Mushroom Progress

My mushroom box has kept me very excited over the last few weeks. I finally harvested the first 'flush' of mushrooms the other day and am now waiting for the next flush to come through. I've been so impressed by the Swiss brown mushroom box that I've bought another box from a local mushroom farmer that went along to the Mt Eliza Farmer's Market.

My Composting Solution

For the past month Dan and I have been putting out composting system to use. Since doing so we've cut our rubbish each week from 1.5 big garbage bags to only half a bag! We are now only throwing out non compostable items such as plastic and recycling paper, cardboard and metal.

Worm and Compost Buckets:

Our solution has 3 parts:

• The Worm Farm: All vegetable scraps excluding citrus, onions and garlic get fed to the worms. I generally feed the worms once a week and blend all their food up so its nice and mushy for them. The also get feed a 'fattener' once a week made up of chicken layer pellets, corn flour, powdered milk, agricultural lime and bran.

• Bokashi Bucket: Everything that can't be feed to the worms get put in the bokashi bucket, including small scraps of meat. This method ferments the food making it okay to put in the outside composter.
• The outside composter: This gets all the garden scraps plus the fermented bokashi bucket contents.

Garden Update

The weather's been horrible the last couple of weeks and today it was finally sunny so I decided to take some pictures of whats been happening in the garden. Everything is growing really slowly at the moment because of the lack of light so there's not much to show.

We've already picked 2 snow peas and there's 3 developing at the moment, very exciting! The newest plantings of dwarf snow peas are taking a lot longer than the first two, but they are getting there.

The two veggie beds with clever clover have started sprouting. They will eventually be dug throw to add nutrients to the soil.

The lettuce in the tub is coming along nicely. As you can see Mum helped me plant the rosemary and thyme along the side ally way.

Snow Peas

I've got three tubs of dwarf snow peas growing at the moment; they're all at different stages so I don't harvest them all at once! One of the tubs has started to flower and the other two are still growing. The packet said the peas would only get to 60cm so I made a tipi out of 1m stakes. The little buggers decided they wanted to expand there from limitation and grow bigger than 60cm so I've had to build a make shift cage around them to support them, it doesn't look pretty but its working for now. I've revised my tipi/cage configuration for the newest set of seedlings.

Mushrooms!

I was the garden shop the other day and stumbled across these mushroom boxes. There were two types too choose from: Shiitake and Swiss Brown mushrooms. The Shiitake mushrooms grown along a piece of wood which wouldn't be practical for my garage as the cats like to climb and explore over everything. The Swiss brown mushrooms grow in a box which is much more suited to my needs so i deiced to try that one out.

Above are the pictures of the Mushroom kit. When you open up the box there is a bag of brown castings which you add water to and then spread over the white web-like surface of the compost in the box. That's all there is to it. It's kept in a cool draft free spot out of the light and sprayed to keep moist. The instructions say you should get mushrooms in 2 to 3 weeks, fingers crossed and I'll keep you posted.

Garden Face Lift

When Dan and I first moved into this house 9 months ago the majority of the garden was taken over by 8 big coastal rosemary shrubs. They were taken out when we had to replace the back fence and because I didn't do anything with the vacant land straight away the weeds took over. We've been blessed with the very annoying Sour Sob which is very hard to get rid of and continues to re-appear. Over the last week when the weather has been surprisingly good Dan and I dug out every sour sob by hand and then placed wet newspaper down and 10cm of mulch on top of that. Hopefully this will smother the weeds and we won't see them again, fingers crossed.

 To divide the space up we've put 3 square meter veggie patches in. As its half way through winter and there isn't much we can plant in them that will be ready to harvest in time to plant the summer veggie crops. To make sure the weeds don't take over in the empty beds I've sewn some clever clover seeds that will be dug through just before we plant the spring crops. Clever clover acts as a green manure adding nitrogen to the soil. The middle patch has 10 golden shallots and 10 red shallots in it which will be ready around December.

Down the side of the fence in between the garage is a bit of a dead spot at the moment, there were agapanthus there but they didn't make it through the fence replacement. I've just mulched it for the mean time until mum comes down to help me choose shade loving plants to go there as it doesn't get any sun.