My Sprouting Vege Garden

 I have sprouts!!

Some of the seeds I have sown are turning into plants. The peas I planted first have an almost 100% strike rate. I'm not sure if the gaps are because a seed hasn't germinated or because I missed a spot.

Immediately following the peas, radishes have been popping up with their distinctive heart shaped first leaves.

I spread radishes (as I always do) through the carrots and it thins the carrots without sacrificing anything. The radish seed was at least 20 years out of date, so proof that sometimes it's worth ignoring the best before dates. I think I can see early carrot fronds poking up too, but so far they're too small to be sure.

I'm not keeping up very well with the potatoes. There are so many and they are growing very quickly. I've stopped rescuing the potatoes I dig up, unless they are at least palm sized. I'm not going to need to buy any seed potatoes this year.

I also think I have a couple of beans up. I'm watching to see if more happens. 

I'm maybe halfway through clearing the patch. I think the difference this year is I'm planting as I'm clearing. Normally, we'd clear the whole area before doing anything else and nothing would happen for at least a month. 

It's a battle to not plan everything in advance. I start to worry that I'm going to run out of ideas or repeat myself, but then I get to the next part and I'm inspired again. 

Hubby is laughing that I'm taking anything that's not nailed down. The water trough, the cracked wheelbarrow with a broken wheel, a few pots and there's an old concrete laundry tub sitting in a paddock waiting for me to move it into my garden. I think I'm cleaning up loose bits in useful ways. 

My Puntastic Vege Garden

 As I'm planting lots and lots of seeds, it quickly became clear that some signs were needed, so I could be sure what I'd planted where.

Who wants ordinary signs though? Let's have some fun with them. 

I set a challenge for the spawn to come up with simple and fun vegetable puns for our signs. Normally, my son would be all over anything to do with puns, autistic kids are very talented at them, but this time it was the oldest who contributed the most. 

I also went searching online to see if there was anything we could do with broccoli and cauliflower that wasn't beyond my artistic capabilities (Barack-oli) or needed explanation which misses the point (Broc n Caul - Rock n Roll). But not even punpedia (yes it's a real website, look it up) was much help there.

Three days of gale force winds, torrential rain and snow on the mountain gave me time to start making signs. 

Some are music inspired: 

And some are just wholesome, heartfelt messages for anyone wandering through my garden:

There are still more to come. Watch this space.

My Barren Vege Garden

 Gosh, that sounds a bit dramatic doesn't it.

My garden isn't actually barren, it just looks that way right now. 

I've cleared probably four times as much ground area as I had done last week. I've layered beds with lawn clippings, mulch and manure. I've made lovely paths, also with mulch. I've shifted pots, driven posts and with Hubby's help, shifted a large concrete water trough. 

I have boxes and boxes of seeds. Some were left behind by the people we bought this place from, some were ours. Every year I think I get this idea that I'm going to start some veges from seed, some years I even do it, but who can seriously resist the 3 6-cell vege plant punnets for $12 that you find in hardware stores at this time of year. 

I decided this year, I would use this seed. If it grows, great, if not, I haven't really lost anything. To be clear, one of the packets of seed I emptied this week was "good for growing season 2000". Most are more recent than that, if not always by much. 

The down side is, since I've planted out so much seed, there's nothing to see yet. There's nothing to cluck and fuss over, nothing to tidy or check. 

For the most part, I look at my garden and it seems like a barren wasteland of mulch, posts and planters.

My Surprising Vege Garden

 So I posted about my vege garden, how I want it to be surprising and random and an adventure. 

It would seem that my garden (or the spirit of my garden?) heard and approved. 

An hour after posting last time, I found sprouting potatoes in the garden. 

The year that I left Hubby to it, he planted potatoes down this end. He dug trenches in the stony, sour soil, planted spuds and pretty much ignored them after that. There were minimal efforts made to mound the growing potatoes and when those efforts were made, he just used more of the same soil. The few spuds we got were small and unpleasant and we'd pretty much forgotten about it. 

So I've moved these few into tyres and started building it up with grass clippings, manure and mulch.

Not too long after my pleasant spud surprise I found onions.

I planted them a year or two ago, I really don't remember. They didn't seem to do very well and Hubby kept pulling them out with weeds, so I had assumed they had all gone.

I was wrong. Some are clearly last season's onions, most of the small bulb has rotted down but there's new growth coming from it. Others are new, at least one of last year's must have flowered and dropped seed.

Now I'm carefully inspecting every handful of weeds I pull up. 

My Vege Garden

This is my vege garden.

Every year, I tell myself I'm going to have an amazing, productive garden and some years, I even achieve that.

About 5 years ago, we decided to turn this patch into a vege garden. Everyone got excited about it. Hubby sprayed the grass and weeds and turned it over with the rotary hoe. Then he just kind of left it. 

I did get his help to put in the deer fence height warratahs to stake my tomatoes. 

But I made the beds, I planted and weeded and watered, I nipped laterals from tomato plants and tied them up, I mounded up potatoes, I picked several kg of beans each day to keep them fruiting. 

I picked, I podded, I blanched, I froze, I bottled and preserved in every way you can imagine and possibly a few you can't. 

So I was a little pissed when I heard my darling Hubby bragging about his vege garden and how well he's done with it. 

The following year, I left him to it. And it was pitiful. I managed to rescue several of the jalapenos and count that as a win.

The year after, I decided to try hugelkultur beds. I was soundly criticised by family and the beds didn't really take off. 

Last year, I was working a physical job and didn't have the energy after work to put into a garden. But I did experiment with a patch of it. I spread a thick layer of chainsaw shavings over this stretch. I topped it with a decent layer of well rotted manure and then another layer of shavings. 

It was about as wide as a footpath and ran for maybe 8m. I planted some tomatoes and a cucumber in this patch and surrounded it with a net to keep rabbits, chickens and our one remaining turkey out.

It went okay. Nothing particularly special, but better than we'd seen for a while. 

This year, I'm feeling a bit more motivated. I weeded the patch I'd built up last year. It was so easy. The roots came up with barely any force, I was pulling up entire root systems for cooch and yarrow with ease.

And the soil! It was rich and dark and full of life. It was light and healthy. 

A two finger salute to the people who tried to convince me that macrocarpa mulch is toxic and kills the soil. 

So this inspired me even more. We've got plenty of wood mulch, Hubby is chipping the too-small-for-firewood trimmings from the macrocarpa hedge we had cut down last year. 

I have started with a bed along the length of the tunnelhouse. I wanted to put tall climbing peas there. They need support. Ideas were tossed around. I decided to make my own, with the help of a few years worth of baling twine and a gun stapler.

Hubby has been looking at my work with a puzzled frown and confused judgement. But I've decided it's my garden this year and he can just stay out of it. 

Yesterday I started working out where my beans are going. I'm cleaning up the ground and making beds and paths as I go. I'm using stuff we have around the place for supports and inspiration. Yes the beans are going to be in wavy lines, and in the curves, I'm planting other stuff. 

I'm going for a wilder garden, few straight lines, no monoculture beds, random, glorious chaos. I want a vege garden that's fun, where a wander through is a bit of an adventure. Turn a corner and there's some unexpected broccoli, or sunflowers or that patch of wild fennel I chose to leave where it was. 

He keeps asking me what's my plan for this part. No plans, isn't it exciting?

He thinks I'm crazy but hasn't said it out loud. I don't care. Currently it's a work in progress, I will keep you updated. 

Dyeing Wool with Blackberries

 Our relatively wet summer showed itself this year in the size and volume of wild blackberries. I only travelled a short distance through the brambles and picked several kg of large, fat, juicy berries.

The problem, as ever, is what will I do with them this year.

I tried cordial one year, a non-alcoholic one.  The first attempt was weak and unpleasant.  The second was wonderful but grew a hideous mould fairly quickly and had to be thrown out.

This year, I made some fruit leather with them, but still had heaps left over.  I wondered, could I use it for dyeing my wool?

A quick Google search showed me I could.  To my surprise, the page I found explaining the process showed a lovely blue from dyeing with blackberries.  I was determined to try it. 

The instructions said to gently heat the berries in water.  Not to let it simmer or boil. I didn't have a stick mixer at this point, so once the berries were softened, I mashed them.

I mordanted my yarn, including a scarf I'd recently woven and dyed it.  

My first batch came out a lovely purple, with a pink tone to the purple.  Quite a bit different to the colour shown on the website.

In the dye bath

The scarf drying

I dyed some more yarn using the same dye bath and it came out a different shade of purple, more blue than purple this time. A third batch through the dye bath came out in a silvery grey with faint hint of blue.  Miss Fifteen argues with me about whether there is any blue or purple hint to the grey.

I picked more blackberries to do this some more, but because I was going to be away for a week, I didn't have time to dye any of it, so I froze them until I did have time.

Successive dyeing has turned out quite a range of colours.  No two are quite the same, and sometimes two skeins in the same batch came out in different colours. The batch that accidentally simmered came out with the least amount of colour, even though it was a fresh batch of blackberry dye liquor.

I have to say I haven't been particularly scientific or consistent in this process.  Next summer when the blackberries are fruiting again, I think I will be.  I will pay attention to times and temperatures, to ratios and ripeness and possibly even test the pH levels of my water.

All my different colour results

Peaches

 Another autumn and another mass gift of peaches. Black boy peaches from previously mentioned friend and normal peaches from my inlaws. 

Another year of "what shall I do with this lot?"

We're not eating bottled peaches any more than we have previously. I think we've eaten one bottle in the past year. We're still well overstocked with jams and jellies. Even after a summer of renovations and making scones with jam and cream for lunches.

We are out of crumbles in the freezer. So I decided on peach crumbles using this previous recipe. We are also out of fruit leather, so I will use the black boy peaches for that. 

I still had plenty of peaches left over after making several peach crumbles so I decided to try drying them.

They were washed, stones removed and cut into fairly thin slices before being laid out on dehydrator trays.  They dried fairly quickly and taste great. I managed quite a good yield from them.

I've kept enough for us and the rest will go for snacks for the grandchildren.