Summer Growth

In the latter pregnancy stages and early newborn (with added toddler in toe) days, gardening was really not front of mind. Well, it was probably front of my mind but it was really not factoring on the priority list! Time poor and dog-tired anyway, digging about in my garden wasn’t on my radar for a few months. Our poor veggie garden was neglected and unloved there for a wee while…but then just one weekend (even just one Sunday afternoon) meant that come Summer we were greeted with a modest bounty of goodness. Our little patch is alive with Summer growth and producing us a little bit of this and a little bit of that…

I often look at our vegetable gardening efforts and see the missing pieces – we’re not very organised about anything much, despite all best intentions of heirloom varieties and Diggers memberships and soil health and companion planting…it all goes a bit loose and hectic in the end! But the ramshackleness of our veggie plot kind of suits us, we whack things in when we remember, dig things up and move things around and throw some manure around if we can be bothered. As a result, anything that comes out of our raised beds is a complete bonus. And look at what we have produced, not too shabby for not much forward thinking. Purple beans and capsicums and cucumber and lettuce and strawberries and tomatoes and zucchinis galore…

 

The strawberries admittedly are from last year, but have gone gangbusters this season (with little to no love!) This year though we will lift them and pull apart some runners and re-jig…or so we promise, stay tuned. A few other gems from last season have sprouted up, a couple of cherry tomato plants and peas appeared (I didn’t even think we grew peas last year?!) The zucchinis have, as usual, been next level in both bountifulness and size! Beware the giant zucchinis that grow before your eyes overnight. I even revamped my herb pots such has been the flurry of activity in these warmer food producing months. Obviously a simple ten minute job but one that had been sadly unattended to whilst I’ve been attending to, y’know, keeping two little humans alive, let alone a basil plant.

Conditions have been incredibly mild though, a little bit too mild for our poor tomatoes who are all green still with warm, hot Summer days slipping away – eeep! Come on sunshine, redden those ‘matoes up nicely puh-lease! Otherwise it’s going to be the year of green tomato glut.

Our grapevine over the chook pen has gone wild! Which is fabulous, I am envisaging an almost fully covered structure next Spring/Summer, and am eagerly awaiting the gorgeous Autumn colours to come soon, now that our days are getting shorter and the light is more…Autumnal. It’s coming, I can feel it (so come on tomatoes!) We also have a bumper crop of silverbeet/rainbow chard growing along the chook pen – which we didn’t plant! I always throw the excess silverbeet (always armloads of the stuff) into the chook pen, turns out it’s incredibly easy to self seed, so it would seem!

We have enjoyed our warm Summer evenings watering the garden with the girls, Harriet in her pram (always happiest outdoors) and Eleanor running amok in her gumboots and ‘haaalping’ with her little watering can. She eats strawberries and cherry tomatoes from the garden with great gusto…but unfortunately the beans are ‘yuck!’ and the glut of zucchinis haven’t magically transformed into a toddler greens eating machine. Ho hum… Funnily enough she eats ‘Grandad’s TATOES!’ and carrots enthusiastically, the one thing we have literally hundreds of acres of and the other I can’t seem to grow to save myself.

Although it’s very haphazard and a bit slapdash, our efforts in being vegetable garden gurus has paid off handsomely this growing season. Just imagine what could be done if we actually put our minds to it! Our little plum tree produced fruit this year too, although as per the slapdash-ness of our food producing we didn’t net the tree and most plums have vanished to the birds…the thing is though: there’s always next year. When our girls will be a bit bigger and chubbier, our days perhaps not as full of sleeping routines and mealtime schedules (or not?!) but our zucchinis no doubt still epic. Always with the epic zucchinis.

Are your tomatoes still green where you are?
Do you have grand foodie garden plans but a bit slapdash like us?
Found a flamingo-clad baby girl in your patch too?