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...]
Low Care Plants that Attract Bees
If you like to grow your own vegetables it is a given that you will want to attract bees! Yes, there are some food crops that don’t need bees, such as carrots, beetroot, and leafy greens like chard. But with most crops you need the help of bees to pollinate the flowers. In our garden the bees do the majority of the work pollinating our peas, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, watermelons, strawberries, and capsicums. Sometimes we hand pollinate some of the pumpkins and … [Read more...]
My Garden: How I Plant Carrots
I got sick and tired of pulling up funny shaped carrots that are all twisted and hard to cook with so I worked out a better way to plant my carrot seeds! When I was a kid I used to love eating carrots straight from the garden. Sometimes they would be funny shapes, a bit twisted and bent, but they always tasted way better than the bought ones! When I got back into growing vegetables a couple of years ago a carrot patch was one of the first things that I planted. I tried to plant the carrot … [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...]
Tips for Growing Strawberry Plants
We had a couple of strawberry plants sitting on our veranda for a couple of years and in the autumn we planted them out in our vegetable garden. They have been fairly quite over the winter months but now that spring has arrived they have really taken off. Strawberry plants like quite a bit of sun but because we get some really hot days during summer we have planted ours in a position where they get some shade in the afternoon. When I was young my parents had a big strawberry patch and it got … [Read more...]
Controlling Cabbage White Butterfly
Planting vegetables like cabbages and broccoli usually attracts the cabbage white butterfly. Protect your patch without using sprays with these great ideas. We have really been getting into the vegetable gardening this summer. It has been great to be able to go and get some fresh carrots or a cucumber from the garden whenever we need them. We have also been enjoying home grown beetroot, garlic and peas. A few weeks ago I planted some broccoli seeds and was successful in getting two nice … [Read more...]
Hi, I'm Kaylene, and I'm a keen gardener,budding baker and wannabe DIYer!