Lovely Lady Legs

I was about to tell you how excited I was about this carrot. And I still am, it's my first proper carrot ever, it grew like a carrot, tasted like a carrot and was all round quite fabulous, but I just almost swallowed a fly.

I was sitting here peacefully drinking a lovely cold beer, when I took the last swig of the bottle. I'm so lucky that when I felt something strange in my mouth my first thought was fly, because to the great entertainment of all watching, I immediately spat the entire mouthful out onto the coffee table.

Yep, fly.

It was close people, very close.

And enough to put me off pretty much everything tonight, including my excitement over this carrot.

ps I was also going to blather on about how I think carrots look like ladies legs, but the fly incident has put a stop to that too.

If You Eat Just One Tomato For Eternity...

Then please let it be this one...

Oh My Goodness.

I've never ever tasted such a wonderous tomato. Never Ever.

You might remember a few months ago I got excited when I discovered Digger's seedlings at my local IGA. I went a little nutty and snapped up as many as I could, I wanted to prove to IGA that the seedlings were popular, and therefore they would carry them. In retrospect that is more than a little nutty. Good nutty though, because in doing so I discovered the tomato from the garden of Eden.

This lovely little green and yellow number is otherwise know as Green Zebra. And apart from being deliciously attractive, little Green Zebra is perfection on the inside too. It's not a large tomato, or at least mine aren't, and I remembered that the tomato lady at the markets told me to go be feel rather than colour. I had been keeping a careful eye on these ones, and all of a sudden I noticed how much they had yellowed (they were uniform green until then). I gave the bigger one a little squeeze, and it felt soft and ripe, so off it came.

I honestly wasn't expecting much. My cherry tomatoes are quite nice, lovely and fresh I'll give you that, but the one big red tomato I had produced had proven to be floury and very disappointing. So I was ready for it.

With this one though, I could tell I was onto a winner as soon as I sliced it open. It was firm, yet pliant, the knife cut through it like butter... and the slices... juicy and tender, and the taste, it was a tomato, and yet not, there was something a little different about it. Put to a blind taste test, I'm not sure if I'd pick this as tomato. It was that much better than any tomato I've ever tasted.

From now on, apart from a few experimental plants to see what else I am missing out on, I am devoting all my tomato talents, and lack thereof, to this one tomato type.

I love you Green Zebra.

Growing Against the Grain

The children love to potter around in the garden. Mostly they love digging into the dirt and adding water, mud pies are a bit of a specialty around here. They are pretty good at respecting the plants too, with the exception of a couple of hiccups on Felix's part, but mostly they watch where they put their feet, and love pointing out things that are growing.

Once every few weeks I get out all our seeds and let them choose something just for them to plant. Without fail Felix will say carrots, so we have a few hundred of them scattered around the place. This time though, they wanted to plant out potatoes. I'm not sure why, but that's what they wanted, and so that's what we planted.

Luka insisted the best place for them was the hottest, sunniest spot in the garden. We added some lovely composted manure, put in some potatoes, and covered them up. I wasn't going to say anything about it perhaps being not quite the right time for potatoes, or perhaps that spot was a bit hot, after all I'd only be going on what I've heard other people say. Personally I know nothing of growing potatoes, only that I put some in once and they came up.

Luka would have asked me why we couldn't plant them, and I wouldn't really have had an answer. I don't know what happens when you try to grow potatoes in the heat.

I don't know why doesn't really cut it with children.

So in they went under a lovely layer of mulch, and up up up the plants are growing. Hopefully they know what they're doing.

And pretty soon we'll either have learnt why, or we'll have some potatoes.

It's win win really.

Swaying in the Breeze

Okay, there was no breeze, but I did sway. Swayed from my principles and beliefs, swayed from my promises to myself about growing from good heirloom seed, and lastly, swayed from buying from small and trustworthy businesses.

I bought eggplant seedlings and didn't even look to see where they'd come from. In fact, I didn't even care.

They were so pretty... look at the difference, the photo above is my eggplant grown from a reputable seed, all the others are store bought from who knows where.

There's a big difference in looks between the two... the store bought ones are strong and lush and healthy, with crisp green leaves, new growth, no blemishes and no half eaten leaves.

And I admit it, I was swayed by nothing but good looks.

Are they not beautiful though?

Not only did I sway, I revelled in my swaying. Gripped in the full force of vegetal lust I bought four different kinds, that stripey purple one, a plain dark purple one, a skinny purple one and a white one.

You can see that I can't remember their names at all, hey. I was beyond caring, all I could think of were eggplants, big ones, little ones, striped ones, white ones, any kind at all, and finally, maybe, just maybe it was going to be possible to grow eggplants in our garden.

Who bothers to ask names when you are blinded by such a moment of pure passion?

Caging Dragons

I am so proud of this little dragon fruit cage... wooden stakes, some wire fencing and a few twisty ties, and I feel like I deserve a big gold star. I was a little unsure of how big to make it, but this is supposed to be a dwarf plant, so I made it small. The idea is that it will drape over the top and the copious amounts of fruits will hang down, supported by the structure.

I wasn't really thinking of the practicalities anyway, I was busy hammering and manipulating wire. I was woman with tools.

I feel like a certified master builder.

I don't know why, but until recently I have always been hugely chicken when it comes to constructing things. Hammer in a nail? What if I get it in the wrong place? Use wire? But it's all scratchy and difficult to manoeuvre. If I didn't get myself in such a grubby gardening state every day, you'd honestly think I was a right princess.

Lately though, I've been getting very adventurous in my various construction projects. It all started with the raised garden beds and since then there's been no stopping me. I've extended the chicken coop, tunnelled tomatoes, and made structures for the cucumbers to drape themselves over. I've supported bananas that are fruiting and and made tripods for the fruit trees. I've even made these very cool structures for the pole beans to climb up which I can't show here, I'm a little worried they aren't quite as cool in reality as I think.

Pretty soon I'll have staked, caged, tripoded, and tamed every single thing that dares to venture into our garden.

Last week I started eyeing off the house.

Showstoppers

These sunflowers are part of a project that I started a few months ago in my front yard. The project kind of assumed that they would all flower at the same time, but that hasn't happened. They haven't even grown at the same rate, some are way taller than I am, others are just above my knees, and the one below is my favourite, because we stand exactly face to face.

But it doesn't matter. I planted these a little begrudgingly, I have said before that I am not a huge fan of growing flowers, but now, I am so glad I did.

They are just simply amazing.

I love watching the progress of the seeds as they develop. There are hundreds of circles of flowers inside the much larger flower head, and it's like watching a slow fall of dominoes as each individual flower opens to reveal its seed... I did a little reading about them and apparently the little flowers (called florets) are arranged in an spiral pattern where the interconnecting left and right spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers.

That hurt my brain, but it sounded too cool to leave out. You can read about it here.

Anyway, I called this post showstoppers because they are in my front yard. And they stop passers by. Every day since they flowered I have seen people walking by, pointing them out to their friends and family. Some just stop and look, other people stop and talk to me, and although I have very little to do with their beauty, I feel as though I have moved people, and that makes me feel chuffed.

ps I will show you the project as soon as a few more of the flowers flower. It's very cool, but messy cool, not neat and tidy like the vision I had. Plants don't seem to want to confirm to my rules.

Hiding From The Children

If I ever want to eat something yummy, and have it all to myself, I have to hide from my children. It doesn't matter what it is, they could have exactly the same thing in front of them, but if it's on my plate, they want it.

I have to hide, because most of the time I am obliged to give in because of the sharing thing. They've got me there. I was munching on some buttered toast, which I could see had hypnotised Felix. He doesn't even like butter, he'd refused the offer of toast when I put the bread into the toaster, but of course, the request came...

"Can we share your toast Mummy?"

There's no getting out of that one. Of course we can share, sharing is what we do, we all love to share, its a good thing to share! Slobber all over my toast, it doesn't matter, as long as we are sharing.

So now, when Mummy is eating something delicious and doesn't really want to share, she hides. And just this once, one time only, I wanted a strawberry that hadn't been "shared" first. So after I took this photo, even though they weren't super ripe, I picked three of the red strawberries, and hid from my children to eat them.

And they were soft and juicy and delicious, and they were all mine.

I'll share the next lot.

The Thrill of the Hunt

I don't think I've ever had such an exciting time digging in the garden in my entire life.

I was so skeptical about the potatoes that I planted back in August (the 8th to be precise), I know that technically someone somewhere does actually grow potatoes, but I just doubted that that someone could ever be me.

The plants did shoot up pretty quickly, but then they flowered, something which I don't think they always do... and I was thinking, right, they are putting their energy into flowering, there won't be any potatoes from this lot.

And then something today made me go into the bed and have a little dig around.

I've got no idea what prompted me, I certainly wasn't actively looking for potatoes, but I guess I must have wanted to see if there was anything happening at all under the soil.

I almost couldn't believe it when I discovered the first one. I was scratching away with a spoon, and all of a sudden, there one was, just sitting there. It was as though someone had just dug a hole the night before and popped a tatie in there! It looked exactly like a potato should look. That made me really suspicious.

I started thinking that maybe it was one that I had planted in August, I had no idea what happens to the old ones when you plant them out. I gave this one above a little press sideways with my thumb, and away came the skin, that's when I started believing I had grown a potato, the skin just rubbed away super easily. That smacked of fresh potato to me.

If I had any further doubts they were swept away by this little growing one, I certainly didn't plant that.

I couldn't help myself, I kept on digging and scraping, each new potato just put the biggest smile on my face, I certainly got the gardening high with these babies. I only found these five, but there are other little forming ones in there, and I didn't do the mounding thing properly with the plants, so that would have cut back on the harvest.

Of course I am now rushing out to the markets the next chance I get to buy as many exotic varieties as I can.

Because as of today, I am a Certified Potato Grower.

When Things Come Easily

I am guilty of not loving and caring for my cherry tomatoes. They just grow too easily, they don't make me work hard enough to appreciate them. I don't even plant them, like everyone eles's garden I'm sure, they just pop up everywhere... there must be a cherry tomato planting secret society... people walking innocently past your garden, no one looking, quick, a handful of seeds into your yard.

So that might be going a bit far, but they do pop up everywhere. They are by far the most prolific and healthiest producers in my garden, and like I said, I don't take care of them. I let them grow where they are, if they fall over I leave them to decide whether to live or die themselves, and I would never even think of watering them. The treat them mean approach just works.

Anyway, this year something different happened.

I ran out.

I had a huge run of them in winter, up to the point of making jam out of them, but I didn't think to plant any more... the old ones died off, and all of a sudden, I was tomatoless. And boy, did I feel it. I was used to grabbing them out of the garden as needed, and all of a sudden, I had to buy them at the shop! It wasn't fun.

So now that I am lucky enough to have them back, I'm not going to let them go again. Tomorrow I'll be out there staking and watering them. Love for my tomatoes is going to shine through... it might just be the end of them :p.

We never do know what we've got until it's gone, do we?

And I Said There Were No Flowers

So it's not a vegetable and usually I think the non-munchable stuff is pretty boring, but this is our tree, and it's special.

I am pretty sure I've blathered on about it before, but that was in the depths of winter, now I get to show you the first of the summer flowers.

It's a massive tree, right smack bang in the middle of our backyard. And it's special for a few reasons. It loses its leaves in winter, leaving the yard lovely and sunny to potter around in. Then it leafs right up in summer, and it means that even at midday on the hottest Brisbane days, we can relax under it in the garden and enjoy the cool shade.

And the best thing of course is the huge big horizontal branches. Fabulous for climbing, and just right for a tyre swing. Thanks for the tyre Drew :)

And yes, I know they are a pest here... but still beautiful. The tree I mean.

So the poinciana does lose its leaves, but apparently it's not to do with the cold so much as rainfall. If there isn't a lot of rain during the winter, it will lose its leaves, if there is rain aplenty, some of the leaves do drop, but certainly not all. This year it still had a lot of growth on it during winter, so it seems to hold pretty true.

And it grows! If we don't cut it back, the branches touch the ground by the end of summer. It's kind of cool for a while, like being in another world under the canopy, but it starts to get a little claustrophobic after a while, and I go wild hacking away at it. I really need to have it professionally lopped, but I do adore playing with the ratchet.

Other People's Gardens: Stacka and Harmon

And Glynn and Harmon's too!

So what do you think? I just love it, it is so practical, and so much neater and tidier than my own. The garden sits just outside their kitchen door, so it's super convenient for meal times. Then the Besser blocks, they not only contain the garden, you can also make them into any shape you like, and plant things in the middle of them. Eveything is easy to reach from all sides, it just all smacks of common sense gardening.

On top of all this, and just in case you missed it, their garden says "hi". Stacey swears they didn't do that deliberately.

Above is Stacey pointing out her renegade tomato... then there are her rockmelons (that I though were watermelons, I am still having problems with that!).

I adore this flower... it's an edible chrysanthemum, and although eating raw flowers makes me feel one step closer to being a cow, I love the idea of it as an edible garnish.

The garden is just great, it's only been in for around 4 months and everything is just thriving. the soil is lovely and rich, they actually empty their kitchen scraps into the middles of the Besser blocks and cover them with paper and water, so tons of little mini compost heaps that can be directly planted into. I just think that is the ants pants, an ideal non-messy way to compost.

So that's it, Stacka and Harmon's (and the rest!) guest garden.

Are You Happy There?

This is my wonderful new dwarf dragon fruit.

Well, I say wonderful, but I am finding it kind of hard to love...

I bought it over the internet, I got excited about all the dwarf fruit tree stock this company had, and I just went wild ordering stuff left, right and centre. I ordered way too many trees, and I really hope that dwarf means dwarf.

If it doesn't, I'm in trouble.

Anyway, like I said, I'm finding it a little hard to love. When I first saw it, I had a little freak out. It looks like a cactus. A funny looking one too. When I asked the guy how to look after it, he told me to plant it in the ground. Thanks a lot for the help garden guru.

I've looked a bit on the net, and they seem to grow up over a structure, and then cascade down over it. It's the downward facing parts that bear the fruit. And the fruit is just beautiful, beautiful looking anyway, I haven't actually tasted any yet. Told you I got excited when I bought it.

So, after my research I'm still not sure what to do with it. It's got roots coming out of the stems all over the place, it's got fat bits growing off thin bits, and most depressingly, it hasn't moved a muscle since I planted it. That was a good few months ago now, and no new growth. I don't know if it likes its spot or not.

It doesn't look like it's dying though... oh well... I'm going to try building it a structure tomorrow. And I'll keep watering and feeding and mulching, and we'll just see how it grows.

Popping Paw Paws

It's amazing that while for some things in the garden are the biggest mission to grow,other things just pop up and thrive with no help from you whatsoever. For a friend of mine it's macadamias. She has them popping up everywhere, in the most unlikely places, clinging to bits of leaf litter and generally going nuts. Of course I go and pinch one of hers and it is now so peeved that it hasn't sprouted a new leaf in over six months.

For me what pops up in the garden, is paw paw. Everywhere, all the time. This little one above is next to some watermelons. The good thing about paw paws is that they don't spread out, so I usually just leave them to do their thing.

The bad thing is that I don't actually like the taste of them.

I am getting better, but why couldn't a lychee tree be my pop up fruit?

What's your pop up plant?

Flattened Reeds

This is what we found on the ground this morning. Strewn carelessly across the concrete, ripped from their branches.

See the scratches? I'm not sure what has knocked them off, but there will be no bending like a reed in this situation. There will be a lot of resisting like the mighty oak, swimming against the current and bagging of bananas.

I might actually cry. I love these bananas, I want to care for them, nurture and protect them, and of course, eat them. Me, not wild animals, me.

I put them in my fruit bowl to see if anything will happen, but I am pretty sure they are supposed to be filled out before you pick them. I am also pretty sure they take around 5 months to ripen on the banana plant, so they certainly aren't going to do that on my kitchen bench.

I know I'm going to be lying awake all night listening for disturbances too. I want to put a protective bag around them, but I worked today and it's dark now, and my boundless love for them doesn't include me up a ladder in the pitch dark.

Rocking chair and a rifle sounds so much more preferable to me :p