urban vegetable patch

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!

I remember as a child heading off with my Grandpa, down the back of the garden to the vegie patch, here I learnt many little gardening skills, including planting, how to water plants, how to use my special little shovel, but most importantly how to know when to pick the garden goodies. We would load up our buckets with all manner of vegies and head back to the house were Grandma would be waiting and then she would teach me how to prepare the vegies we had just bought into the house. My most favourite vegetable was a purple bean, now I didnt like beans, but for some reason, the purple ones were ok, now I dont know whether it was beacause they didnt really look like a traditional bean or whether it was beacuse I had helped to grow them. But they sure tasted the best! So it got me thinking about getting children started in the vegie patch. Not only will they learn lifelong skills, but it may also encourage the more picky eaters to try some vegies.

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!

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!

I am the procrastinator queen. After moving into our current home over 1 year ago, I finally got my act together and got my backyard done. The result, as you can see below, is a usable vegetable patch of 6m x 1.3m using treated timber. The bottom was filled with local area soil and topped off with compost. Not only have I made the place look so so much better but I turn a once piece of  un-usable land into a workable vegetable patch. I am so proud of myself.

garden before the big makeover

Garden after. OMG!

Garden hawk-eye view

The plants that I am currently growing:

• Snow peas
• Soya bean (edamame)
• Rock melons
• Tomatoes – 1 red fig and 3 of unknown spices grown from a seed mix
• Spinach
• Bok Choi
• German Chamomile – currently growing in container.

I am fertilising the green vegetables weekly with a weak organic liquid fertiliser and boy are they growing like crazy! Spinach leaves are harvested weekly by picking the outer ones and leaving the center to grow.

Not sure about the Bok Choi though. They are not growing as well but I will with-hold my judgement for now; The weather has been cold in Melbourne for a couple of weeks and probably it is the heat that is the missing ingredient.

Snow Peas

Bok Choi and soya

Ha-ogen Rockmelons

Red Fig Tomato

Corn

German Chamomile