Thursday, March 25, 2010

Planting of the Winter Crop
















Today I planted the Winter Veggies, it's been a couple of weeks project as Ivé needed to move all the tops of the planter boxes to reduce the height of them and then haul 300 kgs (ok I got the boys to do it) and a trailer load of mushroom compost too add to the soil to improve it for the next crop.

I still have the white onions, leeks and spring onions to plant along with carrots parsnips and turnips but it's not the right time on the moons cycle to do that until next week so that will be done then.

I also had loads of Silver beet and discovered that you cannot transplant this fully grown it just withered up and died and although I gave the lot to the chooks to eat so it wasn't wasted I am sure they would have preferred to eat it fresh! I have included a picture of this I tool and you can see Ivé added lime to the other beds too which I do at the end of each year for ph balance and to break up the clay soil a bit.

I planted some silver beet seed, pack choy, bok choy, silver beet plants, 3 types of broccoli, 3 types of lettuce, rocket seed & english spinach.

Last year we went to Sovereign Hill and they have the olden days veggie gardens set up with all they have for pest control then and I was so inspired by it I have decided to use this method for my veggie garden to keep the birds of the beds and if any chooks should escape which does frequently happen there will be a method in place to ensure they don't cause too much damage.

RecentlyI found at an a bargain at a antique shop on a recent camping trip and brought 500 bamboo sticks for about $5, they are very thin and pushed into the ground between seedling make the ideal bird protector as the blackbirds don't like to dig around them they stay away. Bliss!

I cannot plant the onions until Ivé removed the pumpkin which I think is at the end of it's life and the yellow zucchinis, and wevé had great success with that, I will then remove the top layer of the bed and reposition it and add more manure for the onions and leave the bottom layer for the root veggies such as the carrots and parsnips with no manure added as they don't like this and it can cause them to split.

3 comments:

  1. Looks great. Are you doing beans this year? I've just put broad beans and snow peas in. Carrots are starting to sprout, but they hate me.

    Is that a compost heap in the back ground? Do you have a worm farm?

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  2. Well I really wanted to do beans but apparently they needed to be planted a few months ago.... Yes I have a compost on the left hand box and a big pile of cow manure on the right. I might do Snow peas in 6 months or so. I do have a worm farm it's going really well, I shall put some photo's up of that next time.

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  3. You'll have to do a seperate post with all the natural pest controls you use. I've very interested to know but too lazy to look it all up! We're hoping to get our vegie garden up and running this year, seeing we won't have a new baby and all that ;) We have to make new garden beds though as the edges are all breaking on ours :( I'm hoping to make them a bit higher this time round so I won't have to do as much bending hehe

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