Taken over by Pumpkins

Last year I grew my first pumpkins. I'd tried before, but I think I always left it too late for them to be successful. Last year I learned that pumkins spread, a lot! They will also grow up things, not just along the ground as I'd envisaged before seeing how easily they'll scale a fence or wrap themselves tight around a lemon tree! My pumkins last year new no boundaries, so this year I've put them in a different garden away from too much other stuff, but they've still taken over.



Pumpkin spread, here it's escaped the garden and heading onto the outside footpath.



This years seed came from a pumkin my mum bought that I'd never seen before. She purchased it around Halloween, so it was probably a special type, not sure. I can say it was large, and not the typical Queensland Blue or Jap I'm used too, not even a butternut. So official pumpkin type unknown, but very round. I struck the seeds in punnets before planting them out, and even gave Mum some too as a thankyou for keeping the seeds for me. The resulting vine looks like it's on steroids!! The vines have giant leaves, and the baby pumpkins that form under the flowers are huge too. But to date, not one has taken. They have all just died and dropped off the vine. And it's not just something unique to me or my garden, Mum's haven't a single pumkin under way yet, and in past years I've been more than a little jealous of their pumkin successes.





Baby pumpkin dies and drops off.



Section of pumkin vine showing female flower  (characterised by the swell of the baby pumpkin below it) forming.



Female flower dies back and the baby pumpkin starts to grow in size below it.



I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Last year, I did learn that they have both male and female flowers, and it's from the base of the female flowers that the pumpkins develop.

 My vines have produced lots of male flowers,

Male flower, I noticed the stamen is quite different on the female flower but didn't have my camera with me at the time.





The male flower is usually on a longer narrower stem and doesn't have the bulge of the baby pumpkin directly under the flower.



especially at the beginning, and have only produced female flowers in the last few weeks. There's not been many bees around the flowers that I've seen so I'm wondering if mother nature needs a hand this year with the pollinating.

I wondered whether the giant leaves are hiding the flowers a little too much, preventing the bees from seeing them?

When I checked Mum's vines today it seemed as though the she had the same, but at least she had female flowers that were still open, so I used a feather and manually pollinated the female flowers with pollen from the male flowers. Hopefully that will give her some success. Now if only I can manage to catch my vines with the female flowers still open. If you have any other ideas what could be going wrong, please help, any advice is gratefully received.

In the meantime, I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope, as these are the only pumpkin seedlings I put in this year. If I don't have any success it will just mean I'm back to buying my pumpkins again.





New year, new additions to the garden

It's been so long since I posted last. Welcome to the new year. The end and beginning of last year was pretty busy for us. I had a largish tree fall down over my back fence during one of the storms we've been having, wiping out the fence and a chunk of my garden at the same time. The rockmelons were wiped out, so too was a raspberry bush, but it at least has sent some new shoots up since, and my peach tree was pretty badly damaged, but recovering slowly. Then to herald in the New Year I caught a virus going around work and ended up sick in bed for a week. And the rain didn't seem to let up at all here. Brisbane had the flood (we weren't personally affected and my thoughts go out to all those who were), which shut my work down for a couple of days and gave me time to recover from my virus. All the while the weeds in my garden were thriving and getting out of control. A few weeks on and I'm getting it back under control. The tree has been cleared, the fence temporarily patched, the dead plants removed. Over four wheelbarrow loads of weeds had to be removed from that garden and even more from the other which I'm only part way through. The rain has been good to the garden, my latest corn patch is thriving, the pumpkins are beginning to traverse the yard, the passionfruit vine is fully loaded with fruit, and the citrus trees too. We've dug all the weeds out from the base of the Lemonade tree, mulched around it and propped the heavily fruit laden branches off the ground with some stakes. The bannana trees have become huge and one has it's first sapling appearing at it's base. The comfrey under them has flowered prettily. And life in the garden goes on.

Banana Plants, the one at the back has it's first sapling, weeds in the foreground were looking to take over!

Since then, I've added an arrowroot plant to the garden. Unfortunately it wasn't the type I'd expected. This one is not the Queensland arrowroot, but rather an idian one. It will still make a nice addition, but not what I had originally intended. A tumeric plant has also been added. I have used tumeric in cooking plenty of times, but had never realised until researching it, that it is a type of ginger. So my little garden now has Tumeric, Thai ginger, and Galangal. All I need now is a Cardamon plant to round out the ginger collection.

I'm thrilled to have also added two peanut plants to my garden. I've been looking around for whole raw peanuts that haven't been treated in any way in the hope of being able to use them to grow my own, when to my greatest surprise my husband spotted growing plants at a local Bunnings Warehouse while looking for an electric whipper snipper (ok, the whipper snipper section is nowhere near the plant section, but you can't blame any gardener for detouring past the plants first!).
Peanuts have self pollinating flowers, and after the flower is spent and has died back the plant grows a shoot down from where the flower was, and into the ground, here the peanut forms. From different websites I've read regarding growing peanuts, a bush (they grow to around 50 to 60cm high) will produce up to 50 peanuts. To harvest they normally pull the bush out of the ground roots, peanuts and all and turn it upside down for the nuts to dry out for a couple of days before harvesting them. I'm hoping my first two will turn into many more down the track.

We've also replaced our plum tree. We bought and planted one last year when we put in our peach and nectarine trees. It never really seemed to take and in the spring when it didn't get new leaves I had to face the fact that it was definitely dead. We were given some good advice when we went looking. The first one I had selected at the nursery was not suitable for our subtropical climate, we wouldn't have had enough cold hours to encourage it to produce fruit. The gardener at the nursery was very helpful and looked up which would be best variety for us and that's the one we finally bought. It looks a much healthier and is a larger tree than the old ones and we know it's suited to our environment so hopefully this one will survive.

I mentioned the electric whipper snipper earlier, and yes we did end up getting one, to go with our new electric mower. Our old petrol mower has died and parts are unavailable to fix it. I always struggled with putting petrol in it. Our petrol cannister would leak everywhere, even when I used a funnel it would run all over the place. I worried about using a petrol mower in a garden where I've shunned any unnatural or non organic fertilisers and pest control, so this time around it's electric for us.



One of the wheel barrow loads of weeds removed from the garden!

 We bought an Okra plant at the same time as the peanuts. I bought seeds for these ages ago, but hadn't gotten around to planting them. From my reading I believe one plant will provide quite a few Okra, and as I haven't cooked or eaten them before, I'll try this one before getting too many going.
I'll leave it here for now & get this posted! I'll try to put some images of the new plants up on my next post.

Ginger

I've been patiently waiting for what seemed to be the appropriate time to harvest my ginger. I bought a Thai ginger plant some time last year & following the instructions stuck it somewhere where it wouldn't hurt for it to become prolific, sat back & Googled some directions on what to do with it. According to one source (I'm sorry I can't quote it as it was some time ago now, and at the time I never dreamed I would be writing about it) I could "harvest" it anytime from about April through till almost September, but leaving it longer apparently results in the ginger being hotter. The tell tale sign of when to dig up the fragrant roots coincides with the leaves yellowing off & turning brown. I'm not one for overly 'hot' dishes, so I didn't want to wait too long, but my leaves didn't seem to want to change colour either. So I've been waiting & waiting for a sign. Today was the day! Yellow leaves from the tips. And then, it poured rain!!!!Not one to be detered, especially after waiting forever, I took the opportunity presented by a break in the downpour & off I went.

Wow, nothing could have prepared me for the amount of roots I got from my one little plant, all hidden under a canopy of leaf fall, & just waiting to be snapped freshly off. I washed the excess dirt off, and ideally would have liked to dry them out in the sun, but it's not to be today, so instead I brought them inside to rest on a teatowel & dry out.

In addition, today was special as we had our new home stay daughter (high school children who come to study english from overseas) and her sister come to stay at the shack overnight. Today, regardless of the rain, we went for a walk along the beaches, and had a pasta for lunch topped with fabulous tomato & herb mixture(basil, parsley, rocket, garlic chives) picked fresh straight out of the garden. It's moments like these I feel rewarded for the work that has gone in and look forward to making it a larger part of my everyday life.