Hi to my lovely sister, the only reader so far which is fine with me. Maybe this will just be a way for you to see all that I’m up to over here!
We started a garden at our house here, wasn’t sure how it would go being in the middle of the desert with such salty soils. But things have flourished!
We dug over the soil, added some much needed nutrients and started planting – we put in seedlings because we wanted to give them a fighting chance before summer set in. There is no Spring here, just Cold Winter then HOT Summer! Although at the moment it is the lovely transition, where the days are up around 30 degrees celcius and the nights fall down to around 12 degrees. Next month it’ll be high 30’s every day and mid 20’s at night – yuk!
Anyway back to the garden
We planted tomatoes, silverbeet varieties, spinach, chillies, zucchinis, peas, beans, beetroot, fennel, rosemary, lemongrass and aloevera in the garden beds. In grow bags we have rocket, aubergine and capsicum, in pots and hanging we have cos lettuce, basil, oregano, coriander (my new favourite herb!), chives, a banana plant and fennel bulbs and in a rusty old wheel barrow that Anna rescued from her work (spray painted on the side is crush!) we have voracious mint and thyme.
It is so lovely to go outside and pick our own vegetables and herbs fresh from the garden.- there’s nothing like it! Today’s first job on my list is to go out with the watering can and give the plants some Seasol – a concentrate of seaweed (Mum you’ll be proud to know – I still remember how embarrassed I was when you would drag those big loads of seaweed up from the beach just for the garden!).
I mulched the plants with a sugarcane mulch and that has been essential for keeping the moisture in and the weeds down. The most important thing here is keeping up the watering, we may have to get some shadecloth for the summer as things will fry in the sun but for now the plants are flourishing. I can’t wait until my chillies grow so I can use them with the coriander in my favourite recipe which I will put up here another time.
Grow garden grow!
Dancing Speargrass 