Colour Hunt

Over the last two weeks my days have all started the same; I go outside in a search for colour. Generally I'm disappointed but the last two days have been promising. I've been waiting for all my beautiful green veggies to turn colour so I pick & eat them! I haven't had much produce from the garden beside my green, purple and butter beans and I'm itching for a big bowl of tomatoes!

My grosse lissie tomatoes are all still green, the tigerella tomatoes are almost ready and the pumpkin still has a long way to go.

The Jalapeno and Standard chillies are still green but the capsicum's are starting to turn.

Mum & I in the Garden

New Years Harvest

2012 has arrived nicely with my first reasonably sized harvest.  I picked some Green & Butter Beans, Spacemaster Cucumber, Costata Zucchini, Strawberries, Yellow Tumbling Tomatoes & Mini Mama Capsicum this morning. I also have my first Wrinkled Butternut Pumpkin forming and some more cucumbers and zucchinis.

Me standing next to the pumpkin ladder.

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.

Summer's almost here!

It felt like summer had already arrived yesterday with the sun shiny brightly and I got burnt for the first time this year! The garden is shaping up nicely with almost all of the summer veggies in with a little more space for more.

The garden is looking good with the big veggie bed exploding with red & baby cos lettuce, spinach and parsley.

Unfortunately the majority of my tomato seedlings went yellow and died, but I did manage to save the Tigerella and San Marzano seedlings and they're now in the ground. I bought some more tomatoes to fill the space where my seedlings should have gone; all up I've planted 10 tomato plants: 7 in the veggie beds and 3 in tubs. The tomatoes that are in the ground now are:
Cherry Varieties: Beams Yellow Pear, Wapsipinicon Peach, Tomatoberry, Sweetbite and Tumbling Yellow (which only grows to 40cm tall the tomatoes 'tumble' off the plant)
Standard Varieties: Tigerella, San Marzano, Grosse Lisse and Apollo

Out of the seedlings I stared earlier in the year I've planted out the wrinkled butternut pumpkin, spacemaster cucumber, costata zucchini, lemon basil, sweet basil, Thai basil and wild rocket. 

Wheel Barrow with nasturtiums and marigolds in flower, the pumpkin ladder and costata zucchini seedlings

I've also planted a  fire chilli (left), sweet mama capsicum (middle), mini mama capsicum (right) as well as a  jalapeno chilli and.sweet chocolate capsicum,

Pray Mantis