urban vegetable patch

Growing your own heirloom vegetables – Bringing Carbon Dioxide down to earth, is written by Diggers Club founder Clive Blazey.

It provides information and loads of photographs to help you on your way to growing your own patch of heirloom vegetables. Plus also has a section for children to get started on their own vegetable garden.

Find out what makes these old varieties of vegetables so good!

Growing Your Own Heirloom Vegetables: Bringing Carbon Dioxide Down to Earth

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!

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

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

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?

Snow peas flowers!!

I thought I would never see the flowers from my snow peas but the day has come. After buying some seedlings from Bunning in early August, I stupidly realise that peas are more of an Autumn – Winter plant then a Spring – Summer plant. Oops! That would teach me to read before buying.

I did not really tend to them much after transplanting except for watering and the occasional splash of leftover liquid fertilizer. No surprise, some died, others eaten by bugs of unknown species.

So there I was, minding my own business and doing the usual gardening type things and ‘Whoooo, is that…..?’ Oh yes. Surprise indeed. I am now like a praying hawk (more like a mother realising the potential in her long neglected child), waiting for the emergence of the sweet, sweet peas.

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!