A Year Later

A photo memory came up a few weeks ago, of what the garden around the water tank looked like when we put it in a year ago. It has changed so much since we finished it! Even though I've seen it grow, I'm still in shock about how much life it has there. 

The biggest thing to grow was the passion fruit vine, which now covers the entire water tank, as well as all the balustrade down the length of the deck. It just grew and grew and grew! The flowers we originally planted took off, and in that garden bed I've also had spinach, lettuce and bok choy growing through out the year. 

One end of that long garden bed is still tricky to grown things in, so I might experiment with more shade option plants coming into autumn. We will see. Down the front garden bed, things are happy and healthy too. I bought a set of capsicum seedlings from Bunnings, three out of the four of them turned out to be banana chillies, which are not hot, but pretty disappointing when you were expecting capsicums. 

That said, they love their life in the garden bed and we have had so much fruit off them. Sometimes they grow so quickly I can't pick them in time. They aren't hot, but they are also kind of boring on their own, so mostly I feed them straight to our guinea pigs, who love them. 

Last time I went to Bunnings, Rachel was with me and asked if we could grow some eggplant. I wasn't sure but she's really into trying new stuff, so I figured, why not. I could always feed them to the guinea pigs if we had too many. The eggplants also like their life in the garden bed, and we've had some pretty nice fruit. I'm the only one eating them, but at least they are not growing as prolifically as the banana chillies are, so I can keep up. 

How pretty are snapdragon flowers? 

In our other spontaneous garden bed, things had gotten quite out of hand with regards to tomatoes and pumpkins that popped up out of the compost. We had tomatoes galore last year. I couldn't give them away fast enough. One week I gave away 7kgs of tomatoes, only to pick another 7kgs the next. There were truss tomatoes, grape, perrino and cherry tomatoes. So many tomatoes. 

The pumpkin vine grew around it all, but no fruit was forthcoming until we got back from our Christmas in Bundaberg and I wad delighted to see success! 

I left it to grow until last week when I got sick of all the weeds, and ripped out heaps of the old pumpkin vine along with them. There are still some vines there at the other end of the garden bed, so I'm hopeful for a few more fruits, but we will see. 

Got to be happy with that effort right? I'll have to take a video of the passion fruit vine because it's too stellar to capture in photos. Gardening is the best.