A Lucky Story

NB the photos load onto the page in the opposite order to the order that I load them. It's not my fault the photos are backward compared to the story!!

For my dear friend Lucky, who is a self-confessed rhubard (her keyboard spells it like that - the keyboard has a virus that mis-spells things on purpose!) killer, will be crying with envy in her skinny Coke when shee sees "rhubarb alley"(photo #3). I can't remember exactly how many, there's well over a dozen rhubarb plants here, along the left-hand side of the sawdust path. I think I originally planted out 21 plants that had been divided up from 6 or 8 older plants, so I really didn't expect them all to survive. Together with the blackberries(photo #2) (the camera wanted to focus on the fencepost rather than the fruit, sorry) that are growing on the side fenceline, and the apples (photo #1) (this shot is of the Red Delicious apple tree) the rhubarb contributes to a fruity feast. In fact, a recent lunch consisted of cucumber-on-toast followed by stewed apple+rhubarb+blackberries with homemade soy icecream. All the fresh food came out of my garden, what a great feeling!

Coat of many colours for the house

It's done - well, done enough to look good from this angle, anyway! We haven't finished blocking in around the front, and I really don't like the "Claypot" i.e. orange paint. It was meant to be a reddish-orange-terracotta colour. Oops. I'm considering whether to take the remainder back to the hardware shop and try re-tinting what's left. Or maybe I'll just paint the orange bits white? Too hard basket for the moment, I'm afraid. The garden is looking lush though, I picked 22 apple cucumbers yesterday. So it's cucumber on toast for breakfast, cucumber sandwiches for lunch, and meat-and-salad (mostly cucumber!) for dinner. You can see the top of the compost tumbler amongst the golden nugget pumpkin jungle, it hasn't moved position from the earlier photo.

Self-sown cucurbit = ?

The rambling cucurbit vine that's providing some welcome shade for the chooks in chookhouse #2, is a self-sown unknown. It's doing its best to overwhelm the Mary Washington asparagus to the rear of the righthand bed, and the younger Purple Pride asparagus behind the steel fence post is barely identifiable.

BTW, the asparagus to the left of the path is UC157. Both it and the purple varieties will be old enough to pick next spring, all being well. Mary Washington just finished her first season's harvest. Yum!

Lush abundance

Instead of working on more "important" things, I took the digicam for a walk around the garden late this afternoon. I couldn't quite get the same angle because I had been standing on the back of the ute when I took the 8th Dec photos. The greenery and mulch predominate today, whereas the neat edging and the paths were the main features 2 months ago.

At harvest stage are: Blue Lake and Purple King beans, red cabbage, radish (yuk! I grow them to sell), rhubarb (ditto radish comment), apple cucumbers, rocket, onions (although they're buried under the self-seeded tomatoes and I keep forgetting they're there!), gold zucchinis, capsicums, and herbs including chives, curly parsley, thyme, oregano, salad burnet, italian parsley, mint, rosemary. It won't be long till I'll be picking sugarloaf cabbage, silverbeet, tomatoes by the score, golden nugget pumpkins, and a few carrots that actually did what my friend Trudy said they would when she told me to plant my carrot seed with the radish seed for better germination. And later still will be purple carrots (the best germination rate I've had for any carrots - and they didn't have radishes to nurture them), turnips, beetroot, blackjack zucchini, giant russian cucumbers (... can't remember what other cucurbits I planted in that bed), potatoes, peas, sweet corn, banana jumbo pumpkins, broccoli, cauliflowers, jerusalem artichokes (if I'm dying of starvation, or want to sell them!), maybe even some eggplants, although they'll probably be tiny if they ever get growing.

And it still feels like I haven't planted enough, even when I walk around the fruit and vegie shop thinking "I don't need that, there's some in the garden" and realise that the garden is saving me between $10-$20 a week.

Oh, and I could be on the verge of a bumper apple crop. Both red delicious and jonathons are heavily laden. Unfortunately, they all seem to have visitors - codling moth. They stew up well when they're still a bit green, before the moths totally ruin the fruit, I'm told.