the top and sides, fixed the possum and bird population. Or so I thought, watching out the kitchen window a very clever butcher bird had found a way to steal my cherry tomatoes, perched on a corner stake, he carefully put his beak through the netting and picked out a nice ripe cherry tomato, squished it in his beak, decided that one wasn’t tasty, spat it out and tried another… needless to say he was quickly “shooed” off. But that’s part of the joy, the ups and downs, successes and failures. The learning.

But there is nothing quite like picking your own produce, especially the first one of whatever for the season, it’s kind of an almost childlike sensation, amazement that “I grew this”. And for me this feeling never goes away!

Melbourne had a wild weather night on Friday; There was wind, rain and more rain. My mob of unruly tomatos flopped over their existing supports and nearly killed itself. It’s probably my fault for not staking it properly in the first place.

unruly red-fig tomato. Look closely on the bottom left of the bush

While stalking them securely to the existing bamboo stick, I realised some of the undergrowth are starting to grow out and up to get more sunlight. This is not good because as they grow bigger (which is what happened now), they will be heavier and lay in the soil bed for support. This is bad bad karma for spreading disease from soil to plant.

What I did was, I had a bit of a DIY moment with 2 kebab sticks and a rubber band. I tied the two sticks together in the middle (using the rubber band) and poked them in the ground to form a ‘X’ shape. I then gently lifted the branch and rested it on top of the kebab stick frame.This will lift the heavy branch above the ground now. Not sure about its performance in high wind condition; Will deal with it when it comes. For now, I am a happy girl.

Branch support to lift it up and up