New seedlings November

- all year round lettuce
- sunflowers
- cayenne
- eggplant black beauty
- radicchio
- corn
- zucchini tondo di piacenza
- cos lettuce romaine
- capsicum California wonder
- capsicum seven colour mix

These were all planted on the 12th of November... Sorry. Seeded in trays.
I'm expecting to extract them around the start of December.
Photos pending.
Today was all about weeding, taking the tomato and nettle plants away from the beans.
There are come pepo and curcurbits sitting in a seedling tray that im going to plant out in a few days.
I'll be super excited if they turn out to be rock melon or water melon.
We've got so much food coming at the moment. I'm going to plant out the rest of the space soon. 85 tomato plants. Shit! Someones making their own sauce this year.
We've migrated into the orchard. I'm going to brick off a few beds here and there and when it comes to the chicken coop, well work a twisted path around what I create in the next few months. I will get new crooks around autumn.
Potatoes are going famously.
All trees have got pathogens, apple scar, peach leaf curl.
I planted 15 artichokes. All will die I think. They look like pathetic and chlorotic weedy afterthoughts sticking out of an already busy topsoil.

Eating our compost.

We have a little bin in our home, as most Australian's I assume, would have this little bin in their homes: for compost. This bin, shallow as it is, fills up quickly and this fresh trash goes into a bigger bin that's just outside our back door. I am more lazy about emptying this one into an even bigger bin, which is the actual garden compost bin itself.
The bin that lies just outside our back door is removed, not necessarily when it's full, but when I can't take the smell any longer. That's a particular brand of laziness I like to call 'painziness'.
However, when it does get emptied, the ritual dictates that I pick up this now 40kg block of smelly sludge and cart it 100 metres to the garden and empty its sloppy contents into the large compost bin. Carting it back is no bowl of cherries either because what smell it did have before has now amplified because it is, for all intents and purposes a shit salad which has just been tossed with two corroding strips of roadkill acting as salad forks.
It's smelly, is what Im trying to say. Anyway, it compels me to take the next step which, as you would have guessed, is to run it under the tap, semi fill it up, semi swirl it around and dump it onto the closest patch of dirt which is just to the side of our verandah.
Enter the Jap pumpkins and the tomato plant. What must have happened, somewhere along the line, is I must have composted a tomato and a pumpkin, they must have had viable seed sitting at the bottom of the compost and when I washed them out and thrown them onto the garden, they must have just grown from all the favourable conditions. Brilliant.
Keep in mind, these are some of the healthiest plants Ive grown in a while. The Tomatoes were beautiful. We picked 10 huge green tomatoes and 4 plump red tomatoes. With the green tomatoes, we made a delicious pickled tomato relish that I added to some toast, hommus, and smoked salmon. It was lovely. And it was encouraging to know that unripe tomatoes have such a great use. Clare also made fried green tomatoes with some other green tomatoes that were late season in our actual garden.
The next thing we did is raise a jap pumpkin amidst the hebe. We love this Jap pumpkin because I've just come off a summer which produced 32 Queensland Blues so youd think that I'd be over pumpkins. However, Jap pumpkins have an easier use because the flesh is sweeter, the skin is more tender and it is much more suitable to use in roasted vegetable salads and pizzas, which is exactly what we did.

Here is a video of our May panning view of our vege patch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRpgLwcYf00

Pumpkin fiasco

I grew pumpkins. I normally plant a few seeds in the ground around October, thinking that nothing will come of it. Oh how wrong I am. The Pumpkin God's laugh at my ignorance. They say to themselves, 'Oh this man is an idiot. He knows not what a single seed of pumpkin can do to his back yard' and then they do some almighty pumpkin retribution on my back yard.
Seriously. What is the evolutionary trigger for pumpkins excessiveness? It is seriously the most insecure vegetable Ive ever come across.
Kill everything around it with its pretentiously massive leaves and hollow stems. Produce a fruit that weighs ten kilograms, with enough seeds to blanket a sandpit.
Not only that, my three seeds that I haphazardly placed in the ground turned into a sprawling mass. It looked like a Dickensian birds eye view of London. Pumpkin edition.
And not to mention the amount of fruits! Three seeds. 32 pumpkins. Big ones. Queensland blue to be precise. Look at the photo of the abnormally growing pumpkin. It grew inbetween this fence. It didn't just decide to die. It decided to kill my fence!
Not only is it a green menace, it is a creeping green menace. It has creeping vine stem mods that wrap around vertical surfaces and climbs up them. It can fruit these huge pumpkins seemingly in mid air and maintain the weight of them. And then when theyre ready to seed, they just fall. Yea no worries. 10kg boulder hurling from the sky. Thanks evolution. The liquid metal version of the Terminator version of vegetables. A fully grown pumpkin vine will stand proud at the foot of a fence, with huge rock like fruit, and still aim to get onto the other side of the fence by sliding a little vine underneath the crack and then flowering a goliath pumpkin some weeks later. Then, it will kill your family...
I picked every last pumpkin. And I have been giving pumpkins to everyone who comes over my place. They have to take it. Some are thrilled. Some are apathetic. Some dont want it. But they take it anyway.
I actually had a fight the other night with a girl coz she didnt want to take one.
'What you dont like pumpkin?'
'I like pumpkin'.
'Then take the pumpkin'.
'I dont wanna take the pumpkin'
'Take the pumpkin'.
It was like the Jerry Seinfeld Space pen episode.
'All I said was I liked the Pumpkin... You know that pumpkin can grow upside down?!'

The Moss Episode

This garden is inundated with moss. It was originally the orchard that is adjacent to the beds, now it is encroaching slowly. The primary suspect is poor soil drainage. The water is not seeping into the ground quick enough. I am considering getting some clay breaker solution and putting it into my soil. There are particular spots in the vege patch that I predict wont thrive, due to it being located in the same position where moss thrives. Not only will it have to compete with the moss itself, but the conditions which make the moss thrive also wreck havoc on the vegetables planted there. Rock solid soil, an intricate network of tree roots, poor soil drainage, clay and finally, not enough Sun.
I say not enough Sun, but it's not much Sun. I can make it work. I hope I can, at least.
My thoughts are kept positive by the lime which will break up the soil, make it more pH neutral and will put a bit more oxygen into the soil, making it more friable. I think once the profile of the soil improves, the microclimate will support vegetables. Though I'm wondering if I should physically remove the moss, or whether it will just retract in time. I have the right mind to take the top layer away for composting so that we start with a fresh slate. The deciduous trees provide ample ground cover that kills the moss dead; depriving it of the light. They only thrive where the soil emerges above the dead leafy canopy.
The moss on the photos are from the crossover onto my vege patch. Maybe i could remove that manually and then observe the soil and the moss once the lime is injected. I want to learn more about mosses effect on other plant life. Ive got to learn to do my research on certain things before deciding to do the blog thing. FIAL!
I'm experiencing winter more consciously this time around. Im learning what you can grow and what you can't. I'm learning about the proper times to plant and not. Im learning what effect the weakness of the Sun, it's tilt and the heat that it fails to emit in these mid months. Im learning how I dont need to water the garden as much. Im learning how effective weed management needs to be in hotter months, and how weeding is not a really big problem for me in Autumn/Winter because they fail to grow at an unmanageable speed.
Then again, maybe I should just give up and become a moss farmer.

TIMBEEEER

I planted a whole bushel of seeds in the bed near this tree. I got down on my hands and knees and meticulously covered each seed with but a half a centimetre of soil, and I've been watering with care. Nothing. I did this on the 1st May. sixteen days later, the best i can see is my snowpeas are starting to germinate, but thats because moist seeds which have come to the surface are starting to break. And another line of dicots are coming through in a bunched heap. Though i dont know what they are. Im going to have to thin them out. I hate thinning things out. it seems so wasteful.
However! The rest of the bed (and were talking 90% of the bed here) is completely baron. Not even weeds will show up. This is a high order oddity that I cannot crack. The only thing I can figure out is that the winter sun is not shining on the bed directly for long enough. There are three huge eucalyptus trees around the vege patch. One is dab smack in the middle of the vege patch, another, just as old and just as large sits outside the vege patch and the one in the photo sits inside the fruiting orchard, bordering the vege patch.
So I came to the conclusion that my plants are not receiving enough winter light. I ringbarked the tree you see in the photo. No umming and aaahing or aaawwwing, It's done now. i took an axe and hacked away at the perimetre until there was no cambium left. I will slowly witness the leaves drop off.
Eventually, I'm going to have to call someone to help dismantle the young tree, as it has been growing there for the last 10 years and is already taller than any of the fruiting trees. Cutting it straight down is going to cause damage either to the newly erected fence, the newly constructed vegetable patch bed or the 7 year old fruiting trees.
Therefore, someone is going to have to come and do it piece by piece.

If you build it... he will cucumber.

I am partial with putting things into neat packages. This last summer, I let my produce roam free and uninhibited. The rocket was sown liberally across a patch of dirt; cast higgledy piggledy, come what may. The cucumbers and tomatoes were given their own private fiefs in a seemingly arbitrary placement. And of course, the pumpkin threatened to put an end to all of it.

Looking at the photos, you can see how wild the garden was, compared to how orderly I am in the process of making it. This is good right? No fail here. Hold...

The problem was found with the trenching. I dug trenches that would invariably form the borders of the raised beds. The problem was that when i backfilled the raised beds, I had now put on top, a hard, dusty and rock solid clay base that, when wet, was eligible for pottery casting.

So now my beds which at one point had rich and friable soil now has a thin layer of mud, which, if I dont do something about it, will soon invite the moss; which is already encroaching from the neighbouring crop. (Another entry perhaps)

So have I messed up? Well, yes. But Im pretty convinced that I can restore the quality of the soil (fingers crossed on the coffee ground). By the way, an update of the coffee story. Good news, I watched a youtube clip, which I should probably include in this entry as an addendum to last week.

Meanwhile, here are some photos of my new orderly beds that are coming together. There should be nine beds in all. In future, Im going to plant my pumpkins in an open field where they will have the freedom to spread their legs and not bother my raised beds.

The Coffee garden

The first thing you need to know is that I have little patience. Translated to the garden, I do something first and then I ask questions later. This is going to be a theme of Garden FAIL and, in all honesty, it's probably the cause of most of my failures in the garden. I know this in advance and yet, I still proceed. Why? Don't know. The Beau of today obviously doesn't care about the Beau of tomorrow enough to do necessary research.

This brings me to the coffee garden. As you can see from the pictures, I have recently purchased a beverage at Starbucks. After listening to faux acid jazz tracks in the corner of the room, I glanced over at the counter and noticed a sign which read 'Free coffee ground for your garden'. Long story short, ten minutes later, I was hauling five bags of coffee grind out the front door and into my car.

When I got home, I sprinkled it all onto my vege patch with no regard for what my garden could cope with or what it would even do to my garden. It wasn't until after I'd emptied about 50kgs of grind onto my brassicas that I thought the acidity of the coffee would be an issue. So I read the packaging.

Starbucks assured me that after roasting the coffee, the acidity was cooked out, leaving the acidity relatively neutral. But something told me that Starbucks had not conducted an intensive investigation into verifying this claim, and since they were giving this stuff away for nothing, something inside me told me that Starbucks didn't care about the state of my silverbeet. Nor did it even mention how often I am to apply this stuff and in what quantity. After sitting with this thought for a while, it dawned on me that they were probably happy to see the back of me; hauling out their rubbish that they were no longer responsible for.

On the upside, my whole garden smelt like espresso for an entire weekend. I should research the benefits of coffee ground to my garden. I'll use the internet. because that's not bound to be unverifiable hearsay. It's good enough for impatient farmer Beau. Worst case scenario, I will have salted the earth for 100 years with coffee ground and the only thing ill be able to successfully grow will be spinnifex and fucking nettle.