The Brussell sprouts grew wonderfully and while not all of them manged to be tight, it didn’t really matter as they were still delicious and made it into several different dishes. They were full of flavour and while not as large as the store bought ones they were still good. And that brings me to the wombok, Corine started them off as seedlings for me and I nurtured them into really good looking and tasty fat womboks. I did have some issues with millipedes, but they didn’t destroy the crop which was the main thing.

I still have the onions growing that I planted amongst the cauliflower and Brussel sprouts, they will be a little bit longer before they are ready.

Now for Spring!

But “Houston, we have a problem” they are literally bombing our house with bat poop… it is getting everywhere – on the house, on the pavers, on the driveway and on the cars. I would hate to think what might happen if we left washing on the line overnight!

At first we couldn’t work out what they were after, usually they visit in the warmer months and eat the neighbours fruit on the loquat tree, but its not loquat season? At last we realised they are arriving each night to feast on the berries of a neighbouring lilly pilly tree… the berries are black, so that will give you an idea of the tar like “bombs” that we are being hit with.

Has anyone else experienced an ongoing problem with bats bombing them????  Would love to hear from you.

But despite the chill in the air, it is a great time to grow some of those yummy winter vegies.

So far this winter the crop has included growing some brussel sprouts, cauliflower, onions, peas, beans and wombok. And below are some pics of the winter vegie garden in its early stages.

Garlic has also been planted and is up and growing nicely as well.

I have also done a bit of a renovation on the garden area which had the tomatoes. Its been dug up and several handfuls of bio-mustard sown, so that it can be dug in as green manure at a later date. This will make the patch nice and nutritious for the summer vegies.

Plus strawberrys are in, and this year I have been a bit adventourous and have also planted some white strawberries – Strawberry Fraises Des Bois. It will be interesting to see how these go and more importantly how they taste!

Keep an eye on this blog, because since I took these pictures, the cauliflower has grown into nice heads, the brussel sprouts are sprouting and the wombok is hearting… I will post more pictures soon and update on the winter vegie plot soon…

Dwarf Snow Peas - just up out of the ground...

Wombok

Chilli - but something has helped itself and taken a bite - possums??

Bush Beans

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.

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.

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!

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

With a young child, a good starting point  is to involve them in your family garden, give them a small watering can and get them to help with the watering, let them pop the seeds (non chemical coated/treated is best) into the soil and let them pull the odd weed out, and most importantly let them help pick the vegies. It is a gentle learning introduction, then as they get a little older, give them their own piece of patch to plant out with their favourite vegetables.

If your child is a picky eater or your would just like to make the vegie gardening process a little more interesting, investigate some heirloom varieties of vegies, there are some fairly unusual and can I say funky vegies out there.

Here are just a few ideas (note: you may need to purchase these varieties as seeds, rather than seedlings);

• Beans – Purple King, Rattlesnake (purple and green), Dragons Tongue Bush Bean ( purple and white)
• Capsicum  – Sweet Chocolate
• Carrots – Dragon (purple skin)
• Corn – Popcorn or Anasazi (multicolour kernels-red, white & blue)
• Beetroot – Candy stripe (red & white flesh), Golden (yellow fesh) or white (white flesh)
• Pumpkin – Guatemalan Blue Banana or Turkish Turban
• Radish – Black round spanish
• Tomato’s – So many to choose from, but black russian, green zebra or the large mortgage lifter may be fun, along with yellow and red cherry tomatoes.
• Watermelon – Moon & stars
• Zucchini – Tromboncino.
• Strawberries – White Alpine, yes they are White! ( and available as seedlings)

These are just a few fun, yet traditional heirloom varieties that may just spike some interest in Vegetables and gardening, plus they can also make a great “show and tell” subject at school.
Look what I grew!

Time for a revamp was the call.

One particular patch was just really past its useby date, so I started to look around at what we had on hand, so that we could have a bigger and better vegetable garden. Hiding behind the shed were a couple of bits of colourbond (left over from the shed construction), so with tinsnips and a metal grinder we spilt the wider piece of roofing colourbond into two and decided that the two smaller bits would be perfect for the ends. Construction began and in a short time and some random bits of scrap wood we had a new raised vegie garden.

We also found some old garden hose that we put a slit into one side and then placed this on the edge of the colour bond and rivited it to hold it firmly in place. This will help prevent getting cuts from the tin.

In went some lovely compost, chicken manure, soil, blood and bone, plus some wetting agent to help with moisture retention. But before the patch was complete, we decided we would include an experimental watering system, to help save some watering time and maybe improve the efficeincy of the water. So before the last layer of soil was put down, we coiled a weeper hose across the bed and held it down temproraily with some metal pegs. The hose attachment end was left hanging out of the garden bed.Then down went the final layer of yummy soil mix, then the metal pegs were gently removed and we hooked it up to the hose from the rainwater tank.

In went some cauliflower and brussell sprouts and in between these went some randomly placed red onions. This combination I have since found out is a receommend companion planting combination that helps deter white cabbage moths… Fingers crossed on this…

As for the watering system, it seems to be working the cauli’s and brussel sprouts look like they are happy and healthy.