July 2012: Garden goings on

I've been thinking recently that I haven't written about the garden much lately, so I'm going to try to post once a month on what's going on in the garden. I'll just grab the camera and walk around taking pictures of things which grab my attention. Hopefully over time you'll get to know the garden a bit more and see its ups and downs.

Winter is here and it's the best time for us to make compost. This is because we can get much more scraps from the vege shops and it's cooler and easier to do the hard yakka that turning compost is. My plan is to make compost every 5 weeks in the cooler months from now on. It will give me between 4-6 turns of the first batch before I need to leave it to rest and start turning the next batch. Then I'll have another 5 weeks to use up the mature lot before I do the next batch. This load is about a third dry leaves I raked up at work. It has halved in size after 5 days so it may end up being quite small, but the leaves will break down to quality humus with great water holding capacity.

This is Quin's patch. We had a nightmare with this patch (poor germination, pests) so we turned it over to Quin. He's done a great job, with flowers, spinach, peas, lettuce and brocoli all doing well.

Beets and lettuce, with onions and garlic in the background.

The apple trees still haven't lost their leaves and may not. Sabrina Hahn says rip all the leaves off if this happens, but I don't have the heart or energy. If you're wondering what all the string is for I'm training the trees. This involves spreading the branches to achieve the right angle and pruning to allow sun and air to penetrate the crown. I love it, it satisfies my need for control in a healthy way I think!

The broad beans are up. I love them, Amy's not so keen. Old inner tubes make good supports for these.

We have a decent crop of Valencia oranges which should ripen in a few months. Hopefully I can keep on top of the fruit fly this year.

This straggly looking vine is a boysenberry. I've got on top of a bad infestation of scale and this should bear beautiful berries in summer. Unlike our Loganberry which died last year, it unfortunately has really nasty thorns. On second thoughts maybe this is a good thing, I might be able to eat a few before Quin gets them all...

Many of the productive trees are bear branched now. This is the almond tree (beautiful branch structure don't you think?).

Banana disaster! Amy kept telling me we should start harvesting the bananas, but no I told her it was too cold for them to ripen. Then I looked under the bunch bag and saw that over half the bunch of 150 were over ripe and splitting. This will teach me to listen to my woman more often. We've given some away, frozen some and banana and chop chip cake is on the menu, yum.

There aren't many flowers out the front, but the ones that are there are stunning. Here's a Banksia menziesii and Hakea laurinia.

 

The luffas are finally ripe (ish). They would be a lot easier to peel if they were drier but we can't wait to pull down the vine to get some more light into the back of the house. I think we got about a dozen this year. Amy's put them in the sun oven to dry out a bit and the plan is to use them in soap and as sponges.

That's all for now folks.