Harvest Monday, 28 January 2013

My garden is still providing us with lots of fresh summer food and I have been busy making pickles, relishes and sauces (as well as the odd jam). Heres whats good in the garden a the moment.

Big Black Russian Toms, yummy I think I will make some turkish bread today and have a BLT.

This is my late planted Big Rainbow, it is absolutely covered in Tomatoes, and heaps of flowers. The seeds are from the Diggers Club who say that one plant can produce 17kg !! I hope so.

These are the pumpkins I have picked. Some people say you should just wait for the vines to die down but these all seemed to be holding the vines back from producing more female flowers, so off they came.

Here is a shot of part of the pumpkin patch, there is now another 2 Australian Butters growing and another 5 or 6 Red Kuri's. We will have plenty of pumpkin for winter use.

Isis Candy is one of my favourite cherry tomatoes, they are sweet and juicy as well as prolific.

The Blue Ballet squash are doing well and the 2 extra plants I added at the end of December have both set their first fruit.

Very excitingly the chook shed was finished, so we are off today to buy some point of lay girls.

Here are my totals for the week.

Zucchini                                 3.160 kl

Tomatoes                                8.560kl

Cucumbers                             1.380 Kl

Sweet Corn                            1.250Kl

According to my spread sheet, from the start of January my garden has produced $695.41 worth of veggies! Crazy.
There was also Basil and parsley that I used to make dips and pesto with but I don't weight those (even though the are about $4.00 per bunch and I probably grabbed a couple of bunches)

Harvest Monday - 21 January 2013

Summer so far has been pretty good to my garden, we did have a 39 degree day(nothing compared to South Australia, they had 48!!!) that burnt a lot of my Tomatoes and Capsicums as well as toasting my Rattlesnake bean plants. Thats small fries when there are out of control bush fires in other parts of Victoria and all over Australia at the moment. There is some more hot weather coming up so I hope everyone is staying safe and cool.

So heres whats good in the garden at the moment.

My Pumpkins(this one is an Australian Butter type) are growing and setting fruit like mad, I decided to pull this guy off after he passed the fingernail test. It seemed like the vine was putting all its energy into this pumpkin and not into producing more female flowers so I picked him. Low and behold the vine produced 3 new female flowers shortly after and they are getting fatter every day.

Blondkopfchen, or Blondie as I call it is such a sweet tomato. It is heart shaped with a little nipple and gooseberry like veins. Its a multiflora type that produces masses of little flowers followed by a ridiculous number of these little guys.

This is one of many hundreds of sprays that the Blondkopfchen is putting out!

I currently have a massive stash of these lovely Beit Alphas in the fridge waiting on my new Ball Mason jars to arrive. Yum, bread and butter pickles galore.

The Black Cherries are abundant and so yummy.

and the Purple Beauty Capsicum are getting nice and big. Aren't they such a pretty colour?

These little Red Kuri are the perfect size for 2 people.

Its not all been good though, in late december i started noticing holes in a lot of my Tomatoes. Caterpillars - not only Caterpillars but mice too, Dang it all. So far I have managed to get rid of the Caterpillars with Dipel but the mice are not so simple. I have been picking the fruit as soon as they get colour, if  i leave it any longer all thats left the next day is a tomato skin.

But everything is looking lush and green an we haven't had to buy any Veggies since before Christmas. Whats growing in your garden at the moment?

Here are the totals

Beit Alpha Cucumber              1.52 Kilos

Costata Romano Zucchini        1.15 Kilos  

Tomatoes                                  3.59 Kilos

Green Beans                    260g

Capsicum                           240g

Corn                                990g

In case your wondering, i'm not going to add in my Pumpkins until they are all done. That will most likely be mid April.

Thanks for stopping by!

Tomatoes

With summer in full swing my Tomatoes have started to produce some delicious specimans.

 Tigerella's

 Jaune Flammee's

Japanese Black Trifles

All super fresh and yummy. Talk about low food miles, straight out of my back yard.