urban vegetable patch

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!

Well, it wasnt snow, cotton wool or a spiders web.

So what was it?

This was the big question facing vegie patch owners Fiona and Peter and their family.

The even bigger question was, “is it bad”?

Having just recently planted their vegie garden they began to wonder what they had done to cause such a problem.

So after a couple of photos, they began to surf the net for an answer and after just a short while, they found the answer.

And it was all good news, they had done nothing wrong and the white stuff was in fact a fungus, but a good sort of one. Saprotrophic Fungi.

According to the Fungi section of the CSIRO – Saprotrophic fungi (also known as saprobes, saprophytes) obtain their energy and nutrients by breaking down dead organic matter such as in soil, litter, dung, and wood.

And for a bit more info a search of www.environment.gov.au came up with this info: Saprotrophic fungi obtain their nutrients from dead organic matter. There are many forms of dead organic matter—leaf litter, dung, soil, dead animals, wood and dead fungi-to name just a few. Saprotrophic fungi use them all. Saprotrophic fungi feed on and recycle about 85% of the carbon from dead organic matter, with bacteria and animals responsible for the other 15%. These fungi release the locked-up nutrients that can then be used by other living organisms, making the fungi vital to the health of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems around the world.

The original answer that gave way to further investigation came from Wiki Answers: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_can_you_remove_mold_from_the_dirt_in_your_garden

The cause may have been due to the fact that the weather had been quite warm and all of a sudden the garden owners received almost 100mm of rain in just a couple of days, and with the weather still being warm, decomposition of the organic matter may have been quicker than usual for that area of Australia.

But whatever the cause, we found it fascinating to look at and we learnt something ourselves.

If you have come across a problem in your garden and then solved, it feel free to share it with us and the readers of the Urban Vegetable Patch.

Last year we dug a crop of potatoes that we had planted and we backfilled the patch to allow it to rest before we planted another crop. But we must of missed a couple of tiny little potaotes, because after a short time, up came some new potato plants.

We thought about not keeping them, but fiqured if they felt the need to grow, so be it – and waste not want not!

So up came a little crop of potatoes and as they grew we just kept heaping the dirt around them, so they would continue to grow upwards. Finally the time came for our accidential – free crop of potatoes to be dug and while we didnt get a ton of spuds, we certainly got enough for a meal or two.

And yes, we are now resting the potato patch!

Well what can I say, I have been slack!

And now I find that the year is marching on and I am sooooo late putting in this season’s crop of vegetables. So off I trotted to the garden centre and I begrudgingly purchased some seedlings.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against the planting of seedlings and I find them very convenient and a great way to get a vegetable garden off to a flying start. It’s just I feel that seeds give me better bang for my buck! Even when I factor in the other costs such as seed raising mix, I still feel that seeds give better value. Plus you get to see a mature plant develop from scratch.

But in the “for’s” for seedlings, you only pay for what has sprouted and you don’t need to thin them out, they are just ready and waiting for you to pop into your vegetable patch.

So because I am running so late this year and have only just cleared out my vegie patch, I have decided my plan of attack is to plant some seedlings to get crop 1 started and then some seeds to get the second crop going so that I have a continuous crop of vegies such as cucumbers, lettuce, bok choy and beans…. hope my plan works and if it does it should keep me in vegies for a while…

But  what is your preference? Seeds or seedlings?

Yellow Zucchini - before the dreaded leaf mildew set in

Well after years of fiddling around with lettuce in pots etc, 3 years ago I took the plunge, got my act together and organised 3 garden beds. Each measured approx 2 metres long by about a metre wide and yes I am in the suburbs of Melbourne. In the past 3 years I have managed to grow some awesome tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini, broccoli, chilli’s, spuds, a random eggplant or two and some other odd bits.

But it has not all been success, last year the zucchini went mouldy, I tried everything but nothing would help those poor little things, so out they came. The hot summer knocked the stuffing out of my garlic and it died, but to my surprise it has come up again this year.

I also have a large possum population that enjoys a nibble on the odd leaf or vegetable, so I have driven stakes into each corner of each bed and hung bird netting over the top and sides, fixed the possum and bird population. Or so I thought, watching out the kitchen window a very clever butcher bird had found a way to steal my cherry tomatoes, perched on a corner stake, he carefully put his beak through the netting and picked out a nice ripe cherry tomato, squished it in his beak, decided that one wasn’t tasty, spat it out and tried another… needless to say he was quickly “shooed” off. But that’s part of the joy, the ups and downs, successes and failures. The learning.

But there is nothing quite like picking your own produce, especially the first one of whatever for the season, it’s kind of an almost childlike sensation, amazement that “I grew this”. And for me this feeling never goes away!