Self care by growing a garden

Oooo @Former-Member sounds lovely - I love home grown veggies !!

@Shaz51 Inpatients are very pretty 🌱 xx

@Sophie1, we can get late frosts here, so I haven't planted out mine yet. We're due for a 3 degree night later this week, but am thinking once that one's safely past, I might start planting out. First potato plants are already looking healthy, and I'm in the process of planting more.
I've got seedling capsicums, assorted tomatoes, cape gooseberries, tomatillos. Cucumber, pumpkin, rockmelon, zucchini and bean seedlings are just coming up in the greenhouse, and I planted seeds for eggplants, okra and more capsicums yesterday. Waiting for parsnip, cucamelon and beetroot seed I planted a couple of weeks ago to come up, hoping they do... and I've got other vegs, herbs and flower seeds I want to plant too. 🙂

Only problemo... I haven't got enough beds ready yet.... 😛 I maybe planting some by the method of digging a pot-sized hole among remanent weeds and filling it in with decent soil, and if that's not enough, I might try out the straw bale method I posted about a week or two ago.

I'm not big on grass... I would honestly be very happy if the entire yard was garden beds.

Was thinking now that the Melbourne Cup had been run it would soon be all systems go in your garden @Smc . Do you have any spare cardboard you could much around with if you go for the spot in the remnant weed method?

Forgot about some beetroot seed I have, might see about putting that in. Do you soak yours before planting @Smc @SJT63 ?

Picked up a roma tomato seedling yesterday, our other two Tommies are cherry varieties so thought a regular size fruit might be desirable.

We don't do full size toms here in summer as there's too many fruit fly, some beans finishing up but the snake beans for summer are about to take up the baton. No more peas now until after easter.

Pumpkins fruit all year as do the self-seeded cherry toms that pop up all over the place.The strawberries never stop either. It's too hot for lettuce so we grow something called "dutch corn salad" which doesn't seem to mind the humidity and is a great substitute. Zucchini just starting their march, no flowers yet.

Onions nearly finished, still going on the carrots, chillis in flower, caps about 6" high, 1st of the 3 beds of corn will harvest in about 2 weeks I think. Cucumber just about to start climbing the trellis as is the Ceylon Spinach self seeded from last year. 1/2 a bed of mixed asian greens - will sow 1/2 beds every 4 to 6 weeks for some months now until the weather cools down enough for the brassicas again. We haven't done beetroot in the summer before, but have a couple of rows in to see if they will be ok.

Mr does all the gardening, I just do the washing, trimming, bottling, freezing, drying and cooking. It takes all weekend somtimes so I haven't kept up with the soap making - had to buy some laundry liquid for the first time this year a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, the garden keeps him out of my way and gives him a real sense of contributing. It's great.

🙂 Sounds like a very busy and fruitful garden @SJT63.

I've never soaked beetroot seed, it's come up anyway, but possibly soaking would help speed it along?

I put in seeds for some more melon varieties today- one rockmelon, two watermelons, all types that are meant to grow well in cold climates, so here's hoping. Also bought some Spaghetti Squash seeds today, so they went in. And I did some planting out. A few flowery perennials, and a few leeks. Really "a few"- I tucked six into a small vacant patch. So there's still most of the punnet to go.

@Smc Your garden sounds amazing - I ran out of garden beds too and squeezed a tomoatao next to a bush where it shouldn't be lol

New leaf unfurling

@Sophie1, in all honesty, most of my garden looks a mess. But it's a productive mess, and I'm hoping to make it more so this year than it's been for a while. (More productive... not more messy. 😛 )

I've had a few years lately when I haven't had "the heart" to get much done. Too burnt out. And too many times when I've been away at my parents house at the times when I really needed to be preparing and planting garden beds. But this year, "stay at home" has meant we've had less pressure on us, and it's feeling great getting stuck into the garden in a big way.

Years ago, I was growing a lot of our fruit and vegs. With a mind to the unpredictability of life, I put a lot of perennial and self seeding food plants in, along with a lot of tough perennial ornamentals and flowering bulbs and self seeders. These have kept ticking along, producing fruit, herbs, flowers and a small but useful range of veggies, when I had little choice but to let the rest go, and ask Hubby to slash down the weeds. Sometimes I've been so down that seeing the "toughies" in full flower made me feel like crying, as if my emotions didn't know how to go towards happiness anymore so just amplified the sad instead....

This year, I'm glad to say that I'm finding the garden a genuine pleasure. 🙂 So to that end, I've bought some more seeds today... and some more protective wire baskets to keep the rats from raiding them!


Rodent proof seedlings. 🙂