The Vegging Gardener

In the dying days of spring

2011-11-14T20:36:00.001+11:00

The beans / snow pea bed is off and running. The corn / pumpkin bed is... well you probably can't even tell its a corn / pumpkin bed I had a big win last year accidentally companioning tomatoes with carrot. So I'm trying the same technique, with added basil, on capsicum this year. Spanish onion, being picked as needed As are the leeks Brown onion coming along Building up a nice

Smallest. Egg. Ever.

2011-11-12T21:15:00.000+11:00

Look at this. Look at it. Honest to god, its got to be the smallest chicken egg ever. What on earth do you do with an egg this small? I reckon it'd make an omelet about the size of a fifty-cent piece. Or some french bite-of-toast? One tenth of a muffin, if I added a pinch of flour and a smear of butter?

The spring orange festival

2011-09-29T21:44:00.000+10:00

What I really like about oranges is that they keep forever on the tree. And that's also the reason why we always get to spring and have to quickly consume bucket loads of oranges to make way for the succession of fruit the September sea of blossom heralds. It's not that we haven't been using them through the year - its just that we seem to get enough fruit off these two small trees to justify

Final score on the carrots and parsnip

2011-09-24T19:46:00.000+10:00

Its a bit of a mixed bag from the carrot / parsnip patch today. I pulled all the carrots (since they keep really well) and found a variety of shapes and sizes - from baby to baseball-bat. A decent crop though, all very usable specimens - about a month's worth, I'd say. Sadly some of the parsnips were totally forked, which not only makes them harder to use in the kitchen, but extracting them from

The many faces of broccoli

2011-09-23T20:36:00.001+10:00

Here on the plot, Broccoli is much much more than a one hit wonder. No, it goes on to churn out three more hits I can think of before we hop off the bandwagon and move on to the next plant of the moment. So for the time being, it more than earns its keep in what is very high value property - a good sunny bed in my winter garden through to spring - because it doesn't end once I behead the main

Pumpkin in interesting places

2011-09-18T14:29:00.000+10:00

You probably thought I was joking when I said it. But you should know me better than that by now. I really am going to grow pumpkins on the car-port roof. To the right we have my three exploratory pumpkin seedlings - over the next few months I'm going to train these up the posts, and let them go nuts on the new frontier. There are so many reasons why this is a good idea. First of all - Its a

Farewell, snow peas

2011-09-15T21:05:00.000+10:00

Death-brown adds such a depth to the garden. At the heart of any good pitch for another crazy garden idea is a decent crop of snow pea. The wife loves the snow pea. So after kilo upon kilo, month after month since autumn, I sadly called it a day on my winter snow peas yesterday afternoon. I imagine you can see why, the plant only looks marginally better than it would if you'd taken to it with

Consistency and Obstination

2011-09-15T14:22:00.000+10:00

Avid followers of my garden would know that there's only about one thing that I do with any consistency on the plot - and that's miss the start of spring. With months to co-ordinate and prepare my attack, something always seems to happen in the middle of August and, oh look. It's half way through September and I don't have a single seed in the ground. I've had a whole host of excuses over the

My new blank canvas

2011-09-13T17:50:00.000+10:00

I'm getting so good at finishing projects, you might even start to think its becoming a habit. And I didn't even start this one all that long ago. Now to plant it out...

Finishing some "unfinished"

2011-08-19T19:45:00.000+10:00

If there's one thing the wife absolutely loves, its got to be the way the yard is littered with half finished projects. Its not just because it gives it an abstract, new age feel, or because the ironing got done. I figure it could have something to do with my euphemistic interpretation of the way her face contorts when I suggest starting another something new. But no matter how much it makes her

Spring?

2011-08-18T17:46:00.000+10:00

The oranges think so. The lemon thinks so. The plums definitely think so. The apples... Nah. Stuff ya'.

By Rognvald's Mattock!

2011-08-15T21:11:00.000+10:00

Anyone over the age of four will tell you that you can't use grass in a salad. And since I am reminded daily that we're currently growing a couple of under-four-year-olds, I thought it an opportune time to reclaim a bit more of the lawn before those few extra sets of eyes join the wife, watching suspiciously whenever I disappear into the yard with a mattock. In any case, I'm going to be leaving

Getting cold feet

2011-08-13T16:13:00.000+10:00

More often that not, its dark when I leave the house over the colder months. When I arrive home its darker. Some nights I still go out to see the plot, when the need is most great. But I'm almost never there in the mornings. It's hard enough getting out of bed, let alone venturing that one step colder. For me, the coming of Winter marks the time where the otherwise steady, stable relationship I

Taming of the lemongrass

2011-06-26T22:01:00.000+10:00

About twelve months ago, a good friend of mine brought round a pot of lemongrass he'd been growing on his apartment balcony. Sadly his balcony wasn't the most sunny location on the block, and not for lack of effort, what arrived on my doorstep was barely recognisable. With the hope it'd see better days here on the plot, we settled a blade and half worth of lemon grass into my herb garden with the

Parenthood Fail

2011-05-23T22:02:00.000+10:00

You could reason this is a chicken's way of telling you that you just don't visit as much as you used to. But don't give them that much credit.

Easy like Tuesday morning

2011-04-05T19:51:00.000+10:00

While you were in bed this morning, listening to the rain on the roof and wishing it was the weekend, I was outside doing things anyone else would be doing on the weekend. Of course that meant I was also getting wet, but for those thirty minutes I felt like a free man... before Tuesday well and truly set in. But before you feel the need to launch into a debate about who was the winner and the

Beans, Beans, Snow Peas

2011-04-03T21:32:00.000+10:00

Not bad, them chickens.

2011-03-30T21:07:00.000+11:00

Potted Mango

2011-03-28T20:24:00.000+11:00

A few years back, my sister kindly gifted me a Bowen mango tree for Christmas. I remember being quite perplexed by it - not knowing exactly where I'd put it. If you don't know, the Bowen is a variety of mango you'd regularly see in the tropics growing to a size that would put Jack's Beanstalk to shame. Big trees mean deep roots, so the most compelling showstopper was that my yard is a light

Slug fortifications

2011-03-27T18:51:00.001+11:00

If you were ever a kid, chances are at some point or another you've built, modified, and defended a fort. You'll have laughed. You'll have cried. Sometimes because your mum wanted the cushions back. Sometimes because your brother turned your fairy castle into one. And sometimes because your wife just didn't share your enthusiasm about those ramparts you're building in the backyard. For the record

Preparing for beans

2011-03-08T06:54:00.000+11:00

So it was a less than spectacular summer. Time to move on. This week I'm getting things ready for autumn crops, and top of the list is beans. The wife loves beans, and is by far one of the worst garden pests when it comes to getting them to the table - because they rarely make it much further from the vine than her mouth. Luckily, her one-for-the-pot-one-for-me attitude rarely causes a problem

This year's champion: Jalapenos

2011-03-04T06:55:00.000+11:00

Every season you get winners and losers. And sometimes you get champions. By that, I mean your freezer is full of them. You eat them in every meal. Your friends are sick of you trying to offload the excess glut onto them. Even the chickens won't touch them any more. If you've ever grown food at home, you know what I'm talking about. Its happened to you. You say, plant a single cucumber and

One giant leap for poultry-kind

2011-02-28T20:56:00.000+11:00

For the first time in nearly twelve months, the back left corner of the plot has started to produce something on a regular basis other than chicken shit. Granted chicken shit is extremely useful to the home gardener, but it just doesn't make an omelet the way you'd like. Usually of late I've found myself writing about maximums - but in a turn of events this week, I'd like to introduce you to

Box of chicken

2011-01-16T22:10:00.000+11:00

So yesterday, I bought a box of chicken. How this differs from your average pack of white wings sweet chili tenders is that this box of chicken was much larger, less frozen, moving and occasionally making noises. What can I say, I'm not your average kind of guy. I loaded the box into the car for an obligatory game of corners. Obligatory, because chickens have no sense in how to deal with motion

Mouldy pumpkin leaf salad with a hint of dairy

2011-01-14T21:03:00.000+11:00

A few sad-looking stragglers of last year's crop. I never used to like pumpkin very much at all. It was one of those childhood things where the taste didn't really come into measure - it was just entirely too orange and squishy-looking to be something that I would consider edible food. When the folks somehow managed to dodge swatting hands and fly the aeroplane through, it only seemed to