Gardening for the Clueless: Touring the Vegie Patch

Right, back to the garden tour. If you missed the start of the tour, you can catch up by having a glance at my front yard . If you are an avid gardener, and didn’t read my first warning, click on that same link, or read the title again. This is not the advice of a gardening guru!

I love my vegie garden. It’s a little overgrown at the moment and badly in need of a weed. I’m waiting for it to rain. It makes it much easier to pull the weeds out, especially when you have as many as I have cultivated at the moment. The plant blocking the path at the front is rocket. Advice for the clueless: Rocket doesn’t taste very nice when it’s left go wild as such. Very bitter. I have to work out how to keep it under control… In fact I’ve planted a new punnet, because I think I may just have to pull these bushes out.

The masses of greenery on the fence is our passionfruit vine. It has been awesome. We have got so much black passionfruit from it. More advice for the clueless. Passionfruit vines love to spread. I have four garden beds in my vegie garden, and planted the vine there. In one year it has covered the cute garden seat in between the two beds, and completely taken over the 2nd trellis where I had cherry tomatoes growing. I’ve now got cherry tomatoes intermingled with passionfruit. It’s a bit crazy! 

Another gardening tip: Cherry tomatoes are FANTASTIC to grow! (Providing they don’t have to compete with the passionfruit.) Last year I got a punnet of seedlings and got a bumper crop from them. Really easy to grow, heaps of fruit and no disease! Much easier than normal tomatos. They hardly produced any fruit and the fruit I did have had blossom end rot. I know people say growing tomatos is easy, but if you are gardening challenged, start with cherry toms. Plus, it is always satisfying walking past them in the supermarket and feeling smug that you have hundreds of them at home for the same price as a punnet would cost!

The above picture is some advice for the clueless. This will be what your broccoli looks like if you don’t pick them immediately. If you think, “I’m not having broccoli for dinner tonight, I’ll pick them later…” you may come back several days later to discover them looking like this. The bees will love it, but you won’t.

The same applies to cauliflower. I have this love of cooking it straight after picking. I have all these visions of extra nutrients nourishing my families body when I do this. This shot is before my theory backfired, I left the cauliflower in the garden too long and it went a frightful yellow. I don’t know what’s wrong with my cauliflower in fact, it took ages to grow and I’m sure the leaves aren’t supposed to be this big.

Continue Reading