urban vegetable patch

In our alphabetical series of posts about various aspects of vegetable gardening, I thought B might be for bugs in the Vegetable Garden. But not the bad ones… lets look at a double B – Beneficial Bugs!

Bad bugs get loads of press, so I thought by looking at the good bugs, it may give you some ideas on controlling those bad, nasty and destructive bugs that can seemingly devour a vegetable garden overnight!

Ladybugs

There are good ladybugs and bad lady bugs, so how do you know which is which? Well its all in the spots!

The 28 spot ladybug is bad, but before you go squashing it make sure that it is destructive, if your vegies aren’t under threat maybe leave it be. But if you find an 18 spot ladybug, you should be delighted, these are the good ones. They will happily munch away on thrips, aphids, grubs and a few other nasty bugs.

Not only that they are quite an attractive little bug to have hanging about your vegie garden. Kids love them!

Lacewing

These are a green bug with 4 clear wings hence their name lacewings. And its the hungry little larvae of the lacewings that are predators. They devour pests such as scales and mealybugs, aphids, moth eggs and smaller caterpillars. I read somewhere that they can eat approx 60 aphids in an hour, now that’s an appetite!.

Spiders

While you may sometimes despair when you get tangled up in a web in the garden and then do the crazy “I just ran into a spiderweb” dance. Spiders are your friends, they eat various bugs and while you need to be wary of them eg redbacks, white tails and funnel webs just to name a few… they can be particularly handy.

There are a number of other very handy bugs that can take out the nasty ones, these also include wasps (citrus gall wasp is great for citrus trees), some bugs such as the Damsel Bug, Predatory Shield bug and this one sounds good… the Assassin Bug!

So how do you get these beneficial insects into your garden?

Attract these beneficial insects into your garden by planting a few attractive plants such as sunflowers, daisy’s, borage, parsley, rosemary,coriander and native plants, just to name a few.

You may decide if your infestation is bad, to buy some beneficial bugs. There a number of suppliers in Australia that sell these beneficial insects and a couple that I have found that sell via the Internet are: Bugs for Bugs – www.bugsforbugs.com.au & IPM Technologies – http://www.ipmtechnologies.com.au

If you are interested in finding out more about beneficial bugs, take a look at this newly released book – Bug: The Ultimate Gardener’s Guide to Organic Pest Control

Eggplants behind bird netting - I was not sharing these with the birds!

OK, sorry about that headline, just had to do it as this year for the first time, my eggplants have flourished!

I have had several nice size Eggplant “Black Beauty” and to my surprise and delight I have also had a couple of the heirloom variety of Egplant Listada di Gandia, these are supposed to be a purple and white striped eggplant but for some reason mine was more white. But that’s OK, I was just surprised to get any at all. I had previously tried growing eggplants before but this year I popped them in a different spot and they just loved it. Maybe they liked being planted alongside the tomatoes or perhaps it was the afternoon shade from the large gum tree.

On a regular basis, we will be posting an A-Z of various aspects of vegetable gardening.

So to get started – we will kick off with good old A !

A is for Abundance!

Try as hard as I might to get a good “even” supply of vegetables of various varieties, you can guarantee that something is bound to fail and something else may produce prolifically, at times over prolifically and you end up with an abundance of a particular vegetable.

Hopefully it is one you really like, but what do you do with an over supply?

Here are just a few ideas;

• Give it away to friends, family or a charity – consider a food charity, soup kitchen etc

• Preserve it by bottling, pickling, drying or freezing.
  Some vegetables can be frozen as is, but most may need to be blanched before freezing. Blanching is really just a quick dip in some boiling water for a couple of minutes, depending on the vegetable, then plunge them into some ice cold water to stop the cook process. It is also a good idea to give them time to dry off before freezing them. Bottling and/or pickling and how you do it is really dependant on your taste and the type of vegetable you have in abundance. I just had a look at the Fowlers Vacola Simple Natural Preserving Kit – looks much easier than I remember… my mum used to bottle abundant fruit!

• Drying – lots of vegetables can be dried either using the sun or an electric dehydrator.
  You can also puree some vegetables and dry them as a fruit leather. I dry chili by threading them onto cotton and hanging them under the verandah, they dry really quickly in our hot Australian summers. Many herbs can also be dried by handing them in bunches in a warm, dry and “wind-free” spot.

• Jams, Relish and Chutneys
  Are a great idea as not only do you get to eat the vegetable fresh, but you have it as a different form to be enjoyed in another way, such as on toast or on your sandwiches or meats. But the real double bonus is you can give it away as gifts to people who have already said, hey, don’t give me anymore of vegetable x as I am over them at the moment. But by giving them the jam or relish, yes you are giving them more, but its a different form of the vegetable, so they are likely to jump at the chance to enjoy homemade jams or relish. Sneaky!

• Freezing them as a ready cooked meal.
  An abundance of tomatoes this year led me to do this and I still have a couple of packs of sauce left! I made the tomato sauce out of my homegrown tomatoes, basil and capsicum. Then added some onion and garlic, with some cracked pepper and a pinch of sugar, until the tomatoes were cooked. I then waited for it to cool, pureed it in the blender then poured enough for a meal into freezer bags and froze! Its been used in pasta sauce, as a casserole base and minestrone base.Herbs can also be frozen, I like to pick the herbs, put then into ice cube trays in quantities that I would use in cooking, add water to the trays and freeze. I can then pop a cube into whatever I am cooking over winter.

• Make a cake!
  Zucchini cake, pumpkin scones and pie and beetroot cake are just a few baked items that can be made with your abundance of vegetables. There must be more, so have a surf around the Internet to see what cakes can be made with different vegetables.

There are probably lots more ideas and tips on dealing with an abundance of vegetables, so feel free to share your hints or tips on what you do with your abundance!

2 weeks old garlic in foam boxes

It’s Autumn and that means it’s time to pop those garlic into the ground! Well this is my first time growing them so I don’t really know what to expect. I have read that they one of the easiest things to grow, just sow and forget. Instead of popping them into my main patch, I’ve decided to fill up a medium sized foam box with my special potting mix. (Well, as always, I have a little ‘traffic congestion’ on the main patch. So sorry garlic, you will have to settle with a form box). In goes 6 cloves (pointy bit facing up) and after 2 weeks, green shoots!

Apparently, all I need to do now is to keep the water up and feed them occasionally. Hopefully by the end of the year, I will have nice fat bulbs!  Will keep all posted. Go garlic!

Saffron Crocus flower bud

About 3 years ago, I received my regular mailout from the Diggers Club and saw that one of the plants in that edition was the Saffron Crocus – Crocus Sativus and was interested in how a pretty flower like that produced such an expensive spice.

I had purchased “genuine” Saffron threads once for a receipe and they were like little pieces of gold, so I thought why not grow my own?

The bulbs arrived and after some reading about growing saffron, I planted them in a pot. I did this as sometimes things come up in the garden and my partner considers they may be a weed and he pulls them out! So a pot was the safest spot to grow them.

Each year they bulbs came up and did nothing, died off, remained dormant and came up again…

Can you imagine the buzz when we discovered a lone flower this year… we watched it, checking its progress 3-4 times a day…waiting like expectant parents for the flower to open and revel its 3 precious stamens.

Yes, each crocus flower has only 3 stamens, so you need to grow quite a few to produce a kilo of this expensive spice, but I dont really mind if I just get a few, its better than nothing and certainly an excellent way to learn about saffron. Just think you may decide to grow a row of crocus saffron flowers as a border or garden edge and not only do you get some beautiful purple flowers, but you get to grow your own Saffron.

The big day arrived, the flower was open (you need to pick the threads as soon as the flower opens) and carefully we removed the 3 precious stamens. We then dried the stamens for 5 days on paper towel in a dry spot (aka – the laundry) then into a screw top jar ready to be used in cooking.

Was it worth the wait – it certainly was!

Saffron Crocus Flower with threads

Saffron Threads drying