Into winter

It’s winter now in the Southern Hemisphere and our garden is reflecting that. The brassicas we planted a month or so ago are developing. Both our broccoli and our cauliflower are ‘hearting up’. Our silver beet is producing so many leaves and we have some self-sown red mustard growing as well.

Broccoli

Sicilian Purple Cauliflower 💜

I have planted out some seedling beetroot and turnips which are growing slowly.  The beetroot is doing better. I also threw into the beds all the seedlings that I had growing on the assumption that they are more likely to survive in the ground than in small pots.

We are now spending more time on our next big garden project which is rebuilding our chicken run.

The demolition of the old run is complete and the timber for the new enclosure has arrived.

The framing for our new chicken pen – some assembly required!

I am going to be pre-painting the timber with flour paint – a traditional paint recipe that has a lifetime of some 10-15 years. We will go with the traditional red oxide colour found on many old Scandinavian buildings.

In the meantime we are keeping warm, like this local magpie, sunning itself against our neighbours fence!

Capturing the morning sun.

If you haven’t seen it already our May garden video is out on our Two Feral Gardeners YouTube channel. You can see the progress we are making on the chicken run demolition.

Autumn Joy

We’re nearly at the end of April and although the overnight temperatures are getting down towards 0 degrees C, the days remain mild and very pleasant, in the low 20 degrees C.

We are so pleased that our recently transplanted saffron bulbs are delivering us with flowers – although excruciatingly slowly, just one flower every few days. Still some is better than none.

As the pace of summer gardening is slowing we have had time to do some of those smaller, time consuming jobs. For me that means working my way through a series of overgrown pot plants. Some of these have been an easier fix than others. I have freed my sole remaining Hen and Chicken fern (Asplenium bulbiferum), a plant which grows new plantlets on the ends of it’s fronds (hence the name). But I really had to wrestle with my waterlily which was choked with grasses and even flat weeds. I won in the end but it took a long time to get there.

Oh my, what a mess. There’s a water lily in there somewhere!

Newly re-planted and …

after a week looking much better.

A bee has found it easy to drink water from the newly cleared pot by climbing on the waterlily stems.

Steve planted out a whole lot of garlic cloves several weeks ago and they are now sticking their green shoots above the ground. It’s fascinating to see signs of new growth as we are nearly at the end of autumn and winter will be here soon.

Coloured purple

Easter has come and gone. We are at the time of the year (here in Australia ), when seedlings are going in for winter plantings. The days are so pleasant and mild that being out in the garden is a joy.

Seedlings just before most were potted on into bigger tunes.

The colours of the season are regal – Purple Sicilian cauliflower, purple broccoli and Golden Detroit beetroot.  There are even spring onions that offer to produce purple bulbs. Who knew?

The beetroot are a “fingers crossed” crop. Will the seedlings grow quickly enough to establish themselves before the cold weather sets in?

Purplette Spring onions

Purplette Spring Onions, Mammoth Snow Peas

Our mainstay plants for early spring, the broadbeans, haven’t quite made it into the ground yet. There’s time for that.

The big autumn show is just starting. A few days ago, our first saffron bulb poked its leaves out of the ground. We have dug them all up again,  and planted the bulbs in a new bed. We hope for more flowers than we have had in recent times. We’ll see.

A recycled photo from our 2021 saffron harvest

Just now, I looked back over the blog archive and see that hoping for more saffron flowers has become my annual refrain.

We have taken some time off to drive interstate and visit the southern borders of Australia, along the Great Ocean Road of Victoria.

Looking west along the Victorian coast

There are new people to meet, a group of artists across a range of artistic disciplines.

Australian Walking Artists gathering on Gadubanud country

Richard, a traditional custodian of the Gadubanud country, has been sharing the colours of the country and many stories about the land. It is a time of new learning and sharing.

Saltbush berries (the hot pink) and yellow ochre)

Before we left on this trip, I finished our latest garden video. Here is the link so you can see what we’ve been doing in the garden.

Falling behind!

Yikes we have just entered Autumn and I haven’t posted since December. 

In short it’s been a big summer for tomatoes and zucchinis. We’ve picked over 100 zucchinis so far, and still they come.😁 One way we are keeping them for future use is to cut them in half, bake them until soft and then freeze them to make zucchini soup at a future date.

Just 1 of 5 baskets of tomatoes being turned into passata.

We’ve also been making and freezing basil pesto. Our basil plants have been super productive this year. Just cut back on the amount of cheese you add when preparing the pesto for freezing. You can add it back in when you use your pesto in the future.

Looking forward, I  have just bought some new seedlings of cauliflower, snow peas and spring onions that need to go into the ground.

New seedlings from the autumn garden.

Seeds, some for now,  some for later in the year.

I also bought some seeds from the Canberra Seed Savers .I’ll have to be patient for the corn planting, but the carrots and beetroot can go in now.

In case you missed it, our latest Two Feral Gardeners videos on the garden in February is now out. https://youtu.be/kM8hk-QSKoA?si=IsPmD0p1Wqvw9wSV

Christmas 2023

For those of you ‘new’ to our posts, every year Christmas in Canberra is celebrated with the “decoration of the sheep”, a local landmark in the southern part of our city.

Sadly the wonderful woman who started this wonderful tradition passed away last year. We were really thrilled to see her family continue the celebration in 2023!

And one photo from us, setting a new trend – a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo pine tree topper!

Making new beds

At last, we have finally started making new garden beds! If you haven’t read about our plans, this post may help you out.

A new hope …

At present this one has beetroot, cos lettuce and leeks planted in it. The remaining area will be planted to tomatoes. You can see the seedlings sitting ready to go – yes there are way too many for only this bed. We will spread the others around the garden and save some for friends. As for the strategically placed pots, they have been put there so the garden hose doesn’t drag across the bed. Those concrete pots, in particular, are really heavy.

Down in one of our existing beds we have planted corn and some more leeks.

Of course getting a load of mushroom compost and cow manure is helping us along. We are developing many muscles shifting it all!

Water, Wasabi and Wild Foods

I have just finished our latest video https://youtu.be/-ItGiOlPmww about our veggie gardening life and sharing our experiences trying to grow wasabi – the good news is we seem to have finally got it worked out!

We are also covering some simple ways of dealing with soils that aren’t absorbing water properly (hydrophobia) and we even get a flash back to our trip to Spain in the middle of the year when we got to taste wild Rock Samphire, growing on the coast of Galicia.

As it is spring in Australia we are doing a lot of other gardening, mainly moving lots of compost and cow manure as we finally have had the time to start working on new garden beds, as part of our back yard makeover. There are so many things to do!

As you can see in the back of the photo above our broad beans are growing really well. We have had our first feed of them and also some purple podded peas in a stir fry this week.

There is lots more to share including this years tomato seedlings, which are growing away strongly. I’m trying a, new to me, blue tomato called Blue Beauty. I hope it tastes as good as it looks. We also have high hopes of our Padron chilli plants and the range of salad greens we also have coming along.

I hope your gardening is going well too!

In the September Garden

It’s spring in Australia and we have just returned from a long overseas visit, which meant our garden was more or less left to It’s own devices while we were away.

Friends looking after the house and garden reported harvesting a steady stream of leafy green vegetables, apart from that they only watered the garden for us. for us.

I have made a video for our YouTube channel looking at where we are now with the garden, particularly dealing with the weeds that are growing through the woodchip mulch we have been using to smoother our own lawn. I hope you enjoy it!

Here is the link to the video.

Harlequin Bugs

The qualms began when I started to lay out the 138 Harlequin Bugs (Dindymus versicolor), a native Australian insect as I later discovered, on the paper towelling. I had successfully drowned them in a bucket of soapy water earlier in the morning* (see the update at the end of the post) and was curious to know exactly how many I had killed.

The mornings work capturing Harlequin bugs

The general consensus is that they are a pest in the garden, I ‘knew’ this too. But, as I prodded the little bodies into rows for counting I started to ask myself what I really did know about them. Why were they there, what do they feed on (apart from my tomatoes) and what predator was I denying a meal to by killing them?

A number of these questions, were answered in part, in a very useful article written by Ben Courtice on his blog as the river runs by. It made me think about the mallow plants and several other species of plant that are a common food source, that grow in our garden. Maybe we need to be a bit more conscientious about removing those plants.

Mallow plants which the bugs usual food

There are also suggestions that Harlequin bugs may be eaten by preying mantises – I’m glad I spotted a mantis egg capsule the other day. Unfortunately for us, I also read that Harlequin bugs like to overwinter under bark. Well, deciding to spread that 5 cubic metres of pine bark to suppress our un-wanted couch lawn is starting to look like not such a good decision!

A praying Mantis egg capsule

Like so much in garden ecology (or any ecology), there is no one right answer, to doing anything. I read recently that finding a balance is not so much about weighing up one side or the other, rather it is a dance where balance is found in a series of movements between many positions.

Harlequin bugs sheltering behind my rain gauge

I may not fully regret the days actions, apart from accidently killing a ladybird nymph – generally thought of as a ‘good’ predator in the garden, but in future I will do a bit more exploration before I blithely wipe out 139 souls.

*After writing this post I walked out to the kitchen and lo and behold, THE BUGS WERE UP AND WALKING AROUND! Turns out that the soapy water didn’t kill the nymphs, so perhaps next time I have to do as suggested and drown them in detergent. 🙃😬

A new hope …

Since the loss of our chickens we have been thinking about how we might rejuvenate our garden.

We are still nutting out the details, but we do want you to join us on our journey. So please follow along with us!