urban vegetable patch

Male Zucchini Flower

I have noticed that both my cucumbers and zuchinni have both had loads of flowers lately, but I dont seem to be getting much in the way of crop.

So I made myself periodically visit the vegie patch at various times of the day, I know it seems odd and a bit overprotective, but I needed to confirm if my suspicions were correct.

And they were, I seem to be sadly lacking a bit of Bee Action!

I checked the flowers and as you can see in the picture there are male and female flowers which is a good thing, but no sign of any bees buzzing about doing their thing.

So its time to put opertaion Bee into action.

Plant some Bee attracting plants nearby the vegie patch and fingers crossed that this will encourage some bees to visit the garden and more importantly the vegie patch. While it wont help this cucumber and Zuchinni season, it may help next year.

Female Zucchini Flower

Some of the Bee attractors that I will consider are Cammomile, Hyssop and Lemon Balm as the 3 of these are not only ahndy for attracting bees, but also are great herbs. I will also look at some other non edible plants as well, becasue I really need those bees!

Organic
By Don Burke

As a six-year-old he started his own vegetable garden under the watchful eyes of his father and grandfather. Now Don Burke is known as Australia’s foremost authority on all things gardening.

Organic covers all that you need to know to start and cultivate your own vegetable garden including composting, pests and diseases, growing conditions, chickens, harvesting and scrumptious recipes.

In a poor economic climate, good quality, inexpensive food is hard to find to feed your family. Why not start a grocery store in your own backyard? Find out the benefits of growing your own vegies for yourself, including cost-cutting, family fun, fresh produce and greater variety of species unavailable in stores.

From terrace pots to acreage, grab your gardening gloves and seedlings, and your family will enjoy building the garden, no matter the size of your plot.

Purchase online – Organic: Don Burke’s Guide to Growing Organic Food

Disease Tomato - See the black bits?

Ever since I came back from my holidays, I find that my red-fig tomato plant seems to be suffering from bacteria/fungal attack. I first starting seeing black spots appearing on the leaves. To best describe it, it looks like sprinkle of crack pepper over the leaves. The funny thing is it’s mainly affecting the new shoots. But trust me, it will slowly but surely spread to its unsuspecting neighbours. If any of the nearby truss comes in contact, it will turn black and the fruit will eventually die.

I did some quick googling and from what I can find suggest that this might be Blight of some sort. What I am doing now is to vigorously prune as much of the diseased portion away and spray a bicarbonate soda solution over the remaining plant. I am also doing a daily rounds to inspect for further damage. Fingers cross that it will slowly die down as the weather warms up or fire fighting will have to continue.

Do you have the same problems as me? Love to hear your solutions!

10 days after the first flower appeared, I see pea pods!! You can only imagine how excited I was. Snow peas are currently selling for $14.99/kg in the market! $14.99/kg,  are you kidding me?

2 Pea Pods

On the upside, I’ve now got peas! On the downside, I got only 2 peas. I don’t think I can do much with it. Oh well! Before I get all excited and all, I thought I will jot down some points for future reference.

My maturing Snow pea plants

So these are my notes:

• They are a cool climate vegetable. Plant either early spring or late Autumn
• They are really really easy to care for. I will even go as far as saying you can plant and forget about them.[link to previous post]
• Pea seedlings are really susceptible to bugs. I am not sure what bugs (my guess is earwigs) but I lost 2 seedlings due to their ferocious appetite.
• Good in fixing nitrogen in the soil. Plant them after harvesting hungry crops (Eg: Brocolli, tomatoes)
• It takes about 2 months to grow from seedling to flowering stage. Once they flower, pea pods will appear shortly, usually within a week.
• Not all sweet peas needs trellis. I bought a dwarf sweet peas from Diggers that are advertised as “No trellis needed”.
• I do not intentionally fertilise them except for the occasional left overs in my watering can of fertiliser.

Things I have read about but have not and will not want to experience

• They are susceptible to mould/fungus known as powdery mildew. This has not happened to me, but I try to only water the roots using the spout of the watering can

Melbourne had a wild weather night on Friday; There was wind, rain and more rain. My mob of unruly tomatos flopped over their existing supports and nearly killed itself. It’s probably my fault for not staking it properly in the first place.

unruly red-fig tomato. Look closely on the bottom left of the bush

While stalking them securely to the existing bamboo stick, I realised some of the undergrowth are starting to grow out and up to get more sunlight. This is not good because as they grow bigger (which is what happened now), they will be heavier and lay in the soil bed for support. This is bad bad karma for spreading disease from soil to plant.

What I did was, I had a bit of a DIY moment with 2 kebab sticks and a rubber band. I tied the two sticks together in the middle (using the rubber band) and poked them in the ground to form a ‘X’ shape. I then gently lifted the branch and rested it on top of the kebab stick frame.This will lift the heavy branch above the ground now. Not sure about its performance in high wind condition; Will deal with it when it comes. For now, I am a happy girl.

Branch support to lift it up and up

Coming soon…

News of  whats new in the wonderful world of gardening.

Plus we will also be reviewing products that we have used and products that have been recommended to us. If you are a company that would like to have your product reviewed, please contact us for more info…

There is nothing worse than having your beautiful vegie plants seriously attacked by pests. You love and nuture them and suddenly almost overnight, they are devoured by hungry pests!

But the good news is this is a battle that can usually be fought and won, although sometimes the battle can be lost if the hungry hordes arrive unseen.
But here is one of my favourite recipes for ridding my vegie patch of catapillars, aphids and other common pests.

Put into a  spray bottle, 1 litre of warm water and stir in two tablespoons of soap flakes.  Stir this until completly dissovled and allow to cool. Then simply spray onto the leaves of your plants.

It is a good idea, not to spray fruit and vegies within 1 week of picking and remember to store all solutions out of the reach of children.