Guerilla Gardening

I haven't posted here in a million years due to losing interest in my garden. Yes, shameful, however my excuse is that we will be moving on soon. If it weren't for the stupid global financial meltdown causing our house not to sell, we would have been gone 8 months ago and I would have started a new garden already. But I digress...

One thing Cesca and I have discussed recently is the wasted space all around our city. Miles of grassy strips along the kerb. Vacant blocks of land with overgrown grass.

Did you know that there's some sort of food crisis going on in the world, which apparently is going to get worse? Yeah, there are rumours. Everyone I know is whinging about the rising food costs. So, my proposal to Cesca is that we start doing some "guerilla gardening" and planting out all these empty spaces under the cover of darkness with fruit, veges and other useful plants. For free, public consumption.

Of course, being the egomaniacal wanker that I am, I thought this was an original, genius idea that noone had ever thought of before.

I was wrong.

However, that's not to say I'm any less excited by this idea. If anything, I'm now even more inspired to do some night gardening from seeing the results of others. So, who's with me?

Harvest

This photo was taken last week, my harvest for that day.


There are onions (they went to flower/seed, but I ate them anyway) and garlic up top left, the cauli there in the middle. Bottom right are two zucchinis and a cucumber (FIRST EVER CUCUMBER!!! It tasted sweet!).

In that blue thing are potatoes from various self sown plants around the place, red onions (small bulbs but otherwise perfect), the last of the broad beans and the first of the runner beans.

I made up a big vege cheesey bake thing and it was DEEEEE licious.

By golly, another cauli!

Okay, so I planted three cauliflower plants way back in winter.

We ate the first one in October, the second one in November, and the third one in January.

I can't believe I nearly pulled that damned plant out, thinking it was a dud! I'm also bemused that it took nearly four months longer to ripen than it's brother.

Yummmm!

I bought another pottle of six plants today, and I'm hoping that they won't all ripen at once again!

Catch up!

So. Much. Garden. News.

So. Little. Time.


Okay, where to start?

Firstly, YAY! the first of our tomatoes ripened yesterday. They were cherries and were promptly eaten. More should be ripening in the next few days... I can't wait til we have tomatoes coming out of our ears!!! (Hopefully it should be a month or so, we have 9 plants in all, plus several self-seeded ones popping up here and there).

Secondly, we've eaten the first of our potatoes! Yay! I haven't yet pulled up the plants from my bins, but I fossicked around and found a potato or two, so things are looking good. As I just bought a 5kg bag of potatoes from the supermarket, I'll leave the totties in the ground for a bit longer til we dig them up and eat them.

Thirdly, we had strawberries coming out of our ears during December, but alas, only about a quarter were lovely. The others were bland. Odd. I'm figuring that it has something to do with the patch now being many MANY years old. I think I'll have to dig up most of the old plants and chuck them, and start with just new plants, maybe I'll keep an eye out for runners this autumn and use them.


We are eating plenty of produce at the moment - zucchinis (both green and yellow), spinach, lettuce, beans, etc.

We've just started eating our runner beans this past week - yummm! Four types (scarlet runner, shiny fardenlosa, dwarf french, and borlotti fire tongue) and they're all delicious. We ate the last of our broad beans a few weeks back, which was sad, as they're now my favourite vegetable (I never knew that broad beans could be so delicious! My childhood memories of them are of large grey things with elephant-like hides!).


Ummmmm, and that's all for just now.

My pots!

I have quite a few things in pots now.



Firstly, I transformed the kids' old clamshell sandpits into two little gardens. At present they're growing peas, rocket, silver beet, spinach, tomatoes, broad beans and sweet pea flowers. The soil is 100% pure compost (home made) and is VERY moist and rich. Certain things thrive, others don't.

Then there's the potatoes. I stuck three seed potatoes into bins a couple of months back, and just last week threw another three seeds into a couple of new pots (I don't know why it had never occurred to me that potatoes can be sown throughout spring and summer). I expect that we'll be harvesting the first potatoes in a month or so (I actually stuck my hand into one pot today and noted at least one potato in there, so it all bodes well. Or at least, better than last year.)

Then there's the salad leaves and various melons and squashes that I've stuck in pots. And herbs - there's vietnamese mint (useless to us, but I ripped out the large plant in my main vege garden so thought I'd better save a small plant or else my husband will kill me) and basil mint.

Things are growing well so far! I just have to keep up the watering!

Poppies and currants

Poppies. We have opium poppies scattered throughout our garden - gosh I love these poppies! The only thing I don't love about them is that the local junkies somehow manage to find our house each year and rip all the plants out. Grrrr!



Anyway, I only just learned this week by reading Gilly's blog that you can actually save the seed of these poppies to use in baking etc. I did not know that. For some reason (the junkie thing I guess) I thought they'd be poisonous (or hallucinogenic).

So that's cool. I'll add them to my list of genuine vege garden stuff.


In other news, I've noticed that my blackcurrants are doing shitely this year. On closer inspection I discover that the only currants appearing are on the OLD WOOD. Oh. Yep, you got it, when I was doing my annual winter hard prune of my roses I decided to give the blackcurrant bush a hard prune also. Ooops. So looks like we'll have no serious fruit until next year.

Ach well, it's all a learning experience I guess.

Yum....

So, the strawberry season is underway!

We got our first red fruit a week or so back, and are now harvesting about a punnet's worth every day or two. Not bad!


Unfortunately a good 10% of the fruit in the patch are inedible, due to slugs eating them. I'm not sure what to do as I've never had this issue before. I was going to put down straw (as they're just sitting on bare dirt) but Frally has straw under her strawberries yet they're also being eaten.

Hmmm. Oh well, can't complain, a punnet every other day is bloody good! And boy, do they taste fantastic!!!

(Note to self - the sole strawberry plant I stuck in a pot has fruited, but the fruit was yuck. Don't try this again.)

So far in December...

• Strawberries are turning red.
• Runner beans are above ground
• Cherry tomato seedlings are starting to look robust
• Eating lettuce
• Picking off green caterpillars (Some plants have been sacrificed in the name of laziness)
• Watering, watering, watering and watering some more (It's been very dry)
• Waiting, waiting, waiting until I can eat something from my garden other than lettuce.
  

Fruit notes

A couple of notes on the fruit.

The apple tree is looking like producing no fruit this year, despite a nice crop of blossoms and one little mini apple. Alas, the mini apple was blown off by the wind today. Oh well, I don't mind too much I guess, seeing as it's a tiny tree that I only stuck in this year.

The strawberries are SO nearly ready. I spy a couple that look suspiciously red. I'm betting that we'll be eating our first strawbs in a day or so. Unfortunately, a lot of the strawberry plants seem to be covered in some sort of spittle goo - some type of bug I guess. The hose washes it off, but it's kind of gross anyway.

The cherry tree looks like it is not a fruiting cherry, just a flowering cherry. Bugger. (Or, hopefully, we're again in that "no fruit in the first year" phase of its growth).

The blackcurrants were looking very stunted at their tips - on closer inspection I see that they were being eaten alive by white aphids. I high pressure hosed them off, and they seem okay now. I'll keep keeping an eye on them.



The lemon tree (which has NEVER given us fruit) is looking okay this year, thanks to my Mum throwing a heap of citrus fertiliser around the base of it a few weeks back. Plenty of flowers, and SHOCK, it looks like fruit is actually setting! I'm not getting too excited yet, as this has happened before and the tiny lemons just fell off before they got bigger than my thumbnail.

I also threw the citrus fertiliser around the mandarin, for good measure. It's looking healthy and hopefully this year the fruit will be bigger than a large grape and actually have some juice in them rather than just pith. (Again, my optimist side is putting that down to first year blues).

Any other fruits? Oh yeah, the grapes are doing fine. Nothing on the new grape vine, but the old one is laden with baby bunches.

Flowers

Can't NOT mention my flowers, as they're coming into their best just now.



Our front path is looking great - I hung four hanging baskets up there last week (after nurturing them in the back patio for a couple of weeks to get them started). They are filled with pansies, petunias, lobelia and nasturtiums, and although I didn't get clever and stick plants around the sides of the baskets (which would have looked cool but I couldn't be bothered) I'm hoping all the plants will trail nicely over the sides in the next few months.

The roses are also looking good, all in flower now. There is also a gorgeous fuchsia pink peony at the gate, which is great. Poppies are everywhere, and the forget-me-nots are starting to look crappy now so they're about to get the pull.

I've got cuttings of fucshia (my dad pulled out my only fucshia bush last week when he was making a treehouse for the kids) and pelargonium (from Sumner Beach today) in dirt in the conservatory - fingers crossed there.

Geraniums are also looking nice, azaleas are past their best now but still nice, and there are violets, violas and pansies everywhere. Marigolds everywhere too, and foxgloves are popping up everywhere (they self seed like crazy in my garden) and are going to be huge in about a month.

Gutted that I can't seem to find any California poppies anywhere - I had them everywhere for a few years, but they became almost like weeds so I started pulling them before they could self-seed too much. Damn - must have pulled too much.

We DO have opium poppies though (as well as plenty of field poppies). Got to make sure the local deros don't catch on to that, as it's rather annoying having drug addicts ripping up your flower beds looking for a fix.