The Best Christmas Present Ever...

This year I got a my first tomato of the season off my yellow cherry tomato tumbler plant for Christmas, couldn't of thought of anything better!

Summer has arrived

The garden is coming along nicely at the moment with lots of growth and very exciting things happening.

One of the veggie beds that has tomatoes and the mammoth zucchini is going well. The parsley is strong and healthy and I'm trying to grow lemon grass again, hopefully it will go better this year then in past years.  

The rocket plants are getting bigger and I have my first zucchini flower! The Pumpkin is going better since I feed it with a top dressing of aged manure.

The Spacemaster cucumber has the beginnings of fruit on them. The lemon and lime trees all have healthy buds on them and the beans are flowering.

The mint I planted in the garden is starting to spread out just like I wanted and the chocolate mint in a re-purposed cooking pot is doing well. The mini mama capsicums and jalapeno chilli are strong and healthy but neither have turned red yet.

Shallots

This week I pulled up the shallots that I planted back in June. I lost one third of them to aphids that I tried to get rid of with water jets, soap spray and tomato leaf spray; but nothing helped. I'm very happy with the harvest I got from the rest of them though. I originally planted 10 white shallots and 10 red shallots and I've now got 40 in total! It could have been bigger but doubling my original output is still pretty good.

I wasn't entirely sure when I was supposed to harvest them as I read two conflicting times; before flowering and after the leaves had died and dried up. Half of them were about to flower and none of them looked like drying up any time soon. After pondering for 2 days I decided to pull them up even though the leaves hadn't dried up. They've been in the garage for a week now; and they look fine so I think I did the right thing.