How Does Your Garden Grow?

My dreams of being reliant on home grown food from our veggie patch are far from being realised. In my most picturesque imaginings, everything we eat has been grown organically several steps from our back door. Chickens gossip in the garden. Bees navigate from flowers to hive. And I have a quaint potting shed stacked just so with rustic looking pots and handmade gardening tools. I know I could make it a reality. I have the space, the knowledge and the physical ability to turn the earth, sow the seeds, pull the weeds, harvest the crops. What I lack though is time. (And I have a husband that would be just as happy living in an apartment.) One can do everything, just not at once. Right now my priorities are my family and my business. The time I can dedicate to the garden tends to happen in spurts. At such times I reduce each garden to just soil, making piles of spent veggie plants and towering weeds, before planting my next crop of seasonal sure fire winners. 

Right now my tomato plants are sprawling lazily, as they weren't tied up as often as they should have been - but they are bursting with fruit. Four blue berry bushes are coming along, with a sprinkling of green berries promising great things for the future. The mulberries are on the wane after buckets full of precious fruit this year. The herbs are going to seed, and so shall I let them. (Self sown herbs are such a handy and hardy plant.) My mandarin tree is in no hurry to reach its full dwarf height. There's not a chicken or a bee hive in sight. Just two black cats, one old and one youthful, who follow pools of sunlight and nap days away.

Perhaps when I've retired you will find me filling my days in the garden with earth covered gum boots and an old straw hat. Grandchildren will pick strawberries from beneath wild mint, collect falling passionfruit and hunt for snails with me after rain. My potting shed will be the envy of a country living magazine shoot and my pantry will be filled with home made jams and pickles. But for now I'm content to do a little here and a little there and harvest my tomatoes with a sense of satisfaction that only gardening can give.

So tell me, how does your garden grow? What are your pottering dreams made of?

37/52

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013." Che and Fidel.

Cohen and Emerson: It's the little things

I love this time of year in the garden. The weather is beautiful, there is much to harvest and Winter veggies are giving way to Spring planting. While I weed, pick, dig and plant, my little helpers play around me, push each other in the cart and 'work' with their wheel barrow and shovels. By far their favourite things though are the watering cans. A little water in each keeps them occupied for quite some time. And there is nothing cuter than a toddler pottering around with a watering can.

Winter Gardening Checklist

Mulch garden beds - to protect the plants roots from the cold

Prune Mulberry Tree - early Winter is the best time for this

Liquid fertlise - to strengthen plants against the cold

Create new garden beds 

Dig in compost

Plant seeds every two weeks 

Plan for Spring

Tidy up garden edges

Extend cut flower garden

More indoor plants

Add pot plants to front deck

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Some gardening love on the internet -

A useful resource for what to plant when in Australia.

Top five reasons to garden in Winter.

Ten kitchen gardens to visit before you die.

Sustainable Gardening Australia blog.

Home life Gardening blog.

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What are your Winter gardening plans? 

Jam and romantic notions

I have long held on to the somewhat romantic notion of feeding my family from our garden. Of being more self sufficient. Of tuning in to the seasons. Of providing fresh, pesticide free produce with few food miles. Of noticing a difference in our food budget. Creating a cycle of adding nutrients to our soil to be taken up by plants, whose leaves, peelings and seeds will be added to the compost to break down before being added back to the soil. A cycle repeated throughout the seasons. Cycles that, combined with hard work, experience, knowledge and the will of mother nature, produce enough in the way of fruit, vegetables and herbs to eat, share and preserve. 

With each tomato harvested, each watermelon picked, each aubergine cut, each carrot pulled, each sweet potato dug, that romantic notion has become a little more of a reality. Recycled jars now house dried herbs, pickled vegetables or jam made from the gardens offerings. We acknowledge at each meal which part of it has come from our own garden, or been traded with like minded friends and neighbors. Cohen may ask, "is this tomato from the garden?" Or I will say for the one hundredth time, "Tinned beetroot has nothing on home grown pickled beets." The sense of satisfaction is difficult to explain to the uninitiated. 

Another long held dream of mine has been to grow enough strawberries to make jam. (In old Mason jars, of course.) And though I planted a dozen strawberry plants last year, and we were at times getting a punnets worth each day, the jam did not eventuate. Particularly not with a toddler who knew only too well how to pick them himself. The profusion of strawberry runners in the garden currently may make jam a more likely prospect this year, but in the meantime I have found a seemingly fail safe alternative. Rosellas. Cheap to buy - four seedlings for $4, easy to grow in Queensland - I didn't use any chemicals or fertiliser, and tart prior to cooking - which discourages little people from stealing and eating them all. Yesterday I harvested my first fruit off the three remaining shrubs (hubby pulled the fourth seedling out, thinking it was a weed:) and made jam using this recipe. And I must say, Rosellas produce a beautiful jam. It looks, smells and tastes wonderful. Sort of plum flavored and deep red. The fruit becomes soft and translucent.

 

The first flush of Rosellas from my three plants

A cup of tea and a lot of peeling - removing the calyx from the seed

The seeds are saved, covered in water and simmered for 20 minutes to remove the pectin, which helps the jam set

The seeds once the pectin is removed

The calyxs, an apple and the pectin water, ready to be simmered until soft, then have the sugar added

Five jars of beautiful jam in recycled bottles

The same sweet potatoes from three weeks ago, and some Rosellas drying on the windowsill for the purpose of making tea

There are plenty more fruit ripening on the bushes, so I intend to try my hand at Rosella cordial and flowers in syrup next. 

Do you have a similar dream of growing herbs or fruit and vegetables?
Have you ever grown or eaten Rosella before? Any recipe suggestions?
What's happening in your garden at the moment?

In these parts

1. New in the garden - rockmelon, rosella, marigold, dahlia and peppermint

2. Necklace orders wrapped and ready to go, complete with new mini cards from Moo

3. Off the needles, In Threes, complete with thrifted wooden buttons

4. Kitty cat feet poking out from under the curtain (sheet) in our bedroom

5. Tomatoes fresh from the garden and waiting to be preserved

6. Another beautiful sunflower

This Moment

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. - SouleMama 

Today

It's good to have Dave home. We are all feeling a little under the weather though, so we won't be venturing far. However, there is much to do. There's laundry liquid to be made. There's a bunch of mint picked from the garden sitting on the sink. It will be washed and hung to dry for tea making purposes. There are home grown lemons from my sisters mother-in-law to be juiced and made into cordial. There is silver beet ready to be harvested, blanched and frozen. I made this silverbeet and potato gratin recipe last night, with a home cooked roast chicken, gravy and bread rolls to celebrate Dave's return, and it was a success.

It's a glorious Spring day here today. We've been out in the garden this morning. Cohen has been making mud pies as I weeded, planted seeds and seedlings, staked tomato plants and covered them with bird netting. We try to get out in the garden while Emerson takes her morning nap, then she joins us and supervises from a blanket on the grass, or in her pram. We've been eating strawberries straight from the garden and rinsed under the tap most days and Cohen loves to look for the ripe ones. The hills hoist is almost full with a weeks worth of Dave's clothes. I'm making a beef and a vegetarian pie for dinner tonight, I made the fillings yesterday. In the quieter moments I will be knitting the cozy and reading the Country Style magazine that arrived with yesterdays post. 

And of course, wiping little noses.

What plans do you have for the weekend?

What's the weather like where you are?

Do you have any silverbeet or orange recipe suggestions?

Weekending

This weekend was a lovely balance of home and away. There was a family birthday lunch and a Mama only night out to see a musical. A rare treat. We had guests for dinner and spent time in the garden as a family. I managed some quiet moments to myself here and there to knit, read, write, listen to a pod cast and start on a sewing project. I often wonder how I will fit such things in to a day. There is always so much to do for everyone else. Finding those little moments for myself can be unpredictable, especially when a teething baby needs comforting, but I do believe they are necessary. All work and no play...

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1. Collecting lettuce seeds for the first time. Once the yellow flowers died, fluffy hairs akin to dandelion seeds remain, with the lettuce seeds at their base. I picked out the stems, blew gently to remove the chaff and only the seeds remained. 

2. The two tomato plants that sprouted in the middle of the lawn, where a possum had left half eaten fruit, are now producing healthy looking tomatoes. I shall be covering them with a bird net in case of more possums.

3. These spring (green) onions are flowering and going to seed too. It's the first time I have ever seen a spring onion flower. A wonderful sight. I'm so used to simply seeing these plants bundled up with a rubber band on a super market shelf. You can grow spring onions from the bottom white section of the ones you buy at the shops, like this.

4. A Currawong picked this strawberry not long after I took this photo. The main bed of strawberry plants is covered with bird netting. But the few I planted as a border are as yet unprotected. I will be covering them with bird netting too!

5. A flock of Ibis circled high above us as we worked in the back yard. They looked beautiful and majestic in the sky, though I can't say they I find them such on closer inspection. (In Australia you typically see flocks of dirty Ibis at the dump, or behaving like pests as they scavenge for food at outdoor eateries.)

6. Dear old Seth, who inspects our yard work before retiring to the deck. 

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How was your weekend? 

Did you take some time to yourself to do the things you like to do? 

Did you spend more time at home or away?

In the garden

Next stop on the garden tour are the beds along the other side fence. The house was a rental property before we brought it and the gardens had been left to fend for themselves. There wasn't much worth keeping, so we cleared the beds as much as possible in order to start with a clean slate.

This is the second garden bed as it is at the moment. Rows of veggies at different stages and more room for the seeds and seedlings not yet planted out. The green rain gauge in the corner of the bed allows us to keep an eye on the rainfall and water accordingly. 

Eight Roma tomato plants and four sweet potatoes - grown from cuttings from a friends plant.

Two rows of carrots, my first. I can't wait to harvest them and see how they have grown.

Rows of eschallots and onion seedlings. The escahllots were brought as a bunch from the supermarket. I used to keep them in a jar of water to prolong their lives, but I found that re-planting them worked perfectly and we just cut off what we need as we need it.

Four black Russian tomato plants at the front and rows of silverbeet, beetroot, potatoes, experimental garlic and snow peas in a frame. I'm not sure our region if cold enough for garlic. I have grand plans to have numerous and various tomatoes plants this season, in the hopes of fulfilling my dream of bottling tomatoes for use through out the year.

My first potato sprouts - these were potatoes from the kitchen that had sprouted. Another experiment.

Snow peas

The third garden bed, which is home to the worst part of the fence and full of tree stumps.

This is how this part of the garden looked originally.

A mulberry and strawberries in the third garden, and just out of shot a gooseberry and pineapple. The palm stumps should rot down eventually, in the mean time I am planting around them.

In the garden

The first of our three veggie garden beds at the moment.

The garden bed when we moved in, empty except for weeds, a stump and some palm trees.

Parsley, violet, basil and mint

Strawberries, lettuce, egg plant, capsicum and a dwarf mandarin 

Cherry tomato, snow peas and the compost bin

Self seeded tomatoes in the lawn.

Yesterday our mortgage broker sent us an email to congratulate us on the first anniversary of buying this house. It was a few months after settlement that we actually moved in, because we needed to undertake some major renovations. I remember I couldn't wait to get started on creating a garden, despite being pregnant. That excitement remains. I thought we'd take a wander in the garden today, as I've had a few requests to see photos of the veggie beds.

There's a lot going on in preparation for Spring, so I'll just share the first of the three beds today. I started work on the first veggie patch in November last year, but it was destroyed by falling branches during tree lopping. I began again in this corner instead, watching the garden grow as my tummy did. Tottering back and forth with a full watering can because we didn't have a hose long enough to reach. Eventually there were as many weeds as intentional plants, as I could no longer bend my pregnant body over for long enough periods to weed, but still there was a harvest and I was incredibly pleased.

This is the second incarnation of this bed and it is currently full of strawberries in flower, the first green fruits showing, thus the bird netting. Along the front, violets have recently been added for colour, alternated with the herbs. A practice I picked up from a friend. The cherry tomato plants are looking much healthier than my last lot of tomato I planted, which succumbed to disease. They also succumbed to a possum, who would leave the half eaten fruit scattered on the lawn. When I noticed two tomato seedlings coming up in the middle of the lawn I encouraged Dave not to mow over the small plants by staking them. They are now in flower, the clever things. (There are more tomatoes in the second veggie bed.) I threw in a few snow peas in the place of the cherry tomato seedling I did loose. Since starting the garden we have had a year round supply of lettuce and basil, which I have only just cut back.

It may not be the most beautiful veggie garden, but it is slowly growing in to the kind of garden I envisioned and I can see it's charms. I love spending a little time here each day checking the plants, pulling the weeds and day dreaming about what Spring will bring with it.