Greens

vegetable gardening log

Potatoes

29 January, 2009

Filed under: Picked — Tags: , , , , — Carol @ 9:31 pm

Today we unstacked one of the potato tyres. There was a lot of dirt for relatively few potatoes but enough to fill a box. I’m never quite sure when to pull them apart but I’ll leave the other one for a while and plant some 2nd crop potatoes soon and see how those go.

potatoes

Also Simon cooked a great batch of roast veg tonight; scallopini, chillies, capsicum and beetroot from the garden and onion and kumara from the shop.

Weather is still very hot, though today amplifier.co.nz wrote, referring to Melbourne’s 43 degree heat:

That might sound hot but Melbourne has 3.8 million people. Auckland yesterday got to 25 degrees and we’ve only got 1.3 million people. That means that per capita it was actually hotter in Auckland.

Green and red

21 January, 2009

Filed under: Picked — Tags: , , , , , , — Carol @ 8:50 pm

Beetroot and a green dinner, including NZ spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides or kōkihi), scallopini, asparagus, mint and basil.

Beetroot Green dinner

Garden salad

20 January, 2009

Filed under: Picked — Tags: , , , — Carol @ 6:08 pm

Pulled my first radishes today, and they look just like what was on the seed packet! Miraculous! They are Easter Egg radishes and come in red, purple and white. I sowed them with carrots so that when I pull them out it thins the carrots. Seems to working so far but I’ll probably have a tidy up of the carrots once the radishes are all pulled.

Radishes

Also have been picking red cherry tomatoes (even though the plants collapsed earlier on this week after heavy rain!). Today I made a salad of garden lettuce, garden tomatoes and garden radishes. Yum!

Heavy scallopini

9 January, 2009

Filed under: Picked,Planted — Tags: , , , , — Carol @ 10:02 am

Just picked 1.7kg of scallopini! They look like weird hairy flying saucers. They may end up on the barbecue tonight – have to find something to do with them, and quick! There’s more appearing as I write.

Scallopini wouldn’t be my first choice – the packet of mixed courgette seeds seemed to be only this type. This may be the only time I grow them.

Heavy scallopini

(Rat by Jon Thorsen.)

Later on… I keep running out of space to plant new stuff and have been sitting on a whole lot of lettuce seedlings for a while, which were looking periodically sad in their little pots. So this afternoon I cut some more grass out in front of the fence tomatoes, built a mini-retaining wall out of bricks and back filled it with compost, which was enough space to plant the rest of the seedlings (Koanga‘s ‘Heritage Mix’) and the rest of the basil. Hopefully they’ll be happier now.

Tomato pruning

3 January, 2009

Filed under: Pruned — Tags: — Carol @ 1:49 pm

This year I have tried to go more by-the-book with my tomatoes. The first year I snapped off the laterals but didn’t know what I was doing and stunted their growth, also didn’t have enough plants. The next year I just got self-seeders popping up all over the garden which gave us heaps and heaps of green tomatoes. Last year I planted seedlings and left the laterals to go wild. Got lots of tomatoes but more foliage.

So this year I have various plantings – two lots (15? plants) in the raised beds – (MacGregor’s) Beefsteak tomatoes. With these I tried to let them grow two(ish) main stems and broke off the rest of the laterals that I could find. Two plants in their own corner – cherry tomatoes (Weathersfield Organic Cherry Baby/Gardener’s Delight and Sun Cherry). The trusses on those are forming nicely now and they both have 2 or 3 main stems. Today I nipped off the tops to stop them growing any more. Also another set of the same beef tomatoes along the fence. These are smaller than the others because they were in pots for longer, but I have been really strict with these ones, breaking off all the laterals. Finally one or two self-seeders which have popped up around and about.

Anyway, I just did a massive prune of all the bushes, taking off a lot of the bottom leaves and any leaves that were shading trusses. Hope I didn’t overdo it.

Tomatoes

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