March 31

• I've abandoned the weeding lately. I do want to plant my onion seeds, but I think I'd rather buy a truckload of dirt and dump it on the garden! Besides, I want to make some built up beds like you see on gardening TV shows, but that still requires weeding first. Sigh!


• I need a gardener. LOL.


• The two zucchini seedlings that I transfered into the hexagarden got chomped until they were gone. I suspect snails, though I haven't seen any. I planted the remaining three in their place, and they're good so far. Starting to think it's a bit cool for them now, though. The mornings are getting frosty!


• Picked another 450g of silverbeet and 180g of strawberries. There hasn't been enough heat to make as many strawberries this time, and we've also eaten a few for "picnics" without weighing them. Frankly, we've had more strawberries than we can eat. (Well, the kids could eat them, but three lots of nappies is bad enough without the Strawberry Effect!) .


• P.S. Blogger is messing with my paragraphs. Again.


• +$45.70

March 22

480g of strawberries (picked quickly because it was nearly dark) and about 2m of one row of vege garden weeded. Sigh. The dirt is hard to get even the fork into. Need to borrow a plough!

+$39.41

March 21

The two zucchini seedlings are now planted in the hexagarden. There are 3 more seedlings in the tray, plus seedlings from nearly all the cauliflower, broccoli and silver beet. The vege garden is dying off pretty nicely, so I'll be able to weed it soon. Might pull out some weeds tomorrow, and then pick more strawberries :D

March 17

I think a light spray of pyrethrin on top of the strawberry plants has done a world of good. I picked another 640g of strawberries today, and didn't see a single teeny bug.
.
These are zucchinis. I planted 3, and later another 3. But I know from experience that two plants is more than enough!! If it's not too late in the season for flowers and zucchinis to grow, we'll get a heap. The vege patch weeds have only half-died down, so these zucchinis are going into the space in the hexagarden when they get just a little bigger.


Also picked out some silver beet yesterday. Not sick of it yet! hehe.

+$29.81

March 13

Spent $8 at the supermarket on some pyrethrin spray. Tiny tiny bugs keep eating holes in some of the strawberries. They look like specks of dirt, but wriggley. Yuk.

Anyway, I picked another 640g of red strawberries: $12.80, because they're still $20 a kilo; I checked. Then I gave them a light spray on top.

Also have some seedlings popping up! I've seen a couple of shoots of each vege so far. Haven't checked the poisoned weeds yet, but hopefully they're dying down ;)

+$14.46

March 11

My sister came out today, and since we were having a healthy "pudding" lunch, I went out to grab some strawberries: another 420g worth $8.40.

They're collecting tiny, tiny bugs that are chewing little holes, but I'm not sure what they are. I generally chop them off and the holes they eat. Must find out and get rid of them.

+$9.66

March 8

I meant to water the strawberries last night, but I forgot, and luckily, it rained lightly all night. I gave the seedlings a teensy bit of seasol.

Today I picked 320 more grams of strawberries (how did I miss so many the other day?) and 500g of silver beet. Hope my seedlings grow and produce this well.

My running total is in the positive!
+$1.26

March 7

Poisoned my three-fifths of the vege garden with roundup today. As Nathan reminded me, we agreed that the short rows were his, and the long rows (the Southern 6m) were mine. Besides, he has a rebel tomato, which is surviving under his tomato frame amongst the weeds. I found it, because I saw the glow of a single red tomato (which was delicious), and there are two green ones. No planting for 7 days. Lots of weeding and digging to do when they die!

Am considering more zucchini seedlings.

Collected 590g of strawberries this evening.

-$8.20

March 5

Today, I divided the bag of seed starter (nice mulchy dirt) into the dishes, after putting two holes in the bottom of each, and planted (l to r) Silverbeet (6) Zucchini (3) Cauli (4) and Broc (4).



Here's the seedpack info:
Silverbeet: Seedlings by 14days, harvest 2-3 months. 300 seeds in the pack. Look like teeny shrunken heads about 2mm across. Plant 40cm apart.
Zucchini: Seedlings by 10 days, crop 8-10 weeks. 25 seeds, look like small pumpkin seeds. Plant 90cm apart.
Cauli: Seedlings by 28 days. Transplant when seeds are 10cm tall. Plant 60cm apart. 200 seeds.
Broc: Seedlings by 10 days. Plant 60cm apart. 50 seeds. Look just like cauliflower seeds.

Good to have this info, since all my cauliflower and broccoli seeds are mixed up in the plastic bag! But the broc will pop out first ;)

We (Byron, Jasmine and I) picked some silverbeet (800g) and strawberries (640g). I'll add the price to the running total when I check out what they're worth at the supermarket tomorrow. It would have been a little bit more in the strawberry department, if Jasmine didn't eat every single strawberry she picked!



Here is the hexagarden, made with a border of 6 railway sleepers that Nathan got me one year. The strawberries were planted two Summers ago, and we thought they'd all died under the weeds. But when I weeded it... surprise! That's why the harvest is getting added without subtracting the cost of the plants; I'm considering them free. Mum gave me the silver beet, so it's free, too.
And here is the vege patch. I 'stepped out' the measurements, and it's 5x10 meters. 50 square meters is a big enough garden for anyone, really, but it needs just a bit of work. I went to poison it while the kids were asleep, but couldn't find Nathan's poison-mixing watering can.

Here is the littlest, 1-year-old Zach, getting into an apple his big brother abandoned.

Silverbeet and strawberries for tea tonight!

Edit: Strawberries are $19.92 a kilo and silver beet is $6.12. So yesterday's harvest was worth
$17.65.

Running total: -$20.00

March, 2011

Welcome to the garden!

I decided that I'd record the progress of our 5-acre block, as it hopefully becomes something of a self-sufficiency paradise... lol! I can totally do it! I have no time schedule, as such; I'm just going to improve it bit by bit and see where it goes.

Details at the present:

Nathan and I (and three kids) live in Australia, in the cold, windy country near Ballarat. Our block is 5 acres of grass, divided into two paddocks. In the front we have a house, Nathan's shed, a garden shed, a bunch of baby trees (Nathan's) and a pile of mulch! In the back part we have a fenced vege patch (will look up dimensions later) full of weeds again, a hexagonal garden (fenced and mulched) containing about 20 strawberry plants and 1 silver beet, and 4 sheep named Barley, Daisy, Cocoa and Coffee. There are a few surviving fruit trees, a square garden of photinias (Nathan's area) and some wattles and gums (mine), but it is mostly open space.

A week or so ago I started a compost heap. So far it's just a pile of rotten food in one corner of the vege patch! I hope to get some good compost going, though, because the ground is very clay-rich. Tonight I bought a copy of "Your Garden: Autumn 2011"

...some seed packs (onion, cauliflower, broccoli, zucchini and silverbeet), 2 tubs for seedlings, some seedling mix, some weedkiller, and a cheap trowel to replace the one I bent the other day.

My plan is to plant a few seeds in the tubs tomorrow and poison the vege patch. Hopefully the children will have a nap at the same time!

We've had veges before, and have a watering system set up, as well as 4 short rows and 4 long ones and a tomato frame, and the dirt is getting 'wormy', but the veges were a disaster this year. Sigh. Hopefully some of the Autumn veges will do well.

:) $37.65 (didn't include magazine) spent. Will approximate value of any veges, and have a running total :)