2010 Garlic harvest

My first ever garlic effort and what can I say but it is whopping success!! Needless to say, those that have a bit more space to grow turn out to be much bigger; Those that grew in the styrofoam was, well, a tad-bit small. All I need to do is dry them out int he garage before keeping them in the pantry. Happy days

My last mushroom growing experience can only be sum up as a total disappointment. Not only have I paid good money ($20!!) for a kit, I was even diligently watering it day in and out but nothing. It produce absolutely nothing, zip. But you know, one should stop trying because of failures and boy am I happy with the result this time round! Big succulent mushrooms that is all ready for that morning omelette.

Mushroom harvest

My last mushroom growing experience can only be sum up as a total disappointment. Not only have I paid good money ($20!!) for a kit, I was even diligently watering it day in and out but nothing. It produce absolutely nothing, zip. But you know, one should stop trying because of failures and boy am I happy with the result this time round! Big succulent mushrooms that is all ready for that morning omelette.

What made this a success compared to last? Well, get a fresh kit for a start! The last one I bought was from Bunnings and god only knows how long has it been sitting on self. I could only imagine that most of it’s life giving spores are dead or well, half dead. Also, I’ve started much earlier this time. The instruction that came with the kit says the ideal growing temperature is between 17 – 23C. So, if you start a kit in the middle of summer in the garage, it will not exactly be a mushroom friendly environment.

Mushrooms are like weird little creatures; In a short period of time (i.e just 10 hours), you can literally see a difference in size. It’s like have little elfs that comes out to work on the mushroom while you are away! So, if you are thinking about growing something interesting this spring, why not give mushroom a go!

Mushroom (taken on 20/10/2010)

Mushroom (taken on 22/10/2010)

Spring plan 2010

So this is my big plan for Spring. As you can see, I’ve got a good selection of my summer favourites; Ha-ogen melon, Beetroot, Tomatoes & Pok Choy! I am also trying out new crops such as capsicum, turnips and pumpkins. On top of just growing vegetable, I am also going to try out some growing technics I have read over winter.

Tomatoes – Quality not quantity

With all the problems and troubles I had last year with my tomatoes, this year I am going to be super duper disciple with them. That means picking out lateral growth and only keeping 4 truss of tomatoes per plant. The theory is that this will encourage bigger fruits, which is what I want.

Deep watering

I am guilty of that sporadic watering, which I find is doing more harm than good. Deep watering mean water last often but for a longer period of time. With deeper watering what I want achieve is a deeper root system that helps my plants to cope with the hash summer heat.

Seaweed application fortnightly.

Seaweed is just a general good guy to have around. It is a tonic food for plants and encourages root growth (and many other things). Together with the practice of deep watering, what I hope to see is a overall healthier crop for the season.

Vegetable bed in rest

I drove my patch very hard with last year’s spring/summer crops – no resting in between harvest, just constant churning for a full 5 months. With this in mind, I have decided to clean up my winter crops much earlier than usual; I just wanted to give the ground a rest before the busy warmer months kicks in. I started sowing my green manure sporadically around the patch probably around July. By mid August, I started clearing all the winter crops and give my green manure a good bashing and dig-in before applying palletised manure. After this, I just let mother nature do it’s thing with the green manure and really, leaving the ground to rest and have a breather.

With the recent constant rain, I find the soil to be more acidic than normal (PH test came back to be 5.5 ~ 6). To finish the bed preparation, it rake in some Trace element and garden lime. The early signs are very encouraging; While raking in the lime, I find there is so much more earthworms activity than before! On top of that, with all the constant compost and manure I am adding into the patch during the growing the season, the topsoil is all nice, crumbly and yummy looking too. Looking back, I can truly say the soil is in a much much better condition. I just cannot wait for the weather to warm up and the growing to begin.

Tip: I went really easy on adding blood and bone into the patch. The reason being that fruiting crops (i.e: Tomatoes, Rock melon, zucchini, etc) will spend all it’s energy producing lots of forage and less on flowering if the ground is too rich in nitrogen. I find by digging in palletised manure well before the growing season is usually more than sufficient.

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!

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!

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.

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!