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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
psst. Diluted solution of 10% milk and 90% water, sprayed weekly onto peas and anything else that gets powdery mildew, seems to slow it down. Best to spray as a prevention as it doesn't seem to cure the problem but seems to ward off the mildew for plants that don't yet have it. I sprayed my peas a few weeks in a row and the ones that had just started to get the mildew at the base kept growing new and green growth.
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