Fennel, Parsnips, Beetroot and pork

Climber Beans starting to form

The climber beans are starting to form after the flower flush over the last 2 weeks. Hopefully this is the start of many beans to come. Daniar talked about baking veggies for dinner so I thought it was a high time to pull up some of the garden and eat it.

King size beetroot

Pulled out a bumper beetroot, the biggest I've grown. Fed some ot Max, had the rest of the half for dinner and still have half left. No woodyness at all in this one so they must like all the rain we have been getting.

Parsnip numero uno

Pulled up my first parsnip and very happy with the size. After reading a few posts on the internet I decided to dig most of the dirt out aroudn it before pulling the last bit out, it still broke off but I didn't lose much.



Birdproof strawberry cage

I've been losing a few strawberries to the birds so I roped Alex into helping me build a cage to cover them. Spent yesterday knocking up a timber frame with sticks and string lashing, then covered with chicken wire. Hopefully it will keep the birds off the strawberries.

Fennel ready for eating

I pulled up two parsnip today. The first one was a rotten mess on the inside. Well, not rotten as in stinky rotten but it was mush. Not sure how this had happened but at the moment I'm assuming it's due to all the wet weather we've had lately. I also noticed that there is a hardish stem rising up out of the center and probably heading up to become a flower.

Of Broadbeans and Fennel

Well it's high time I started picking some of the broadbeans but of course, I have no idea what's involved or when the right time to pick them is. Some forums I read said to wait till the pods have black spots on them. In the end I just picked the ones that looked like they weren't really going to get any bigger. I then searched around for details on how to prepare them. It turns out it's not as straight forward as you would expect if you're thinking it's just like any other bean (climber type). I found a good you tube video on it - Fava Beans 101 . So we had a go at it and it's really not that difficult. The beans are quite tasty. Much better than eating one raw, which I tried a few weeks ago and it was bitter.

The passionfruit vine is growing quite nicely but I wasn't sure if I needed two in order to get fruit (some plants have to have two different types of the plant in order to set fruit (Avocados & Apples to name some). So it turns out that the passionfruit plant doesn't need two, however if has a few challenges stopping the fruit from forming. The pollen is quite think and heavy so it doesn't tend to get blown around by wind. Each flower on the passionfruit has both male and female bits but it seems that the flowers are known is self-sterile, which basically means the naughty bits can't dance on the same flower. They can only work with the opposing naughty bits from another flower. So anyway, I found a couple of nice videos on you tube that demonstrate the procedure for hand pollinating the flowers. This should get the fruit setting much more reliable. I also ready that some of the types of passionfruit have flowers that open in the mornings, some in the mid day. One column suggested that the pollinating needs to be done within 2 hours of the flower opening. I'm not sure if this is right or not. Anyway, I'll report back once I start seeing some results on my handy work.



Passionfruit flower showing male and female bits



Video on hand polinating passionfruit flowers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eicamZk1qis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4huk5yXX74&feature=related

Lastly, moving onto my toms; I have been doing some reading about whether or not to prune the toms, if pruning, what to prune and why. SO far it seems the main school of thought is that pruning out certain growth can reduce the effect of blight or mildew as less dense growth will enable the air to circulate and keep himidity levels down. Also pruning can focus the plant on creating a smaller number of larger fruit as well as keeping it growing up and not across and spread out everywhere which becomes pretty unruly if you have very healthy tomatoes. So the basic rule as far as keeping your toms upright is to either stake them, build a mesh cylinder that you put over the tomatoe plant, or to use a string line. There is a really good demo of the string line method here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJgA4n-sCE8 

This year I've grown plants from heirloom seed which I purchased from diggers.com.au. I have about half a dozen plants of:

Wasipinicon Peach

Reisentraube

San Marzano

Mixed Russian heirloom

These all seem to be indeterminate type tomatoes, which basically means that don't just grow up like a small tree, but the send out long creeping branches almost vine like. These are called suckers and the removal of them improves the fruit size and growth habit is easier to manage.

Also, built a cage to put over the strawberries today. Alex and I lashed it up out of dead branches we'd collected and some brick laying string. After wrapping some wire mesh around it, the cage fits perfectly over the strawberries. That should stop the birds from making off with my fruit.

Indeterminate tomato plant with sucker highlighted in blue

Veg Garden as of 17th November

The big wet

It's been raining here in Sydney for about 2 months (ok maybe it stopped occasionally but I think most people are over the weather now. The veg garden however, seems to be loving it. All except my poor peas which have turned into dead sticks of mould (thanks to powdery mildew). It's a shame as the peas were so sweet that I could help picking them off and eating them whenever I passed the plants.

Parsnip looks a bit like celery!

Apart from the peas everything seems to be growing well. Today I picked some celery for my wife and she told me it wasn't celery. Well, I know it's a bit thin and woody but it sure looks like celery to me. After a bit of googling we discovered it was parsnip (I think I tossed some seed into the garden back in April but it never sprouted so I assumed it was long gone). I ran down to the garden and moved some of the dirt away from the base of my 'celery' and sure enough there was a good size parsnip hiding under there (yum) which is great because I dislike celery and love parsnips. Interestingly, I had cut the two stalks for my wife and had a much on it (how I found it was woody), only to find out later that the leaves are poisonous. Lucky my wife is more switched on than me when it comes to celery.

Corn and Cucumbers growing a treat

The lower bed is filling up nicely. Corn is almost 2 foot high now. This year I got loads of seed from the diggers club. I'm really looking forward to some fresh veg so long as the bugs don't win the war. Pictured here are 3 coloured climber beans creeping up the mesh in the background. The corn has small gem squash growing amongst it and I have some Trombone zucchini coming up behind the corn. The front shown here is mini apple cucumbers and the the right are the japanese climbing cucumber that isn't climbing yet. I've got a couple of sunflowers in on the right but they're struggling to keep up height with the corn.

Cucumber starting to flower

I found flowers on the squash and cucumbers this weekend. I think I remember reading something about cross pollinating the flowers to get more fruit. I'll have to do some checking and report back here.

Something was eating the carrot tops and the nearby tomatoes. The only thing I've found is white fly, like a small fly about 2mm long. I've sprayed some pest oil on them and hopefully that's enough to get rid of them.

On another note, the beetroots and lettuce in the lower bed are growing well. The lettuce has some white fly in it but it doesn't seem to be affecting it too much. The carrots are copping a hiding though.

Beetroots on their way

Beets are a bit bigger than an egg at the moment. Well that's about it for this post. Hopefully the next one is sooner than 6 months now that there's lots going on in the garden.

My first post

What's it all about

Hello to anyone reading on. I decided to start this blog to write down my experiences and mistakes made while learning how to grow vegetables. I'm not talking about just shoving something in the ground and hoping for the best. I want to understand why my tomatoes grow so well for a month and then wilt and die. I want to know why basil in one spot grows to 12 inches high and basil in another spot grows to 5 feet. So this blog is mostly about the mistakes I make and what I discover after the fact. Everytime I make a mistake I can't help but feel that this knowledge was once common place. Was there a time, years ago, that people would have known that basil grows better with tomatoes. Was there a time when people knew the seasons of fruit and veg? How many people these days know the season for even a small percentage of the fruit and veg that they eat. Does this ignorance leave us to expectations that retailers deliver on by selling produce that has been stored for weeks or months? As I said earlier I picked the last of my tomatoes this week but one thing I have noticed with all of the tomatoes is that they only keep for about a week. I was running short on tomatoes a month or 2 ago and bought some from a local supermarket. I had to travel for work and came back a week or so later. I was surprised to see the bought ones still looking just like they did when I bought them, perhaps a little redder. The home grown ones were rotten. It makes me wonder, how can the store bought ones last so long...

Early June - 2 weeks of rain almost clearing, temps around 10 - 20.

Spent a few solid hours in the veg garden today. I wanted to get the last few fruit off the tomato plants so probably left them in way too long. They were so full of water after the 2 weeks of rain we've had, that much of the plant had been reduced to mush. After ripping them all out along with the basil plants I turned the soil over with a fork and chucked a good layer of sugar cane mulch over the whole bed. After turning that into the soil it was starting to look much better.

So for those that are reading along, I have a veg patch about 4m x 8m. I started it last year some time with the intention of building 4 sections that can be crop rotated over time. I have terraced the area on the side of the yard. I chose this rightly of wrongly because it seems to get the most sun during the day and is also in the corner of the yard and gets the most shelter from wind. I had to bring soil in as the existing stuff was very sandy and full of rock. Lugging 3 tonnes of soil and 1 tonne of composted cow manure from the front of the house down to the backyard was exhausting but good exercise I suppose.

Growing

• Choy Sum


• Pak Choy


• Broad Beans


• Sugar Peas


• Silverbeet


• Beetroots


• Red Onion

Planting

• Turnips


• Brown Onions


• Garlic (russian and asian)


• Red Shallots


• Leek

Planning to start a fruit crop but more on that later...