In my garden today

Today in the garden I was pleased to see that my chilli bush, not the small birdseye chillies, but slightly larger less hot, chilli bush was flowering again and so too were my capsicum plants I'd started from seed from Green Harvest. The chilli bush in wicking bed number 4, the same bed as the capsicums has already got some chillies forming on it.

A rather blurry picture of the chilli flowers

 Also in flower is my smaller mandarin, which hasn't yet fruited. The other older one has fruit on it at the moment and had fruit last year as well, not much but enough that we turned it into jam.

The mandarin flowering.

Also in flower today was one of the turmeric plants. This plant and a few others has been grown from tubers bought last year from a farmers market. I couldn't believe my luck at the time. I'd paid nearly $20 for a turmeric plant from the nursery a couple of months before, and for $3 from the market I got a small bag full of sad looking tubers. Amazingly enough most of them came up, even some that I'd accidentally dropped in the grass managed to survive and grow. This one was just tossed in a half empty pot with an almost dead ginger plant, and now with a little water and love, I have a flowering plant.

Turmeric flower.

And lastly still flowering well and still producing well, our eggplants in bed number two. After we'd picked what I thought would be the last of the eggplants (aubergines for the non Australian), I cut back any scrappy dead looking leaves, gave the plants a tidy up and then top dressed their soil with more compost. And then they started flowering again, and producing more eggplants for us to gobble,

Eggplant flowering after being cut back and it's soil redressed with a good amount of compost.

Eggplant almost ready for harvest.

And last but not least we also picked some fruit from our lemonade tree. The yellow looked fabulous in the bowl with the purple eggplants. Now we just have to make plans for eating it.

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Around the garden

A quick update on what's happening in the garden at the moment. After all the rain we've had things are really happening. The grass has grown to super huge proportions in the side gardens. We are guilty of letting it go while we've worked on the wicker gardens and retaining walls at the far end of the garden so it's not surprising it's now hard to tell there was once garden beds all the way along here. We've started to chop it down, pull it out or dig it up, but it's not going to be a quick job. I'm looking forward to the Easter long weekend to hopefully get a chance to get a good go at it.

The rain has given the apple trees a spur along and they have flowers on and the start of new fruit, as too does the passionfruit vines.

The apple trees are flowering and you can see the start of an apple next to this one. The trees are now about three years old so they are at a size where we should start to see some resulting fruit.

I love the unusual flowers of the passionfruit.

Passionfruit on the vine, and now we wait...

The loquat tree is a mass of flowers heralding signs of a good feed to come and the little mandarin tree is covered in tiny fruits.

This loquat tree only stands as tall as me, but these flowers will probably produce anything up to 50 small fruits across the tree. Normally we just stand there and gobble.

This mandarin is about two years old now. We've had a couple of small fruit that were so tart the only thing we could do with them was make jam. But the fruit look like they are holding well this time, fingers crossed.

Some things that I thought were finished for the season have suddenly sprung back to life. The kale and basil are bigger than they've ever been and to think I almost pulled them out. The chillies have started flowering all over again, just when I thought there would be no more.

Kale on mass at the top, basil brought back to life at the bottom and sides. Pesto here we come.

Flowers mean chillies. These are my favourites, they aren't too hot. I missed out on getting many this season as the chickens suddenly decided after living with them for over a year that they'd try them and really took a shine to them, so much so it's one of their first stops on their rounds when they are let out each day.

Not everything is blossoming however. Regardless of the rain and the sun in between, the water chesnuts haven't been confused about the season and just seem to know it's time to die back. Harvesting them soon will have to go on the to do list.

It's not all about fruit and veg now though, the rose hubby was given for his birthday last year is in flower and the smell is divine. I love roses, but never dreamed I'd have any success with them. This one might just change my mind.

And of course my garden wouldn't be complete unless all this rain brought out the frogs as well. These are one of my favourites, I'm not sure what they're called but they are only about the size of my thumbnail at biggest and although they are green, they shine gold in the sun.

Thanks for sharing my pleasure in my garden at the moment. How is your garden looking with your weather at the moment?

Measuring time in pumpkins

A photo of one of my very early baby pumpkins

Well it’s been way too long since my last blog, almost two months. I was wondering what on earth have I done with the time, where have I frittered it away too?

But I have been doing things, and my garden has kept growing. My pumpkins are now almost all picked. The ones from the footpath were the first to be harvested, but not at my doing!!!! People had begun helping themselves! The first couple to go were just roughly pulled off the vine, so I guess they were walking past and just couldn’t help themselves (they did look fabulous). I wouldn’t have noticed them disappearing except I put little pieces of broken tiles under each one to keep them off the damp ground (last year I lost quite a few to rot, not having known this little trick) and those naked little tiles bereft of their pumpkins stood out! The next ones to go however were very neatly “cut” off, so I imagine someone bought their secateurs with them on their walk, an act of premeditation…so it meant if I wanted to enjoy the fruits of my labour, it was time for picking!



Using broken bits of tile keeps the pumpkins from rotting on damp ground

I don’t like to pick the pumpkins that early. Normally I like to leave them on the vine until it dies back to the stalk leading to the pumpkin and then pick them. I believe that way the pumpkin gets the very last goodness from the vine. So my others within the garden stayed on for quite a bit longer and I now only just have a few left still growing or waiting for them to drain the last energy from their vines. In total I’ve had more than twenty pumpkins ( I forgot to count them all before I started giving them away). They add a feel of autumness inside the little blue shack, with their lovely creamy orange tones. Strangely even though some of them looked like they would turn out as large green pumpkins, and made me wonder how it was possible to produce such a variety of shapes and colours, they all changed to similar colours in the end.

The first made deliciously creamy pumpkin soup, a favourite as we start to get colder. One of course went to my parents, as they are still waiting on theirs. One made a lovely gift for my Nana, with a cheeky red ribbon tied around it’s stem, along with a jar of homemade passionfruit curd. Some have been roasted, and the rest await their individual futures.


Just some of the pumpkins waiting for use

 Well I needed to add an update here, I'm thrilled to say that when we gave neighbours one of our pumpkins,
they've given us some mandarins and a very large gourd in return. Hubby has turned the mandarins into the
most divine jam, (he experimented with our very sour and almost inedible tangerines a week ago, and now perfected it to a whole new level with the mandarins instead) and he's made enough that tomorrow we'll drop the neighbours a jar as a thankyou for letting us access their tree. As for the gourd, I have no idea what to do with it???? So I'm open to suggestions, but for sure I'll keep some of the seeds out of it as it is spectacular to look at if nothing else.





Simply divine Mandarin Jam



Gardening Update

Only a short time to spend in the garden today as we’re off to lunch with friends. A quick round up this morning of any bits ready for picking.
Harvest today:
6 x Lemonade lemons
3 x Passionfruit
1 x Small Capsicum
9 x Gooseberries
A large pile of cherry tomatoes and another two nice large ones



The chickens have lain well again this week & I have a dozen eggs from them. They are laying 3 a day now (hold on, doing the maths on this, I think some may be disappearing to the helper gnomes home??)

Hubby has been keen for more of the lemons as he’s worked out they are great for making lemonade and I have to say, it tastes pretty great too. Up until about 6 weeks ago we were failing miserably with doing anything with the fruit from this tree. It was one of the few remaining trees left on the block and we assumed because of the shape of the green fruit that it was an orange tree (actually the picture on the top of the blog is fruit on the tree). We would wait patiently for the fruit to colour up, and of course it never turned orange. That got us suspicious so we did some research & found out it was a lemonade tree. Again we waited patiently for the fruit to turn golden yellow, but it would fall off rotten to the ground before this ever happened. We thought it must have been lacking minerals or water or even diseased although it looked pretty healthy. It had reached the point where even I had given up and had decided to let hubby dig it out & replace it with another new citrus. That was until just recently I discovered via comments on a gardening chat area that they recommend you pick this citrus when it’s just starting to show the first blush of yellow, that once it is yellow, it’s too late. Talk about ‘saved by the bell’. Not just the tree but us too. Imagine we would have been waiting years for another tree to get to this stage.
I would recommend this lemon to anyone who wants to be able to turn their lemons into a drink that doesn’t have the really tart bite of a real lemon tree. These are quite a bit sweeter and you don’t get the tart finish you relate to the aftertaste of a normal lemon.
Our fruit isn’t particularly attractive, it’s quite knobbly and they aren’t the quintessential shape you equate with a normal lemon, but once you’ve tasted them, you’ll forgive them their little bit of ugliness.