Flowering vegetables: the curiosity continues

A few months ago I blogged about letting my vegetables go to seed just out of curiosity, and I've now got quite an interesting collection of flowering vegies in my backyard.

My leeks have been in flower for quite awhile now, with their beautiful purple and white bulbous heads.  I'm thinking of planting them in the front garden as ornamentals next year, along with some artichokes.

flowering Leeks

I also had a good hack away at my purple artichoke thinking that it'd stopped producing for the season.  The green artichoke had just started so I'd moved on.  Apparently the purple artichoke loved the hacking back to the stem (it had grown to about 2m cubed) and immediately started producing buds again.  So there's a tip! To be honest, artichokes are a real treat, but I'm pretty sick of them now. I'm letting both the purple and green artichokes go to flower now for the season, just to see their big thisley flowers and compare the different varieties.

A large purple bud opening up

You wouldn't have thought I hacked this plant back a month ago. The artichoke's revenge

My green artichoke buds opening up

 This is just an observation, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the green artichokes go purple on their tips when they're opening (and I suspect just past the point of edibility), and the purple artichokes go green on their tips.  If you look at the photos above of the purple and green artichokes respectively, you'll see what I mean.  When the buds are younger they're pretty much all purple or all green.

I've also let one of my green cabbages (actually one of my only cabbages that survived the great snail plague of 2010) go to seed.   It went from being a smooth round surface one day to having these curly flowering stalks exploding out the middle the next. I was thrilled!

the flowering cabbage with some broccoli seeds hanging overhead

 and now to the plants that I get to see flower AND still eat them...

My first tomatoes are starting to blush.  I loathe buying tomatoes at the shops when I have so many plants in the backyard, and so I've been hovering over these plants constantly, waiting for the first tomatoes to ripen.

Roma tomatoes

 

Cherry tomatoes

I also have my 'experimental' eggplants starting to grow spikey things.  I say experimental, because people keep telling me that Tasmania is too cold to grow eggplants. I thought I'd try anyway.

one of the spiky things growing on the eggplant.  I'm assuming it's the fruit.

more spiky things with some arty-looking water drops

one of my great successes last year were my lebanese cucumber plants, so I thought I'd relive the dream

I've never grown corn before, and I'm a bit concerned that my plants are a lot smaller than those at the community garden down the road.  Could it be because I planted them too late? Or perhaps that they had to grow over and over after snail attacks?  I'm not sure exactly what stage they're up to yet, or how the corn forms, but to be honest they're fulfilling quite an interesting role at the moment: garden sounds.

When I think of gardening and the senses, sight, touch, smell, and less so, taste, are all obviously engaged.  However, I think the sounds of the garden can get discounted. Obviously birds have a significant place in the sound landscape, but the sounds of plants are usually only activated when wind is involved.  Even with only a small breeze, corn makes an amazing sound.  It's more than rustling. I only really noticed it today for the first time (I've not been gardening much lately due to work commitments), and at first I couldn't work out where it was coming from.  I wasn't consciously searching for the sound, it was just something that was mulling around in my head. It pleased me that such a distinctive but soothing sound was produced by my largely ignored corn stalks.

I wrote recently about planting all these watermelon seeds.  I transferred the happy-looking seedlings to the garden once they got to about 4 cm in height.  From I think a total of 20 seedlings, this little one below is the only one left. Snails. Again. 

A happier story involves my pumpkins that are keeping my apricot tree company:

to the left of the tree are the turkish pumpkins, to the right, butternut. In the foreground, asparagus.

a butternut pumpkin mid-growth (when are they ready to eat?!)

I can't remember the full name of this pumpkin, but it has the word Turkish in the name.

A Christmas garden overhaul: bulbs, beds and box

I was fortunate enough this Christmas to have my parents visit Tasmania, or more specifically, help me in the garden.  We spent 2 out of the 5 days, digging up bulbs (with surprising results), weeding, de-claying soil, uprooting the evil roses, and most importantly, eating a christmas vegie feast. 

The Christmas Day vegies from the garden: artichokes, red cabbage, beetroot, silverbeet, broad beans

My Green Globe Artichokes, pre-cutting. 

Pip enjoying some cabbage company.  The purple cabbage behind her later became lunch

broadbeans, hiding behind the beautiful flowering chives

Mum's interpretation of 'dead heading' the daisies. 

Dad with his 'shovel' (apparently a shovel is different to a spade - he had to buy his own shovel for the job)

Dad's amazing digging job in the two top garden beds.  The nearest patch was the 'bulb patch' (see below)

the bulbs extracted from the 3msq patch

I decided to move the bulbs from a 3 square meter patch near the clothes line, and turn it into an extension of the lawn for now.  The patch had a revolving show of bulbs most of the year, and while it was beautiful, the patch was quite weed-ridden, and not exactly in the most convenient location.  I've not had much to do with bulbs in the past, however, the previous owners obviously loved them, as they magically spring up all over the garden.  The small patch in the back was completely overcrowded with them, and after a quick google search I found out that I should actually be lifiting and dividing bulbs occasionally (depending on their variety), so it was quite fortuitous that I decided to move the patch.  Apart from the daffodils, which mostly have their yellowing stems still attached, I'm not really sure which bulb is which - they all look very similar.  So I think I'm going to dry them all out and plant them around Easter. 

Some of the websites that I consulted had some very involved instructions: dig the bulbs up every year, store them in boxes lined with sand or peat moss, put them in the freezer, plant them in specific areas etc etc.  I think I'm going to stick to the more simple instructions: plant them, leave them in the soil, dividing them occasionally, and if they seem upset, readdress the issue then. The KISS rule...

Box hedging, which we planted around my greengage/golden drop plum tree.

Agapanthas have replaced the evil roses

 My mum helped dig up the evil miniature roses, which I've loathed since I moved in: they have tiny thorns which spike through gloves and clothes, they were always weed-infested and impossible to weed because of the thorns, they were various shades of pink, and, well, they were 'suburban' roses (not my kind of aesthetic).  Unfortunately, when we dropped the roses off at the tip to be recycled into mulch, my mum spotted someone emptying a heap of agapanthus plants into the pile too.  She grabbed them for my garden, despite my pleas otherwise.  Evidently, she's still 'boss', even though it's my house. I'm a little confused about the weed status of agapanthus - in the weeds of Tasmania booklet I have, they're listed as a weed, yet they're beautiful plants which are sold at nurseries around Hobart and planted by Hobart City Council.  I think if I'm vigilant about cutting the stems off before the flowers go to seed, it'll be okay.

The dog supervising the rose bush removal

 Mum also removed the daisy-like bushes that were responsible for my really bad hayfever last month, which turned into an infection - not a good infliction for a gardener...

My leeks in flower.  I'm glad I left some of them to satisfy my curiosity.  Such stunning flowers!

catch up post: artichokes, bugs, evil birds and more...

I'm having a temporary break from having the internet at home, so for the next month or so I'll be doing fewer but longer blog posts from the uni library (this post is therefore sponsored by UTAS...).  Today, I have a mega stroll-around-the-vegie-garden-style post.  The baby birds that have been tweeting from the gutter right above my bedhead have finally grown up, and just like their parents they like to dig up all my (not cheap) sugar cane mulch and seedlings, eat my strawberries, and fly off with entire pea seedlings in their grubby beaks.  The other day, as I was netting my strawberries, there was a line of 3 birds watching me from the fence with their yellow eyes, occasionally sharpening their beaks on the palings, plotting their revenge...

Initially, sensing a growing threat from the birds as the blueberries grew bluer, the birds multiplied in my gutter, and the sheer cheek of a bird flying off with an entire seedling in its mouth, I bought some 'humming bird wire' from the hardware store (you can vaguely see it in the above photo - it's running above the white netting).  $17.95 for bird wire, with the capacity to cover my entire yard with ease vs $50 for bird netting? I reasoned that the wire was a better option.  I leapt around the backyard, foolishly triumphant as I hammered in posts and attached the wire to old stockings, designed to take some of the slack (on a side note, what do single men use for garden ties?).  However, the wire turned out to be a false economy.  The next morning I went outside, and three cheeky birds were doing the early shift, checking the strawberries for ripeness and sifting through the mulch for worms. My message: don't buy 'humming bird wire'.  Needless to say, I had to pay the hardware store another visit, returning home with a mass of surprisingly expensive netting.  So much for 'saving money' by growing your own vegies...

Anyone (including myself) who has sneered at my Fine Arts degree and wondered what in the hell I'll use a sculpture major for, should check out my strawberry construction.  It's titled Bird Net Over Strawberries and challenges the notion that art and functionality are mutually exclusive.  In all reality it's just a bodgy construction of bamboo stakes, gaffa tape, netting and old tent stakes, but it's holding up surprisingly well.  The bird wire can be seen in the below photo as well.

Bird Net Over Strawberries (2010), dimensions variable

On another triumphant note, my green artichokes are sprouting well.  The mothership looks fairly ready to eat, and the smaller side-flowers are just about there too.  My purple artichokes, mentioned in previous posts are just about gone.  I had stall at a market on Sunday, where I sold a number of them (along with rhubarb and silverbeet), and I suspect that the stocks are just about drained.  I wonder if the purple variety always flower before the green variety, or whether it's just because the green plant is slightly younger?

The Mothership

et al

I also had my first pea harvest (so peas don't grow in frozen packets?).  I picked a decent bowl of pods (after finally establishing which area I had planted the peas as opposed to the snowpeas - an argument for  naming seedlings as you plant), and bought 300g of prawns ready for a prawn and pea risotto.  Just as the rice was soaking up the wine, I remembered that I had to get the peas out of the pods, and got out a big bowl for the peas in anticipation.  I needn't have bothered.  There are SO FEW PEAS IN A POD! Who would have thought...  Oh and it seems that you can eat the pods too, as I gnawed on a few pods out of hunger as I was cooking, and, well, I'm not dead yet...

A not-quite-ready pea

It's not all stories of triumph:  I'm still having troubles with getting a decent head of broccoli. I've tried planting at different times of the year, fertilising, companion planting, but they still go from here (tiny head)

scungy brocoli head

to here:

"but I never even saw you bud!?!"

The cabbages are also quite frustrating, although I can take my anger out on the green caterpillars that like to munch on the leaves.  They're delightfully fun to squash!

The creatures that I haven't come across before are those on my cherry tree that I just noticed this morning:  little black slug-like creatures (pictured below).  Help! what are they? how do I get rid of them?

The nectarine tree (I think - I forgot to mark the trees too), which has the leaf curl is producing cute little fruit things.  Now, I know that people say that you should break off fruit to encourage growth in the first year, but is it really necessary?  The poor tree's trying so hard despite the odds....

Oh and last but not least, my leeks are going to flower.  They're such beautiful forms with their curved buds and so I really have no regrets not eating them all.

For the last year, I've left a couple of almost all plant varieties to go to seed, simply because I'm curious about their life-cycles.  I think it's a good way of learning, and as an added bonus if you're lucky (like I've been), things like spinach and lettuce will come up the next year without you lifting a finger...

garden beast compromise

They scuttle, hide, scare and slide.  The bugs in my garden, that is.  I don't like them, they don't like me, but we both like vegetables.  A bit of a problem perhaps, but something on which I guess I need to compromise.

I just hate picking up a rock and seeing some alien-like creature squirming in the sunlight, I hate picking a bulb of fennel and having a spider crawl up my wrist, cut off a cauliflower head and see it crawling with tiny aphids, or dig into the compost heap and find that a family of rats call it home.

What's started this rant?  Well, tonight I dug up my first ever leek (hurrah), and jumped with surprise at the fat worm entwined in the plant's roots:

 'oh thank duck, it's just a worm'.  

 

It was just a worm this time, but I garden in fear always....

ps. the leek was delicious