Autumn/Winter Garden End of May 2012

Just got back from my veggie patch. It's is freezing out there today! I've been looking out over my patch for a few weeks but with all the rain & cold weather, today was the first time I'd been down there for a while. I trained a few pea plants up their trellis that had fallen flat on the floor & I ate my first snow pea! Yum, nothing like home grown veggies from your own plant.

Harvested some spinach to go in a salad today & some parsley to go in a bechamel sauce for a lasagna. Here are a few photos of how everything is looking now.

My parsley & spinach harvest.

Snow peas climbing slowly.

Whoever was eating the spinach seemed to have stopped, so it's growing once again. Might be too cold for spinach stealing at the moment.

Here's a nice little silver beet plant. I have no idea why this plant is green & all the other silver beet are red?? They came from the same seed packet. If you know, please let me know.

Little silver beet plants. Slow growing.

Parsley & garlic much the same.

The sugar snap peas are looking a bit sad at the bottom, but the tops are very healthy. I'm not sure if this is a problem, but they are flowering, so perhaps it's ok.

 

My Autumn/Winter patch end of May 2012. Things seem to be progressing very slowly. I wonder if it's the cold weather & winter plants grow slower than warm weather plants? If you know, please leave me a comment & let me know if I'm right.

Still haven't done anything about that poorly laid soaker hose. I blame all the rain.

My backyard is a blanket of lush, green clover at the moment & it's really very pretty.

Thanks for reading,

Bel

Autumn/Winter Garden: Spinach

A very overcast & cold day today, but no rain, so out into the garden I went. Today I planted spinach. I went down all by myself, which was nice & peaceful. Little helper came with me to buy the spinach seedlings but didn't want to garden & sometimes, that's nice too.

Firstly, I watered everything & dug up some soil to mound up for the spinach. I tried my hand at tench composting a few months ago & I tried to collect that beautiful soil for my spinach. I sadly stopped trench composting soon after I started it as I couldn't stand collecting all the scraps. After about a week the scraps were awful & the bucket they were in was so, so awful & I just couldn't bare cleaning it out all the time, so I stopped. I will be buying a proper compost bin at some stage because I really want to compost & not send all that goodness to landfill.

Next, I started to separate the seedlings. While doing this it occurred to me that this spinach plant was just one, more advanced spinach plant & I was trying to separate it!! Well, I ended up with one bunch & two sad looking smaller plants. Geez, I don't have much hope for these plants after I hacked away at them, but we'll see!

In they went, still looking sad.

Look at how gorgeous my sugar snap pea's are! So happy with them.

 

Now that they have grown to a decent height, it's mulch time. I mulched them with pea straw.

I opened the packet up side down. Hehe

Mulched around the sad spinach as well.

Spinach & sugar snap peas, all mulched well with pea mulch.

My garlic is looking great! Can't believe how fast it's sprung up.

Mulched the garlic as well.

My parsley, grown from my Nonna's seeds is growing so beautifully. I have added it to many meals over the months.

And little helpers little flower has sprouted this week as well. He'll be very happy to see this next time we are in the garden together.

Here is my veggie patch today. Snow peas, parsley, garlic, spring onions, silver beet, nasturtium, spinach & sugar snap peas. Getting full now.

 

Thanks for reading,

Bel