Filed under: budgeting, city life, gardening | Tags: budgeting, city life, gardening
We had a little frenzy on the weekend, getting the first seeds in for spring/summer.
MrB planted his clumping bamboo seeds (we want it to screen our bedroom window from the street), and I planted 2 kinds of lettuce (Freckles and regular cos), some spinach (for the shady beds), and a punnet each of Tiny Tim and Tommy Toe cherry tomatoes. With our last two overcast/wet Sydney summers, we’ve had trouble getting larger tomatoes to ripen, but we’ve had good luck with cherries, so we’ll go with them again.
We’ve had bad luck with pumpkins, too, but being optimists we’ve started two varieties of non-running pumpkins in pots. We have lots of bees, so their problem isn’t pollination… they just rot on the vine. Maybe our luck will change this year.
I bought new rocket seeds, and some golden purslane for salads; and we’ve just ordered a replacement Fuerte avocado tree. The Hass tree has done well in the ground, but the Fuerte was never happy here… and finally died.
Our other trees are going crazy after nearly two years in the ground. The poor things were hammered by windstorms not long before we moved out of Newtown, and were a bit neglected last summer while I was recovering from my surgery. We gave them a big weed and feed a couple of weeks ago, and have started regular applications of EcoOil to start knocking down the leaf miners on the citrus trees. The multi graft stone fruit tree is starting to set fruit (though it needs some maintenance), and we’ve set out the fruit fly trap.
The multi graft citrus gave us 3 beautiful tangelos over winter, and now one of the other grafts is in flower (limes, I think). And the orange graft that was (accidentally) clobbered by the dog is recovering! The whole tree is looking much, much happier.
We’re still getting HUGE harvests of snow peas, broccoli, herbs, chinese greens and chills, though the lettuces are succumbing to the combined force of slugs and high winds.
And we’ve started our DIY Xmas gifts of mini herb gardens (in sterilised recycled pots). We bought premium potting mix, but very cheap punnets of sage, coriander, parsley, thyme and basil. We’ve added a cutting of our rosemary to each pot, and they’re lined up in the sun. We sound get 5 impressive home-made presents for an outlay of about 35 dollars (it would have been cheaper to start from seed, but we weren’t that organised).
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Ms Betterhome 