reseeding glory, and some more flowering vegies

My first tomatoes reached a delicious deep red this week. None have made it into the kitchen as yet because I can't resist eating the warm fruit directly off the vine. My pumpkins are also looking quite spectacular, some photos of which I've included below. I also have some images of my newly flowering artichokes, which are fantastic.

But first, I'll share with you my latest excuse for not mowing the lawns:

grass, bok choi and rocket: a reseeding dream

some kind of brassica. I think broccoli based on how much broccoli I grow and eat

more bok choi

This is the turkish pumpkin (I forget its official name). Now, I was advised not to pick pumpkins until the leaves wither and die, but is that true? These pumpkins look pretty ready to eat.

nestled up against the fence

Is it just me or do these pumpkins look kind of rude?

My butternuts are not quite so orange, but I've got a few working hard at the moment.  I grew the pumpkins around the young apricot tree, which has worked out well. There's no point sacrificing my good garden beds to such a space-hogging vegetable, and the apricot seems to like the company.

this is the most mature of the butternuts

The green artichoke has burst into flower:

totally worth letting the artichoke go to flower for

My purple artichoke is still considering its position, but the largest bud is looking massive.  I'll be interested to see if the purple artichoke produces purple flowers too.

Lastly, thank you to the person who practices the recorder diagonally over the back fence somewhere. I used to be rather anti-recorder following the compulsory primary school lessons, but for some reason I quite like gardening to the mostly harmonic minor keyed songs.

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.

seeds vs seedlings: a tale of garden snobbery

The other night at the pub, I got into an animated discussion with a guy who thought that buying seedlings (vs seeds) was the ultimate gardening laziness.  It was not the first time I'd come across such plant 'purists' (as I think they'd like to be known), and it seems to be the gardening equivalent to competitive backpacking.

As a keen gardener, but also a reasonably time poor (and often cash poor) gardener I believe that seedlings have a valid place in a backyard garden, and here are a couple of reasons why:

• A punnet of seedlings often costs the same as a packet of seeds.  If you're anything like me, you don't want an entire packet's worth of spotted Turkish gourds, so it makes sense to just buy a ready sprouted punnet, particularly if you know that you can save the seeds for a following year (if the spotted gourds are worth it).  If you're fortunate enough to have a local seedling producer such as Hobart Kitchen Gardens, who sells individual pumpkin seedlings for $1 each, which have been grown from seeds produced by the Tasmanian-based Lost Seed company (they specialise in heirloom, true-to-type seeds, which means that you can reliably save seeds), then you'll actually be saving money with the knowledge that you can grow them again next year with the saved seeds.  A couple of months ago, I bought 3 pumpkins from the HKG stall at the Melville St Farmer's Market. All three were of different varieties and cost me $3 overall.  If I'd bought seeds, it would've cost me almost $10 for the 3 packets.  Yes, I would've had about 25 seeds in each packet, vs the one pumpkin seedling, but considering that I have a number of butternuts that I've grown from seed already (last year's saved seeds), who has room for that many pumpkins in a suburban backyard?
• Scenario 1: you've planted a packet of basil, and watched as the seeds sprouted, the little seedlings growing under your loving care as the spring weather warms the ground.  You're dreaming of all the pesto you're going to make etc etc.... and then one night, when they're about 3 cm tall, the entire patch is decimated by snails, an evil army of snails.  True story.  In this case, my solution was to buy another packet of seeds, but also buy a punnet of basil, so that I'd have some already started at the same growth as my homegrown seedlings.  When the beasts attack, seedlings are great consolation presents...
• Scenario 2: you've dug up a patch of weeds, and want to fill it quickly and cheaply with some colour.  So you go buy those tubs of pansies that are always for sale at 5 for $5 or something like that.  The pansies not only fill a gap, but are great for blocking weeds from coming up, particularly as they spread quite rapidly.  (plus, this is kinda embarrassing, but I cannot, for some perverse reason, grow pansies from seed.  If anyone has any tips, please share)
• You're new to gardening, you want to start off nice and easy, and it's a lot quicker and easier to buy seedlings than seeds, particularly as a lot of seeds need special conditions to sprout.  Don't feel guilty about buying seedlings, there's no shame.

Mr competitive gardener, I'll repeat, there's no shame in buying seedlings, just like there's no shame in wanting to see the Louvre, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Tower of London, the Angkor Wat, the Statue of Liberty, or the Sydney Opera House...

Rant over.

Incidently, I've been growing some things by seed in pots before I transfer them into the ground.  I've had little or no limited luck growing things like lebanese cucumbers, sunflowers, snapdragons, and pansies from seed in the ground, so it's often better to grow them in punnets and then transfer them to the ground later (something that I've only just acknowledged).  Some of the punnets, such as the Tigerella tomatoes and many butternut pumpkins have been given away as Christmas presents.

Pictured below are my 'flower' seeds: Sunflowers in the foreground, Zinnias on the right middle, black pansies and snapdragons in the unchanged pots (of course):

At one week

After 2 weeks. Note the still empty Pansy punnets... Oh and 'Nola' -the grape - is in the front

Below: The 'vege' box (I'm still finding a use for those beloved polystyrene boxes). Tigerella and Gardener's delight seedlings in the far top right, lebanese cucumbers, to the left of them, silverbeet in the middle left, experimental watermelon (I don't know how I'll go in Tassie's cool climate) on the bottom right, and more butternut pumpkins on the bottom:

One week in (note the number of black ex-pansy pots)

Two weeks later (with a couple of presents for friends missing)

tidying up for a change of seasons

I returned from Sydney on Sunday to pumpkin, cucumber, tomato and basil plants that were shrivelled and dead or dying.  You see, while I was frolicking in the sun at the Sydney Biennale, Hobart experienced the first snow for the year. 

Winter is coming, the happy times are over. 

Ok, maybe I sound a bit macabre, but that's how it feels.  The days are so short that I can no longer see the vegies to pick when I come home, let alone garden at 9pm (which I enjoyed in the peak of summer).  I've never been successful with winter vegie growing, although maybe that has to do with my method of gardening.  Polystyrene boxes are great for moving plants around to take full advantage of sun/rain/wind; however, things take so long to grow in winter, and I just am not quite as enthusiastic and the plants consequently would historically suffer quite a bit of neglect. 

This winter I plan to be more organised, more enthusiastic, and try a bit harder.  After all, I have an entire backyard begging to be used.  So on Sunday, I covered everything in blood and bone (which the dog was later caught munching on. Etch); I pulled up and composted the beans and pumpkin and cleared the weeds, dug in mushroom compost into the pumpkin and bean beds where I will plant cabbages/ broccoli in the latter and garlic/onion/ potatoes in the former.

For the first time in my life I've been confronted with the need to practice crop rotation.  I've never rented a house for more than 16 months in a row really, so crop rotation was not really an issue.  It's quite confusing, as the crop rotation 'groups' are not the same as companion planting 'groups'.  I'm not much of a planner so it's proving quite hard to manage.

The one thing I have planned though, is the row of fruit trees that will be down the back of the yard, along the southern boundary so the vegie beds aren't shaded.  I've ordered from Stoneman's Nursery in Glenorchy a Granny Smith/ Pink Lady tree, a Greengage/Golden drop plum tree, an apricot tree, a Japanese plum, a Stella/White Cherry Tree, and a white nectarine.  I tried to order a Plumcot, which is a divine apricot/plum hybrid, but apparently it wasn't available after all.  Booo...

Now to weed the back beds in preparation for the trees... [groan]

The cutting of the pumpkin

I cut my first pumpkin tonight.  Quite a ceremony!

stab

slice

oh shit the knife's stuck

oh so orange!

Like many of the plants I've grown in the last 6 months, pumpkin's a new experience for me.  My friends gave me a small plant which they grabbed from their compost heap, and it seemed to appreciate the mushroom compost and fertilizer I fed it, as it grew across two garden beds (I built a bridge from some lattice for it).

Pumpkin in its peak.  It's now spread beyond this image frame.

It's now dying off, and there are 6 mega pumpkins lying in the leaves.  I've been a wee bit anxious about when they'd be ready to eat, and have received quite a few suggestions, such as 'when it sounds hollow' (hollowness is subjective), when the skin turns grey (hmmm...), when the plant starts to die off.  I chose the latter and evidently it was a good decision. 

We're having roast pumpkin tonight with our Garlicy Lemon Roast Chicken (recipe courtesy of last week's Weekend Australian Magazine).  But for this week we have planned: pumpkin ravioli, pumpkin and spinach curry (two birds with one stone), and pumpkin risotto.  My flatmate is planning pumpkin soup too (unfortunately, my brief career as an aged care nurse means that I have a severe aversion to all liquid foods, and will be sitting that one out).

A walk around the vegie garden

I haven't posted any pictures lately, and yet I've had so much growing.  Here's an overall view:

top tier: pumpkins, leeks, spring onions

second tier: globe artichoke, fennel, tigerella tomatoes, bok choi, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, rocket, lebanese cucumbers, lettuce, mesculin

third tier: multiple types of tomatoes including Roma, cherry, Grower's Delight, Digger's [something], Lenah Valley market unidentified; basil, dying passionfruit, unidentified curcubit.

fourth tier: failed cauliflowers, dwarf beans, white beans.

 From another angle.  You can see the rhubarb in the top right corner.

Crazy pumpkin plant, stretching over two garden beds.  I had to build a 'bridge' between the two beds:

My lone artichoke. I thought I'd try one and see if it survived before trying more.  It's growing like a fiend, so I think I'll get another:

A few young fennel plants. Only four survived the snail feast:

The only cauliflower (out of 10 plants!) that has actually produced a flower: 

Rocket:

My two faithful cucumber plants.  They look a bit scungy now, but they're still growing and producing about four cucumbers a week between them:

Beans.  Also looking a wee bit scungy but they've got a second wind and are producing slowly:

tomatoes

 

My cute tigerellas (so stripey!). Still waiting for them to go beyond the green faze...

Rhubarb

Unidentified Curcubit:

Young broccoli seedlings, with my trial dog-proof snail poison box based on a suggestion by Hobart Kitchen Gardens.  I've never used snail bait because I don't like the idea of poisoning the soil or my dog, however I've lost so many seedlings to the damn creatures that I was willing to compromise

Bok Choi and Spinach plants:

Herbs including flat and curly leaf parsley, rosemary, basil (my better basil is cuddling with the tomatoes), coriander, chives, spring onions, dill, oregano, lemongrass thyme, and mint. Oh, and a scungy orchid:

Last but not least, my cute little fig tree who has more fruit than leaves. I know I should be taking the fruit off to encourage it to grow, but I feel mean because it's trying so hard!