urban vegetable patch

2L Nutrilsoil pack

Recently I found a new organic liquid fertiliser online – Nutrisoil. What makes me really excited is that is mainly based on worm casting! Worm casting people!! Well, most out-of-the-box organic liquid fertiliser are based on blood and bone with other added goodies. You will seldom come across one that is based on worm casting. If you have, you are lucky. Better still, if you have a worm farm, you will probably have a good supply of this nature super fertiliser

I have read a lot about the benefits of using worm casting or worm juice but sadly, I don’t have a worm farm. So you can only image how ecstatic I was when I found them. Nutisoil is family business based in Wodonga and the service you get is just superb. When I first ordered my Nutrisoil, it arrived with 1/3 of the content spilled out of the container. I email to them about it and they send a replacement bottle the very next day! Now, that a service you don’t get everyday.

I have since try Nutrilsoil for 1 month. Previously I am using Yates “Nature’s Way Multi Nutrient Plant Food”. What I found is that the green leafy vegetable reacts more vigorously to the Yates fertiliser where as Nutrilsoil is a more slow and steady fertiliser. I am not surprise with this result at all as I expect the greens to react more to a blood and bone based fertiliser. Having said this, I got a brilliant result using Nutrilsoil to treat one of my tomato plant suffering with tomato wilt virus. It does not cure but after 2 weeks, I notice the new shoots emerging and the leaves have slowly recover its lush green colour.

P.S: Nutrisoil are giving out 2 liters of trail pack for free (add $15 for postage and handling). So you got no reason not to give it a shot!

Growing your own heirloom vegetables – Bringing Carbon Dioxide down to earth, is written by Diggers Club founder Clive Blazey.

It provides information and loads of photographs to help you on your way to growing your own patch of heirloom vegetables. Plus also has a section for children to get started on their own vegetable garden.

Find out what makes these old varieties of vegetables so good!

Growing Your Own Heirloom Vegetables: Bringing Carbon Dioxide Down to Earth

Took 118 days to ripen

The Rockmelon finally ripens. Took 118 days, coming in at 200 grams at about 20cm in circumference. The smell that fills the the kitchen is, oh, just divine – light, sweet and fruity. Before Xavier (my partner) left for this holidays, I promised to wait for him to enjoy the melon. This is going to prove to be more difficult than I anticipated. Must . Be . Strong.

It feels like Christmas was just yesterday but in fact Autumn is just around the corner. Spring/Summer season can be a very exciting season for all gardeners. This is the season where you get all the interesting, vibrant and fragrant fruits and veggies. For me, I had a better than expected season. We got bucket loads of tomatoes, corns, early crops of bok choy and rockmelons! As the tomatoes wilts and the melons ripens, its time to plan for my autumn garden.

Autumn need not be boring, in fact I quite look forward to the cooler months. The colder months are a great time for growing your green leafy vegetables. As the day gets shorter, you have more vegetable variety to grow without them bolting easily. This year, I am dividing the plot into 5 one-meter sections.

Section 1: Cabbage patch

I will grow some mini and chinese cabbage.

Section 2 & 3: Peas

What can I say but I am a total pea lover.  For some reasons, peas tend to get really expensive in Melbourne during the cooler months (which always baffles me, by the way). This year I am going to grow enough to feed me to my heart’s content. Oh, and not forgetting to mention that I am also using it to improve soil fertility.

Section 4 & 5: Fast maturing plot

This section is reserved for me to grow fast maturing vegetables such as spinach and bok choy. As one crop matures, they will get lots of digging and flipping into for the preparation of the next crop.

So this is it, my Autumn plan. Now I just have to get off my butt and start sowing seeds and clearing the beds. So what’s your autumn plan? I will love to hear and gather some ideas for next year.

Last year we dug a crop of potatoes that we had planted and we backfilled the patch to allow it to rest before we planted another crop. But we must of missed a couple of tiny little potaotes, because after a short time, up came some new potato plants.

We thought about not keeping them, but fiqured if they felt the need to grow, so be it – and waste not want not!

So up came a little crop of potatoes and as they grew we just kept heaping the dirt around them, so they would continue to grow upwards. Finally the time came for our accidential – free crop of potatoes to be dug and while we didnt get a ton of spuds, we certainly got enough for a meal or two.

And yes, we are now resting the potato patch!

Enough tomatoes to share

Today I brought all my extra tomatoes to work to share around (btw, there are more from where they can from). Received many emails to say they “were simply devine” and “the sweetest I have ever eaten”. I think this really made all the hard work  worth while. Hopefully, I have convert some to grow their own come next season. Happy me.

I am slowly becoming known as “the lady that grew her own greens” in my company. I tend to get asked random questions about growing vegetables, which was how it started this rather insightful conversation. One of my workmate asks me if I have any experience in growing garlic. Hmm, well,  no. In fact, it never occur to me to grow some as they are just so freaking cheap in stores – $1 a bag of imported garlic.

As the conversion progresses, I was soon found out that the reason he want to grow was because he is concern about imported garlic were fumigated by Australian quarantine. Excuse me! did I just hear fumigate? Australia has strict quarantine laws about importing wood/timber/bamboo but it just never occur to me that food needs to go through fumigation as well. This is made me question, “Do I know really know what I am serving for dinner?”

I want to believe fumigated garlic is safe for human consumption given that its sold readily in the grocery store but I can’t; If fumigation kills any nasty bugs that lurks within, one can only image what it has done to the garlic. I am no food scientist but you don’t have to be one to exercise common sense. Come this Autumn, I will start growing my own garlic. In the meantime, I will buy Australian grown garlic. At least I know it not fumigated and its grown to Australian standards.

Interesting article in The Age about Imported garic

About 3 months old - 1 of 10 expected melons

Fun fact: The skin of a young rockmelon is smooth. As it matures, the skin roughens with brown scar-like markings until it eventually looks like what you see in the supermarket!