I cut down a heap of basil to make room in my brassica bed. I left it to dry to put on the compost. And then it rained. It rained for 4 days. When I went to move it to the compost pile it looked like this:
The seeds had swollen and look like frogs eggs.
It was the weirdest thing I had ever seen, bunches of these egg like pods on the dried flower stems.
Did any of y’all know this happened? How awesome is it to discover weird random unexpected things in your garden.
In the winter months we tend to get rodent visitors. We have dogs, and compost, and our neighbours have chickens, so currently there is a rat that likes to frequent our place and the neighbours place.
It decided that I had left a feast out for it when it discovered my mini-greenhouse.
This was what was left of my newest planted wheat grass. What a disaster.
When I had removed the fresh tray it went for a forage in my near-ready-for-harvest trays. Decimated the whole lot of them.
Trampled, and pulled up, and rooted through. Totally useless to me now. So I took them all out, cleaned it up and decided on a break from growing the wheat grass until I can find a way to protect the trays.
Unhappy that I had taken away their/it’s meal ticket it found my seedlings. It ate all the brussles sprout and pack-choy seedlings I was planning on planting that day. Ate them down to the dirt of their pots. Thankfully I had already planted out my parsley and chives in my vegetable beds, otherwise I might have cried.
So I constructed these to protect my seedlings and hatchlings.
When we go fruit and veg shopping we go to a place that has boxes out the front you can use for free instead of bags. I always hunt for the polystyrene boxes as I plan to use them to grow salad greens for continual harvest. So I put all my remaining seedlings and newly planted seeds into one of them, and put the wire shelf from one of my mini-greenhouses over the top weighted down with some hardwood chunks.
Here is a tray of lettuce I am sprouting to grow, again covered with the wire shelf to protect it from savaging rodents.
So far it has all been successful, and they haven’t done anymore damage.
Majority of the time all we do is blog about successes in the garden and in the kitchen. Along the way or during the procedure pictures are taken as we think we will have more success than failures. Or maybe that is just the optimism. I have had a few failures in the kitchen, garden and with technology lately.
First is a failure in execution. I had the idea to make a lemon basil ‘sauce’ ‘pesto’ ‘something’ to go with our haloumi dinners. Whenever we have grilled haloumi we have it with grilled vegetables and lots of lemon. The smell of lemon basil is amazing. So my thinking was to make a sauce using lemon basil, some olive oil and some lemon juice. I harvested the basil that I needed and put it into my mortar and pestle and ground it into a paste. I then added some oil and lemon juice. It tasted kind of like grass. I don’t know what went wrong, but it was a good idea that did not really work out.
I also have multiple failures in technology. Notice how horrible and blurry and bad lighting that above photo is? Yeah I have a cheap camera that has built in ‘focus’ except it doesn’t really know how to focus well. Many many times I take 10 photos of one item and then just stop in frustration as the ideal settings for the camera to work just aren’t right. Above is a picture of the ingredients for a moussaka that I make. I was going to document and blog the whole process, but I gave up being able to get any decent photographs.
Another recipe I wanted to share is a brilliant non-meat-ball that I make that tastes amazing and has a fantastic texture very similar to real meatballs. The problem was I had a failure in memory. I have made the recipe so many times that I did not bother to look up the ingredients when I went shopping and forgot the main component of these babies. I forgot the pecans. Thus they did not have the correct texture. So these also did not make a blog post. They did however make many lunches and dinners because they are still pretty tasty and who is gonna waste that much yumminess due to one missing ingredient. One day I will make and document the recipe.
A gardening failure was the decision to try and grow chokos in a Queensland autumn. They sprouted fantastically, and grew a little bit bigger and went green when I took them out of the dark cupboard I had them hiding in. They got planted on the back fence in mushroom compost and then no further growth. The choko bulbs themselves have rotted and the sprout/vine has pretty much wilted away. I will try again come spring.
A failure and success in one was the attempt to grow rockmelon in my garden bed where my zucchini were at the wrong time of year. I got two decent sized fruit happening, but the leaf growth got very mouldy and the whole plant died. I was able to harvest the seed (the success part) but the fruit was inedible.
The best thing about these failures is learning from them. Trying to make the best settings for take photos with my cheap camera. Growing things at the correct time of year. Checking ingredients lists at least once even if it is something you have cooked many many times and think you know by heart.
The garden is going well, however due to it starting to get cold, everything is slowing down, watering is only needed every few days so there isn’t much to do around the garden. One of the things I want to do is clear out some of my basil. There is so much and its now taking up space in two separate vege beds. One is at the end of my brassica beds, and it seems I might only get one broccoli plant, so I want to clear that and try and get at least two more plants.
This is the amount of basil I harvested with the plans of making pesto. We filled that steel bowl with only the best leaves, discarding any older or slightly damaged leaves. We still had a few stalks that were unharvested so the pile and stems went on to the compost. The pesto was excellent. We had it on pasta less than 30 minutes from it being made, and had more on potatoes in a bento the following day. The rest has been jarred or frozen.
This was my basil AFTER that harvest. Super unsure what to do with the rest apart from harvest or appeal to any friends who want bunches or just cut it and put it onto the compost pile.
This is the other bed of basil. It didn’t have any competition so it has gone nuts. And the amount of bees that visit it are fantastic. The dogs brush past them, I brush past them, they just move about the flowers collect the pollen. Very happy to have bee’s know where this place is and I will try my best to keep up enough flowers to keep them returning. But obviously I am not running out of basil any time soon.
This is an update on my green manure. So so lush. The pea tendrils are starting to form weaves around the other plants. Fun to watch.
A couple of kale seedlings. I will move the secondary one that came out of no where when I have cleared the basil.
Half of my lettuce bed. Baby cos in various stages of growth.
The other end of the lettuce bed. Some cos, Australian yellow leaf and spinach.
This is the side of my house.It is right next to the carport, with a path to the back yard and gate. It was just a massive pile of rubbish. But when we returned from our trip over seas my dad had cleared it off, put up some railing and repositioned our spider plants to allow them to hang down. As this rarely gets any direct sunlight it is the perfect position for them.
This little beautiful fern was found as a small guy sprouting just under the edge of our back deck. So I carefully dug him up, and put him under the spider plants. He is three times larger than when he was first moved. I think he likes it here.
At the front of the house, outside the fences on the edge of the driveway we have an area of grass. So I planted a lime verbena (I wanted lemon, I ordered lemon but ended up with lime in my delivery). It gets just enough sun, and it will grow well. It is surrounded by some newspaper and mulch to kill the grass underneath to make a garden bed I can plant some flowers in.
I love this night scented jasmine. I love the story of it. The hubs’ father had a really large beautiful jasmine in his garden at the house Mark grew up in. We took a cutting and propogated it and grew it in our old house. When we were moving we took a cutting of that plant and did the same. Propogated and grew it and now it is ready to flower. The smell and beauty of this shrub. It reminds him of his childhood so I think we will always take a cutting of this plant and move it around with us. I just love that technically it is the same plant he grew up with growing in our second house.
Yep, it seems I have a bottle recycling problem.
It took only a day for ants to find the worm farm and try to get settled. So I dug them out and put the legs on the farm and have not had an issue with ants since. The worms are having a great time and have had their first bath on the weekend. I love watching them hide when I put scraps into the top.
Next are sunflower seeds that I harvested from my two largest sunflowers. I still get awed by the concept of one tiny seed making a large sunflower head, that then produces hundreds of seeds. I could plant a field of sunflowers from just the first sunflower.
And lastly an update on neo and his companions. He is doing so well. We have lots of leave shoots and already some flower heads. When I opened the greenhouse to take this picture, it was so warm and humid that the camera lens fogged up.
So lots of things happening, but slowly, and not much to do daily, but lots of things to watch.