Winter Garden Spoils

So much grows in the winter. It surprises me, though I don't know why. Maybe because people rave about spring being the happening time for growing things. Meh.

This years growth of snow pea plants has far surpassed last year. When you water things regularly, and it gets enough sun, the growing really happens by itself. Originally I had some trellis up and my Dad convinced me it would need more, and it turns out he was right, because they have grown past the extra trellis.

The tomatoes next to them have also taken off, and not just cherry tomatoes this year! Actual tomatoes too! Unfortunately there is bad news, the possums have discovered the garden and are eating the parsley like there is no tomorrow. They also ate a whole half dozen strawberries that we had growing too. Rotten possums.

The other things we've got growing next to the snow peas are these beans. To be honest, I don't know what it is, but I will clue you in on how to grow your own unknown beans!

Give your children a pack of dried soup mix beans to play with. And some lentils and kidney beans and chick peas for fun too. Watch them pour these beans from container to container, enjoying the sound they make and hording as many as they can fit into an ice cream bucket.

Then watch, or don't watch, as they ignore your instructions to keep all of the beans in the large container and on the mat that you have placed in the yard, and cart the beans all over the place. Then wait as the beans are dropped and left in all sorts of places. Realise that you can't possibly pick up all of these teeny tiny dried beans and figure that the birds will pick them up.

A few weeks later, after the rain and sun have done their job, you will find a fair few of these dried beans have actually germinated and spouted in your yard, or in the garden or in the cracks between the pavement. Then you can pick them up, plant them in your veggie garden and wait and see what grows.

Who needs to buy seeds or go through a complicated germinating process, when your kids and nature can do it all for you?

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's Growing

Everything has been growing rather well, even though we left for a week and nothing got watered in our absence. Every day the kids love looking for snow peas on the vines and promptly eating them. I think the $4.00 I spent on the pack of seeds has been totally worth it. We have eaten fresh snow peas every day for the last two weeks.

The other exciting news is that we actually dug up some sweet potatoes! I had planted a sweet potato ages ago, that had sprouted in the cupboard. Wasn't sure what would come of it, but a vine popped up. Of course, I know nothing about how to tell if anything is growing under the vine, or how to encourage it to grow under the vine, but I watered it none the less.

I was pulling up weeds last week and out came a sweet potato. I was so surprised, and a little unsure about how to tell weather they were ready or not, but I covered them up and had the kids dig them up the next day anyway. They were delighted. There were only two and Rachel was a little bummed about missing out, but she got to wash them with me, and the vine is still growing, so hopefully we will have more in the future too.