All's Quiet on the Blogging Front (but Pumpkins are Growing)

Things have been quiet, though as always, I've been busy. Not sure I have much more to say really. Maybe next month I'll start going through the back log of photos, creativity, events and memories and start sharing them again. We shall see. 

In the meantime, here are some photos of the pumpkins that sprung up out of our glorious compost from when we did the front garden beds in September last year. For the first time ever we had butternut pumpkins! 

I was hand pollinating some of these, but our neighbours have bees and they were buzzing around most days too. Steve wonders why I bother, but it feels very pointless to have a huge sprawling pumpkin vine with nothing to show for it. 

The pumpkins grew up and over the retaining wall and alongside the water tank. Aside from accidently shading out the little flowers we had there, it's actually the perfect place for them, so we are now thinking we will convert that strip of grass into a pumpkin patch long term. I'm the only real pumpkin fan in the house though, so maybe it's not the wisest of investments. Perhaps it could be used for corn too.

In the meantime; pumpkin scones anyone? 

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. 

Beautification

Time for a garden update. After we pulled out the corn and the garden looked bare and awful for a while. Not for long though, because a plethora of pumpkin vines came up from the compost and because the weather wasn't quite right to plant anything else, we let them grow. 

And grow they did. You can read about pumpkin spoils here and here. But then the weather got to be just right for planting other things, and so the pumpkins were not longer appreciated. I thought they would die back naturally, after they had grown their pumpkins, but alas, they just kept growing (you can see their abundant growth in a picture in this post from March). In the end, we had to do a big cull of pumpkin vines so that we could top up the dirt, re-mulch and plant the tomato seedlings. 

Now the garden looks like this:

Some of those seedlings came from a friendly neighbourhood donation actually. Someone else in in the suburb had a heap pop up and decided they could share the tomato love. What a great neighbourhood we live in!

The garden looks so professional, we we even put in some stakes and wire for the tomato plants to be supported by. There is one pumpkin vine (top left), which grows out of the box and onto the grass. There are two pumpkins still on this vine growing steadily. I've also put some snow pea seeds in too, so hopefully we will see them sprout up soon.

Meanwhile, out front, our rusty old wire fence is getting some winter beautification. Last winter, I planted snow peas around the swing set, using the poles for a natural trellis. You can read about it here. I noticed then that the ones that did the best were the ones in the sun the most. Thinking about it, the front of our house gets a lot of sun most days, so using the front fence for a trellis seemed to be the next logical thing.

The kids and I planted these. I went along with a shovel and made a little hole and got the kids to follow me with seeds and the instruction that they were to put one seed in each hole. Then we went along with a bag of potting mix and they put a handful of potting mix on the top of each.

They look small and cute now, but hopefully they grow up and make the rusty front fence look a bit nicer, even for just a little while. There are a mix of snow peas and other bean seeds, just for variety. Should be good. The gaps are where there was some random cement in the ground (I can only assume from a previous fence?) or the kids missed a hole.

This clump of seedlings are from the first hole, where the children clearly got over excited about putting seeds in.

Garden Spoils

This is the pumpkin! I totally forgot to weigh it in the end, but it was so nice to cut open and see that lovely orangey-yellow shining out. Mum took a quarter for the Easter family lunch, and I gave wedges away to our neighbours. It even smelt nice when we were cutting it. What shop bought pumpkin smells nice when it's raw? 

I was watering the bed of sweet potato plants wondering how soon it would be until we saw some actual sweet potatoes, when I noticed something pushing out of the soil. Thinking some random animal had been digging up in the bed at night (I've heard stories from the neighbours about some tricky possums in the area), I had a poke around and found that enormous sweet potato you see below.

I quickly followed the vine and found a few more as well. The girls were delighted to see them coming out of the soil. We haven't had sweet potatoes from the garden since last August, so it was really exciting to know stuff is still growing there, especially since the plant has been transplanted twice in that time.

I remarked to Steve that even if it's not at all cost efficient to grow your own veggies, when you take into consideration the water, soil, mulch, etc., not to mention the time it takes to look after said garden, the feeling you get from actually having edible food that you grew yourself is amazing. Totally worth it.