My journey about gardening raising sons, mental health and recovering from childhood sexual abuse.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Our Summer Harvesting
Well it's Autumn and we have been harvesting all the produce we have grown from the veggie garden over the past few weeks and I have to say this has been the best little veggie crop we have ever had!
We had more rain this year that we have ever had, in fact in Victoria more rain than ever on record apart from 1 other time!
Still not quiet enough to grow my celery too well although I am using the leaves for the rabbits to eat. The carrots have grown well, the kids frequently pluck them from the bed, corn was delish! It was kind of chewy but really tasty and looked perfect. Potato's did well and we have been eating them for many weeks now, and zucchini, well it's not yet at the back door but it's pretty darn close! No not really but we have a good 5 zucchini's per week for a long time now! Ive made zucchini chocolate cake and soup, I found the key to the soup was not to use 2-3 medium ones but a good 5-6 couple of potato's a carrot 2 onions, stock and blend so it's really thick, that was the best soup I made with them this year.
Lettuce did ok, but went to seed before I could eat it all and with all that rain there were a lot of slugs and they all seemed to be over the lettuce!
Had good success with the cucumbers this year, planted them too late last year unfortunately. The squash did well but it's isn't a huge hit here and it is climbing over 3 other veggie beds suffocating the other plants! So will give that a miss for next year. Bok choy was nice but grew very fast pretty much within 3 weeks it needed to be quickly eaten I imagine because of all the rain.
Its been wonderful having the water tanks full and being able to keep the grass for the boys to play on, first time in a very long time that's happened.
I also planted a very large sunflower patch and it's huge!! This is helpful in attracting the bees to the garden to pollinate the other plants. I have included 2 pictures the initial planting and 2 weeks later then all up 3 month s later they are over 7 feet and flowering, how quickly thing will grow once they in fertile soil! We got an excellent crop of nectarines and also plums but not one apricot this year my son tells me this is because it fruited last year, I knew that but its nice to know he remembers me telling him this very fact.
We have a wire farming fence to the paddock next door and there are blackberries thickly covering it for about 10 metres. We picked a good 4 bowls for a month or so and I ate them on cereal, in yogurt and make muffins with them, they were delicious!
I can't wait to rip everything out to plant the Winter crop, I know I will be putting lots more Broccoli in as we really eat a lot of that in Winter, some more carrots and bok choy, and some Winter lettuce.
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