James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

With all the Waving I've been doing lately I thought I'd break the monotony by doing a quick update about the Garden.

Over the winter we pulled out the zuchinnis and squash and for a while the beds lay unused. I turned them over occasionally but couldn't really get enthused about growing anything. Then my mum gifted us with a few packets of seeds and a few punnets of Broccoflower and I finally got back into the planting mood.

So to date we have:

BroccoFlower: 

Cauliflower:

Spinach:

Peas:

and more.

I really should revisit my Gardenator idea.

Just thought I would do a quick update on the vegie garden. The beds have been left alone for a little while now, I would love to say that they've been lovingly tended for the winter growing season, however whats really happened is that I haven't had the inclination to tackle the work to repair the beds until now.

However that being said we're starting to re-populate the beds and today we planted some Romanseco Broccoli Romano, other wise known as Fractal Broccoli.

The next thing I did was move the Sweet Potato. As you may remember, when I first planted the sweet potato, it was in a tyre next to our lemon tree. Well it's reached the point where the tyre is severely restricting the tubor growth so I decided to move it from the tyre into our middle bed.

Last but not least, our pumpkin vine has finally started bearing fruit. The vine has been growing since soon after I built the compost enclosure, and in fact started from composted pumpkin seeds. After meandering all through our back garden it's finally started to produce pumpkins.

A while ago I posted a how to on growing sweet potato in which I essentially filled a tyre with dirt and compost, put a sprouted sweet potato bit in and hoped for the best.

Well it turns out that I was "Doing It Right(tm)". Below you can see out first sweet potato, pulled fresh from the ground:

I'm quite chuffed, I wasn't sure if we would have much success, but we managed to get above from the below:

And there's plenty more in the ground :)

Today I'm going to spend some time planting radish seeds through out the various beds. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, both Karin and my father in law are big fans of radishes, so they're a surety to be actually eaten (rather than ending up in the compost heap). Secondly, they are also a good companion plant for other fruit and vegies.

Companion planting is something else I'm going to be looking into for the Autumn/Winter season. If I can get pest control through the development of symbiotic relationships rather than the use of chemicals, all the better I think.

I haven't blogged in a while about the garden so with the changing of the seasons, I thought now would be a good time to reflect on our first foray into vegie gardening.

I started this as an therapuetic exercise. It was something I could do that was away from the computer, got me outside and in the sun. However it soon grew into something that I was genuinely interested in. I found that the process of building the beds, preparing the compost and soils, and dealing with the various challanges that comes with raising vegies gave me a meditative outlet I couldn't find elsewhere.

To be honest, our garden was much more successful than I thought it would be. We were able to grow and in fact we are still growing vegetables that we eat and give to our friends and family. Of particular note of course are the marrows and corgettes, which have reached epic proportions while still retaining flavour and texture. Of course the cherry tomatos have flourished, however I am most pleased about the Egg Plants and Capsicums, which have managed to grow some very nice fruit despite being planted too close together and sharing some particularly nasty bugs.

For winter, we're planning on growing at least half of our total vegie needs. This means we're going to be focusing on staples like Peas, Brocollini, Cauliflower and Potatos. Before that, I'm going to need to rebuild a couple of the beds, both from a nutritional point of view as well as a structural point of view.

For those who are interested, I've got a garden set on flickr

Last night I thought I would try my hand at harvesting seeds from one of our jumbo zucchinis. The zucchini in question had turned woody and very soft in the middle so I thought I'd give it a go.

Step 1:

The first step is to get your zucchini and tools together. Below is my starting point:

Step 2:

Next we remove the pulpy core with the seeds:

Step 3:

This is the messiest part of the process. Basically what you do is gently pull apart the pulp and remove the seeds. It's not that difficult, however it can be very sticky. By the end of it you should end up with something like the below:

Step 4:

Now that you have your seeds, the last step is to put them in a sunny place so they can dry and you can bag em up for next year:

So we'll see if I did it right next year.

I haven't blogged in a little while, so I thought I would do a quick update on the Garden.

First up we have our Cherry Tomatos which are just about ready to pick:

Seeing as Ms 3 is our resident Tomato fiend, she'll have the honour of picking the first batch.

Next we have an update on the Sweet Potato. As you can see it seems to have been a successful planting. The greenery is running riot and there are plenty of roots coming off the old sweet potato:

And finally, it wouldn't be a garden report without YAJZ (Yet Another Jumbo Zuchinni):

Karins Grandmother gave us an old piece of sweet potato she found in the back of her cupboard. It had started to sprout so she thought we could do something with it. "Well", I thought, "Why not?"

The first thing I did was check to see if it was still viable. I used the incredibly scientific method of chucking it in the old compost heap (the one the pumpkin vine is growing out of) and then checking on it a week later to see if there was any new growth. When I checked it this morning, there were new buds, so onto the next stage.

Planting the Potato

I have a few old tyres left over from setting up the herbs, cherry tomatos and potatos so I grabbed one and set it up next to the lemon tree:

I layered old newspaper underneath to prevent any of the grass underneath from getting into the tyre. Next I needed to fill it up with soil/compost:

Next up I built a layer of mulch using week old grass clippings that had been sitting in the now fallow middle garden bed. This will not only help to retain moisture in the soil, but should help to kill off any weeds:

Now that we have the bed setup, we need the actual sweet potato. I dug a hole in the middle of the bed, down about ten centimetres and put the potato in with the new buds pointing up:

Our Zuchinni's are finally getting to the point where we can harvest them, and below is the biggest one :)

I've also started using the liquid manure I've been brewing. It's a foul smelling, dark green liquid, but it should be full of planty goodness. I would put a photo up here, but it's not exactly the most appealing sight.

As promised in the last post here are some photos of the growing green type things:

Enjoy :)