urban vegetable patch

Lovely seeds from our friends at "Voted with our forks"

Since my post on ha-ogen melon, I have been contacted by a couple of readers about seed swapping. I am really pumped up about it; I get to swap some of my extra seeds for something new and exciting, like a mystery box! I thought I will continue this effort with this post, and maybe even start a trend. So after sorting through my box of seeds, these are the seeds available for exchange:

• Ha-ogen melon
• Butternut Pumpkin
• Jalapeno
• Edamame (soya bean)
• Tigerella Tomato
• Sweet corn (Honey & cream)
• Sunflower yellow pollenless
• Chinese forget-me-not (blue)

If you are reading this and would like to be part of the action, please leave me a comment and I will get back to you. If you have got no seeds to swap but would still like to join in the fun, do also leave me a comment. Let’s get some seed swapping action happening people!

Several years ago we put some wooden screens up in the backyard to help hide the shed and the clothesline.

They looked great as they were, but they were also put up to serve another purpose to espalier some fruit trees. Espalier is when you grow your plant along a fence or other setup and trim them so they grow long arms, which is especially good for fruit. We tossed up what we would like to grow and decided on a lemon and an olive.

The lemon really tries hard but hasn’t really done much good, the olive on the other hand is loving being espaliered and this year was its second real lot of fruit, I picked 17 black olives, I feel there were a few more, but evidence showed that the Butcher birds had been at them and they had helped themselves to a few… again!

The Olive is the Manzanillo variety and I decided to wait until they had turned black to pick them, rather than pick them as green. We chose this variety as the olives are suitable for eating and as oil. Now I haven’t really had any experience with preserving olives and there was a lot of different methods of pickling them. But i had heard about a method where  you just pack the olives in rock salt for a few months. So I decided as a novice and a little time poor at the moment, this sounded like a quick and easy method. So my 17 olives are now doing their stuff in the rock salt. I did however forget to prick them    so they will take a little longer, however they are packed very tightly so this may work in helping the pickling / salting to work at a slightly better speed… but it is a waiting game.

Will let you know how my olive experiment goes.

Round Baby carrot

This particular carrot was plucked prematurely off the ground. I was just curious on what’s happening underneath the soil. It looks so cute! I split it half and shared it with Xavier. Definitely more from where it came from. Bliss!