Season change over

I find it hard to evict those tenants in my yard who are still working hard and producing yummy food.
Kale works year round here.

The tomatoes are still throwing out tonnes of fruit though the bushes are looking a little bedraggled. The okra are being left to go to seed since these pods got away on me. Okra needs to be harvested when much smaller.

 

Zucchini is still spewing forth, albeit at a slightly slower rate.

 

My nephews thought these were bananas  when they visited - I wish! Still not a bad assumption. You can see where they were going with it.

The peppers are coloring up nicely.

And speaking of color - one day's harvest brought in this rainbow of color and taste.

The harvest is top heavy with tomatoes, but the romas are great to freeze and paste later. I eat the cherry tomatoes as if they are candy, constantly nibbling on them, and the classic and beef tomatoes are usually eaten in wedges with a sprinkle of salt or in my lunchtime sandwich. My antioxidant levels must be off the scale!

One of the best things about growing your own food is that you can get varieties that you cannot buy in the stores. Such as red skinned (and higher antioxidant content) carrots.

Carrots grow all year round here. I planted these carrots in June after I harvested the garlic. They are now a good size to harvest.

In some plots I am able to seed the winter vegetables where there are some summer ones still on the go. Here I have some beans still growing up bamboo and string teepees producing enough for dinner every night. There is a late developer egg plant in the middle which may  or may not still produce something and a tomato plant and a melon hanging forlornly over the edge of the raised bed (to the left of the picture).

The bed is planted with sugar snap peas and cauliflower. The peas are at the right hand edge where they will be easy to harvest on a regular basis. I'll support them with trellising which I can add later as they sprout.

When planting peas, soaking them in water overnight helps them to germinate.

The cauliflower is a more "static" crop in that they are not harvested daily and so I have them in the middle of the bed where it is harder to reach.

Right now everything is protected with Sluggo to beat off the mollusc pests and bird netting to stop my feathered friends from eating the newly germinated seedlings. When the tomatoes and melon get pulled out, I'll plant that section with low growing lettuce as it is on the south side of the bed and won't be shaded nor shade the cauliflower. Lettuce are also fast growing so the crop that is there has a chance to finish.

I don't usually let the beds rest, preferring to use organic methods to fertilize the soil to keep its nutrient level high and mulching with compost.

In the front, the native garden is supporting all kinds of wildlife. Squirrels have excavated the soil from under this fuchsia and made themselves an attractive little home.

In North America squirrels are no big shakes in your garden, I know, but in this case my squirrels are helping me! It seems that they have been stealing/harvesting bulbs from someones else's yard and bringing them back!

I'm not sure what type of bulb it is but I'm going to put them in a pot to grow for next spring. They sure have gathered up a fine collection.

Out back, the baby lizards are scooting about. This little fella is only an inch or so long. The rusty nail head above and to the right of him gives you some idea of scale. Isn't he just adorable?

I can't wait till he's big enough to eat slugs and snails, though judging by the tiny wee snails I found recently, he may be the perfect boyo for the job!


 Byddi Lee

The Bulb Garden

They're in all the shops, being blogged about on all the gardening blogs and gardeners are boasting about how many they have.  Bulbs.  The promise of spring blossoms - or in some cases late winter blooms - is hard for us to resist.  When the nearby adult education center put on a bulb workshop for free, I decided that it was time to start the bulb garden.


I pictured clumps of tulips and daffodils and I'd planned to plant out bulbs that I'd been given in pots and that I'd saved to replant outside.  Some of these would produce lilies.  Add to that the Irises that badly needed dividing. They were beautiful last year - how much better will they be this coming summer with all the extra TLC they are getting.

After a quick trip to the garden center, (actually - there's no such thing as a 'quick' trip to a garden center) three dozen tulip bulbs and another five dozen daffodil bulbs later, I reckoned I'd have a great bulb population for my patch.

Hmmm - my patch. Taking advantage of a spare pair of green thumbs- my Mum is visiting from Ireland - I decided  to remove an area of the red lava stone that covers a lot of our property and work the soil beneath it.

But first I wanted to hear what the workshop advised.   It was given by a master gardener and I learned three very important things.  The first dismayed me.

1) Tulips don't grow well in California!

They need six to eight weeks in a cold place and should be treated like annuals here.  And I had three dozen of them.  It is recommended that they are kept in the fridge for six weeks.  During that time no other fruits such as apples should be stored in the fridge as they give off gases that kill the growing bud.  Even a warm up of half an hour will undo all your good work, so no taking them out of the fridge to make room for Thanksgiving!

When the time comes I'll post about how I plant them up.  I'll be using containers. So no tulips in the bulb garden, sadly.

2) Plant your bulbs three times deeper than the height of your bulb.  That is - if your bulb is an inch long you need to dig three inches down to bury it.

3) If an Iris rhizome has five or more leaves on it, it will blossom next season.

When replanting Irises it is best to think of a clock face about twelve inches in diameter.  Place around the clock at 12, 3, 6 and 9.  Orientate the leaves to the center and the rhizome outwards.  This part continues to grow under the soil.

Removing the red lava stones was a chore.  In places, there was black plastic beneath it, before we could even get to any soil.  In other places, the soil was churned up with the stones, so it wasn't a simple matter of just shoveling off the stones as we were losing half our growing medium.  Mum came up with the idea of sieving the stones with a riddle that we fashioned out of garden center 'flats' and bird netting.

A slow process but effective for the most part.  Here you can see the border between the lava stones on the left and the prepared bed to the right.  Inside the stone circle you can see my Gogi berry bush.  It's dormant - not dead - honestly!

Interestingly, the Irises had been growing in the stones and not in the soil below.  In some cases they had black plastic beneath them. 

We amended the soil with steer manure.  It cost $1.20 a bag.  We also added some old soil from pots that I had sitting about.  The soil was spent but we just needed to add bulk to the plot.  As it was, we were hard pushed to dig the bulbs in as deep as they should be.  Fingers crossed on that one.

To get a natural look with our daffodils we just scattered them randomly on the soil and planted them where they fell.  We clumped the lilies but are not sure if they even grow.  Come springtime I'm hoping for some nice surprises in this patch.  To deter the squirrels and other critters from digging up our bulbs, I sprinkled cayenne pepper over the plot, along with Sluggo of course.  I think I need to buy shares in the Sluggo company!

Finally two more points on planting bulbs. 

Plant them in clumps , not straight lines.  And the pointy end goes up!

Byddi Lee