(thought I'd start a lighter topic, a bit heavy lately...)

Last summer I grew some cucumbers, chillies, various herbs, snow peas and capsicums. The snow peas and capsicums were no good due to lack of preparation and poor location. The others went very well.

Living in a unit makes it a bit hard to grow veges but we have a common area and my neighbours share in what I grow. It good to do a bit of gardening after work. I got into after starting to play a farm game on computer. I thought this is really stupid to play a game when I can do it for real.

Got a small cottage block but manage to do alright, tomatoes, cappys, snow and sugar snap peas, bootroot, potato, brocoli, cauli, brussell sprouts, lettuce, various herbs, lemon, lime, blood orange, red shatoot mulberry, kp mango, carambola, pepino, cape gooseberries, blueberries, passionfruit, wampi, spinach, various chinese veg, corn. Think that's about it.
Planning a move to the margaret river region in six months so now in the process of pruning and transplanting to big pots all my trees that will handle the move.

low maintenance gardner
tahitian lime,(the local supermarket was selling them for $1.99 each)
kaffir lime ,anyone got a good solution for bronze orange bugs?
i have sprayed them with homemade soap and chilli solution
and they just laugh at me!
avocado tree(yet to fruit),
macadamia tree,(those nuts are tough to break)
chilli bush and couple of new passionfruit vines
as the previous one was doing a day of the triffids
and making the fence fall over..
and a rather nice selection of farmers friends and assorted weeds

One of my neighbours used to grow 'Tomatoes' with different shaped leaves in pots and took VERY good care of them, many times over the years people jumped fences and stole the plants.
Occasionally the odd plant died for 'Zero' or no reason. I just don't know why...

FlySurfer said...



Now the soil is contaminated. RoundUp should be banned.

roundup doesn't contaminate the soil, its inactive after a few days

stamp said...

FlySurfer said...



Now the soil is contaminated. RoundUp should be banned.

roundup doesn't contaminate the soil, its inactive after a few days

Well yes and no.
Residual roundup (glyphosate) in the soil doesn't affect most subsequent plantings but it does affect tomatoes and they recommend not to use it if you intend to replant with tomatoes. I've never tried to plant tomatoes afterwards so I don't know how critical it is, but I do know that all sorts of other things grow fine after roundup treated soil.

Those pictures are amazing and inspiring.

This thread encourage me to go out on a wet and cold winter afternoon and start gardening again. I have a good source of soil for the planter boxes I mainly use. The gardener places all the lawn clippings in the green bin. Its never collected by the council so every now and then I take the clippings out and put them ontop of a compost heap in the corner of the block under bushes and trees.

So I'm starting some weeding and putting new soil in boxes and along the top of a retaining wall. The only things surviving winter are the spring onions and parsely.

Does anyone grow garlic? I have a few garlic offcut cloves that are sprouting so I've planted them. I'm not sure if they will grow or what will happen with them.

I'm more intested in growing herbs as they are quite expensive to buy and are fairly easy to grow. Plus home grown herbs seem to make cooking that much tastier.

The garlic that I'm trying out is from Australia. Its not the bleached Chinese garlic. I've never seen that garlic sprout, its possibly dead.

Searching for garlic seeds gave no result so I'm trying these sprouting cloves out. When cutting up the cloves I cut the top off then placed them in a bowl with a bit of water. After a few days in the sun the cloves started sprouting new growth which is promising so it will be interesting to see how they go.


Where is the Sydney Organic market?

Prawnhead said...

low maintenance gardner
tahitian lime,(the local supermarket was selling them for $1.99 each)
kaffir lime ,anyone got a good solution for bronze orange bugs?
i have sprayed them with homemade soap and chilli solution
and they just laugh at me!
quote]
We used to grow cut flowers and I used a product called
Eco-oil. It is made from canola oil,eucalyptus oil,and tea tree oil.
A small amount mixed with water and sprayed once a fortnight
keeps 95% of bugs and other nasties away.It doesn't so much kill as discourages.I am not sure of it's organic cred but it won't poison you.
Plus it's pretty cheap.
jason

Nice tight head on the broccoli there Thommo, mine are all light and fluffly, can't get 'em to chunk up like that before flowering. Using dynamic lifter and vege specific granular fertiliser. Any ideas?

Last year I planted tomatoes in the ground and they did not well at all! maybe too sandy I will put them in pots this year, I have some jalapeno chillies and they are doing great the bush is still flowering and I have some fruits on it as well, from 1 bush I have pickled 6 small 500g jars. I let some fruits to go red and it looks good in the pots ! The jalapeno grows in sand and I pour some seaweed solution on it once a month.
I like the pics of the vegies jungle, but I hate gardening…… not enough time I go sailing every day I can.

Mobydisc said...

The garlic that I'm trying out is from Australia. Its not the bleached Chinese garlic. I've never seen that garlic sprout, its possibly dead.

Searching for garlic seeds gave no result so I'm trying these sprouting cloves out. When cutting up the cloves I cut the top off then placed them in a bowl with a bit of water. After a few days in the sun the cloves started sprouting new growth which is promising so it will be interesting to see how they go.


Where is the Sydney Organic market?

You'd reckon it'd be cooler here in the valley than where you are. Maybe they went in too early, will try some worm wee and seasol on the next lot.
And yeah I'm well thanks mate, been getting plenty of waves for a change. Yourself?

There is no wind, so ya need to chew the straw over something. We could always bang on endlessly about the pro-s and con's of death leashes...

Me for one, I prefer the marine prints over the floral ones.