Watering the vegetable garden can be quite a time consuming job in the middle of summer. You can however save lots of time just by using a soaker hose! I have always preferred to water my vegetable garden underneath rather than spraying the leaves of the plants. I learned from my parents and grandparent that this gives the plants a much deeper watering. This in turn enables them to cope better with the hot summer days. It also saves water because it is delivers the water directly to where the … [Read more...]
Late Autumn Leads to Butternut Pumpkins Splitting!
We have had a really funny autumn this year. It is only a little over a week till winter but many of our trees have only just properly changed colour. Normally most would have lost their leaves by now! I am pretty sure that this late autumn is to blame for some of our butternut pumpkins splitting! We had a cool spell plus quite a bit of rain early in autumn but the last few weeks have been fairly mild. It seems that might have been enough to trick the butternut pumpkins into having a growth … [Read more...]
Sun Loving Plants Need Some Shade Too!
I have been growing vegetables for a few years now in a veggie patch that gets full sun. However I have found that during the hottest days of summer even the most sun loving plants struggle. So in today’s post I want to discuss how I provide shade for the sun loving plants in my vegetable garden over summer. Plants are often described as either needing full sun or part shade. And sources, both online and offline will tell you that vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans need full … [Read more...]
Overwintering Capsicum Plants in the Garden
You don’t have to say goodbye to your capsicums when the winter chill sets in. I have had a lot of success with overwintering capsicum plants in my garden! The capsicum plants that are currently growing in my garden were planted from seed during spring 2013. At the time I never expected them to be still growing 3 years later! The first year I was a little disappointed that the plants took until the end of the summer to really get going. In fact it was early autumn when they were at their … [Read more...]
Cucumbers: Storage Tips to Keep Them Fresh
Summer is officially over but nobody has told our cucumbers; they are producing better now than they did all summer! It is probably because we had such a hot summer this year. In contrast early autumn has been warm but not too hot so the vegetables are very happy! We love eating fresh cucumbers but sometimes there are a few too many to handle. At the moment we are picking a couple of them every other day! We have had an oversupply of cucumbers other years too and we have found it hard to keep … [Read more...]
Recording Vegetable Garden Crop Placement
Our vegetable garden is a bit unusual in that we don’t have formal beds. The vegetable garden itself is around ten metres by five metres and each season we just set up plots within that space as we need them. We have a few main paths around the vegetable garden but other than that we tend to make our plots as big or as small as we need them. We find that this is quite handy because we can often squeeze more into the garden by leaving smaller pathways. It does however have its drawbacks, the … [Read more...]
Harvesting and Storing Pumpkins
This is the first time in years that we have grown a crop of pumpkins. Last spring we got six pumpkin plants growing from seeds that we had saved from a store bought piece of butternut pumpkin. We actually thought that we would only need about three or four plants but we put in six because often some seeds don’t germinate. They all did and we ended up with six very strong plants! They soon got going and quickly took over a large section of the vegetable patch. For a long while we only ever … [Read more...]