Vegie Gardening (again)
Despite the fact that it has been a very hot summer, we got a good lot of rain early in the season. Taken in conjunction with a slow leak in our nearby, snake-infested dam has meant that the vegetable garden is producing bigtime. (It is also of course producing a motza of weeds which Frances is just keeping on top of. Compost shortage is never an issue by the end of Summer.)
To enable some supplementary watering of various things I dug the first half of our spud crop today. It was quite impressive to get 20Kgs of nice ovoids (and a few deviants). They have been temporarily stored in plastic racks to dry off before long term storage. Of course, being a cheapskate I have also gathered in as much as I can of the straw we use to hummock the plants: some of this stuff will get applied for the third year in a row next year.
The images above are from the second digging. This resulted in a further 23+ kgs of spuds. The '+' reflects the omission of the ones that I speared during harvest from the weigh-in. They were sent directly to the kitchen and many of them have already been transformed into chips! Yummo! You will also notice, in the RH image, a sack: last year I purchased 3 sacks @ $5 a pop. This year I found a dozen sacks in the Bungendore tip @$0!
We currently have excellent crops of capsicums (banana and conventional) and hot chillies. These are shown above. The latter are particularly useful since I use hot chillies in my usual bread recipe. (A parenthesis: I conversed about bread with a check-out chick at Woolies recently and she reckoned putting a lump of cheese in bread is the way to go- watch this space.)
For the first time ever we seem to have a good lot of flowers on our aubergines, the zucchinis and cucumbers are doing the right thing and the pumpkins look to be striving (as usual) for world domination. Corn is going well, and while not quite "as high as an elephants eye" will keep our barbecue happy for several evenings.
Fruit is also happening. We are getting an excellent crop of plums - I think some readers of this will already be flinching when they see Frances or I approach with a bulging plastic bag. This is attributable to severe pruning and subsequent netting of the trees. Apples are far from ready yet, but look to be 
offering a good supply of fruit in due course. Strawberries continue onwards and the raspberries are re-entering the fray with the Autumn crop. It is also likely that we will get a good crop of grapes: at present this is indicated by the vines busting out of
the netting.
The tomatoes are beginning to hit their straps in a large way. We have a good mixture of colours and the taste is proving to be excellent. As someone said, with many vegs the taste difference between shop and grown isn't great , but with tomatoes it is an order of magnitude bettert grow your own.
When I orginally set up this post I said "When Blogger and Firefox decide to talk to each other I will bang a few suitable pictures up here. That didn't seem to happen so I went with the Dark Side and used IE! Shlock horror!" Since then the desired conversation has happened so Mr Gates is back in his box!
To enable some supplementary watering of various things I dug the first half of our spud crop today. It was quite impressive to get 20Kgs of nice ovoids (and a few deviants). They have been temporarily stored in plastic racks to dry off before long term storage. Of course, being a cheapskate I have also gathered in as much as I can of the straw we use to hummock the plants: some of this stuff will get applied for the third year in a row next year.
The images above are from the second digging. This resulted in a further 23+ kgs of spuds. The '+' reflects the omission of the ones that I speared during harvest from the weigh-in. They were sent directly to the kitchen and many of them have already been transformed into chips! Yummo! You will also notice, in the RH image, a sack: last year I purchased 3 sacks @ $5 a pop. This year I found a dozen sacks in the Bungendore tip @$0!
We currently have excellent crops of capsicums (banana and conventional) and hot chillies. These are shown above. The latter are particularly useful since I use hot chillies in my usual bread recipe. (A parenthesis: I conversed about bread with a check-out chick at Woolies recently and she reckoned putting a lump of cheese in bread is the way to go- watch this space.)
For the first time ever we seem to have a good lot of flowers on our aubergines, the zucchinis and cucumbers are doing the right thing and the pumpkins look to be striving (as usual) for world domination. Corn is going well, and while not quite "as high as an elephants eye" will keep our barbecue happy for several evenings.
Fruit is also happening. We are getting an excellent crop of plums - I think some readers of this will already be flinching when they see Frances or I approach with a bulging plastic bag. This is attributable to severe pruning and subsequent netting of the trees. Apples are far from ready yet, but look to be 
offering a good supply of fruit in due course. Strawberries continue onwards and the raspberries are re-entering the fray with the Autumn crop. It is also likely that we will get a good crop of grapes: at present this is indicated by the vines busting out of
the netting.The tomatoes are beginning to hit their straps in a large way. We have a good mixture of colours and the taste is proving to be excellent. As someone said, with many vegs the taste difference between shop and grown isn't great , but with tomatoes it is an order of magnitude bettert grow your own.
When I orginally set up this post I said "When Blogger and Firefox decide to talk to each other I will bang a few suitable pictures up here. That didn't seem to happen so I went with the Dark Side and used IE! Shlock horror!" Since then the desired conversation has happened so Mr Gates is back in his box!
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