The first harvest

I just wanted to give you a look at how the garden is coming along... everything is growing and we've already had our first harvests! Those are zucchini in the foreground; in the bottom right corner is my corn field; herbs in the middle; the patch of green on the left is a mix of things... including my bush beans. They are just about to flower. And up the back are the tomatoes.

The zucchini are about to fruit like mad. The average household only needs about two zucchini plants, but I got a bit excited and planted four. One way to ensure you don't have too much zucchini is to pick them when they're still flowering. Tonight we harvested half a dozen zucchini flowers and had them for dinner:

Here's the recipe:

Stuffed zucchini flowers

 

Wash the flowers gently, leaving the baby zucchini attached. Slice the zucchini end lengthwise.

Stuff the flower with a mixture of ricotta, crushed garlic, parmesan, capers, chopped parsley (from the garden) and a grind of pepper.

Dip them in beaten egg, then dust them in flour and shallow fry until golden. Serve immediately.

They are really delicious!

I was also excited a few nights ago when we used a pile of fresh coriander, mint, Thai basil and radish from the garden to make these rice paper rolls:

 

Just a month to go until I get to use my own chillies, cucumber and carrot to make these!

Coffee Break

I love a good bucket of coffee in the morning. For my garden I mean... anyone who knows me understands that I can't handle more than one caffeine hit a day or they have to scrape me off the walls! I had heard that coffee grinds were good for the soil, but of course, my one cup a day habit doesn't really produce enough for a whole garden.

 

So when my friend Michael opened Cravings coffee shop in East Perth, I had a proposal for him. Michael was more than happy to give me all his used coffee grinds! Now every other day after bootcamp I wander all sweaty into his shop with a big empty bucket and swap it for a big bucket full of coffee. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement - I get the grinds for my garden - he doesn't have to put about 6 - 8 kilos of coffee a day into the rubbish bin. When you think about all the coffee shops across Perth, that's a LOT of waste going to landfill, that could be helping our soil!

 

Here's today's bucket of grinds:

 

I was first attracted to coffee as a deterrent for slugs and snails in the garden. The beagles had an expensive emergency trip to the vet surgery to have their stomachs pumped a couple of years ago after eating what was sold to me as "PET FRIENDLY" snail pellets. Yep, I still don't quite understand what was friendly about seeing your dog almost die. That horror aside, I started using coffee around the plants I needed to protect from snails... and for most the part it worked! Luckily Chilli and Mustard don't like coffee... I think a beagle high on caffeine would be more than I could handle!

 

So, how do you use coffee in your garden? If you just have the odd cup, don't wash the grinds down the drain, fill the coffee pot up with water and pour it over your pot plants, or around your herbs. If, like me, you have access to industrial quantities of the stuff, you can add it straight to your soil.Treat it like a soil conditioner... don't add too much and just scratch a bit into the top layer of your soil. Or you can scatter a ring of coffee around your seedlings to protect them from snails, you can add it to your compost - treat it like a nitrogen, not a carbon, so be sure to add plenty of dry leaves, straw etc into the mix... and maybe a handful of lime. Also, if you have a worm farm, put some grinds in there... the worms go nuts for it... but again, not too much. Too much of anything in the garden can disturb the soil balance.

 

So there you have it... next time you pop into your local coffee spot, ask if they'd mind setting aside their grinds for you once in a while. It's good for your garden, and good for the planet as well!

A Housewarming Tomato

Today a friend dropped in with his new puppy and a housewarming gift... a tomato plant! The perfect addition to our food garden! There is a story behind the housewarming tomato. We took the beagles to Phil and Jo's house a while back and they proudly showed us their vegetables growing in the garden. As we turned our backs to refill our champagne glasses, Chilli was in there, sucking one of the four lonely cherry tomatoes off their much-pampered bush! Phil and Jo politely laughed. Until Chilli went back for a second one. The laughter got quieter and more forced, until the beagles had eaten every single tomato off that poor plant.

The housewarming tomato came wrapped in shiny paper with a ribbon and everything! Sadly the beagles were more interested in the tomato than socialising with the new puppy! Here it is in it's new home:

 

Thanks guys!

Strawberry fields forever

Have a look at this fantastic vertical garden designed and built by a friend of mine:

I always enjoy having a chat in the office with Aran about sustainable gardening and he has great ideas to share. When he showed me photos of this strawberry wall, I had to share it with you. Aran used recycled jarrah wall joists, that he milled himself. He says the slats are attached to metal support poles that are cemented into the ground. He and his lovely partner got inspiration for using the different width slats from a picture they'd seen in a magazine of an outdoor shower.

Aran says they decided to make a vertical garden for several reasons... one to hide their shed. The wall is north facing and being vertical it increases their growing space. They have planted heirloom varieties of strawberries in the baskets and Aran says he is adding another rung to the top, where they will plant dwarf rockmelons, which can then spread across the roof of the shed. Doesn't it look beautiful?!



Nature strip

 Another job completed, crossed off the list and another set of strangers stopping to ask us about the garden while we were out on the verge raking mulch and planting the natives! Check out our progress:

Originally we planned to have eight of these old stone blocks and I was going to arrange them in a spiral shape, then plant amongst them. We lugged the first three, one at a time, in the wheelbarrow and dumped them on the verge. But when we went back for the remaining ones, which were half buried under a hedge... we realised why someone planted the hedge on top of them. They were enormous! Way too heavy for the two of us to even lever out of the ground! So, we now have three rocks on the verge, but I think they still look attractive, nestled among the red pine bark and surrounded by native plants.

We mixed in soil improver into the planting holes first, as recommended by Beyond Gardens. We planted a mix of Kangaroo Paws, Conostylis, Velleia (I don't know much about this species, I just grabbed a few at the plant sale and it looks quite sweet), Scaevola and for along the verge to spread into a nice mat of green, the Grevillea Gingin Gem.

They will have to be watered through summer this year, but after that, they should start to look after themselves. I think you'll agree it looks much better than a patch of dirt and weeds!

By the way, I'm on Twitter now, so if you want to follow me I'm @PamelaMedlen. Unfortunately, my Twitter account was hacked today and it appears I sent out messages to everyone in my list saying there were nasty rumours being spread about them. So apologies to anyone who got that message. DON'T open it!!!!

Ahhh, technology. At least in the plant world, I'm the one doing the hacking, and I know what to do to stop viruses!

The bit out the front

The average suburban garden has a patch of lawn on its verge. It has to be mowed, fertilised and watered regularly. Or it it looks like the other average suburban verges, a mess of unattractive, overgrown weeds that make a neighbourhood look shabby.

 

I learnt a lot about verge gardening from the team at Beyond Gardens. They're a group of passionate horticulturists in Perth who hold free seminars around Western Australia about sustainable gardening and food gardening. I was lucky enough late last year to have them transform my ugly verge. Sadly, when we moved house, I had to leave the verge as well, just as the grevilleas and kangaroo paws were taking off, even now I drive past just to see them all flowering and looking lovely. Anyway, I learnt enough from the team and I'm going to transform my new verge! I have native soil mix concentrate ready to go, picked up some tube stock and some kangaroo paws at the recent friends of Kings Park plant sale and I have an idea for a kind of rock 'installation' made out of some beautiful blue stone lying around my yard. (There's a nice story behind these stones, I'll have to relate later, when I can get the facts from my neighbour). Anyway, today I had a big load of pine bark mulch delivered.

 I know I should have got woodchips, but the reason I got pine bark was because it holds its colour, instead of going grey like the woodchip. While the grey can be nice in many situations, I wanted the darker colour to contrast with my 'rocks'. I hope the guys at Beyond Gardens aren't shaking their heads at this! Here's Nat attending MY boot camp. I told him, if I have to go to his boot camp three days a week, he can come to mine on the weekends! I think he'll agree gardening is a pretty good workout!

 

 

 

A place to rest

Remember my asparagus? How I said it was a long-term commitment? And that you had to leave it in the ground for several years before you could start to harvest it? Also, how I dug the poor things up from my previous house and brought them with me to give them a permanent place to rest in my new home. Well... I have a confession to make. I had to dig them up AGAIN. Yes, I've just added another year on to my harvest time frame, right there. The problem was, you may remember, that I only had a matter of hours to dig them up and plant them at my new house and that was well before I had designed the layout of my food garden. It turned out they couldn't have been in a more inconvenient spot. Even after the landscapers went to so much trouble to rope them off with fluorescent orange construction webbing so they didn't disturb them, I came along and disturbed them all. They were right at the top of the stairs. Oops.

 

So today's job was to prepare a new patch of soil and plant the crowns out (again) and hope for the best. That's me in the photo with a margarita, toasting their future success. Now I might mention the limes in the Margarita are not from our lime trees. (Thank you Laina for supplying them). We had a potting disaster with the lime tree recently, and while it's coming back with a vengeance, it did lose most of its fruit in the process. I went to re pot it because the potting mix had become hydrophobic and worn out, but when my husband pulled the tree out of the half wine barrel, the whole bottom of the barrel came out too! There was a mercy dash to the nearest garden centre to get a new wine barrel, some caster wheels from the hardware store and some gravel for the bottom of the barrel, to go with the new potting mix and compost that was waiting! Now that you've all waded through that tedious story, I think you deserve a drink too! So here's a recipe, perfected after many, many trials...

 

Nat's best margarita recipe

 

To a cocktail shaker add:

 half a dozen ice cubes

2 parts gold tequila

1 part Triple Sec

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice.

- Shake and serve in a salt-rimmed glass.

Tomorrow is a big day in the garden too... a big load of pine bark for the verge. This begins the transformation of the verge from highly compacted sand and scruffy patches of lawn, to an attractive (I hope) native strip! Stay tuned.

Herbivores

One of the most exciting things about our new garden is the herb patch. Summer isn't the same without handfuls of freshly-picked basil in our meals. It hurts me to have to buy the soggy, limp sprigs of herbs wrapped in plastic from the green grocer, when I know how different and delicious fresh herbs are. So here's the herb patch:

I do have a rule with herbs. I don't plant things I don't eat. That's just a waste of space. Here I have my favourites growing... basil (of course), coriander (I hope), garlic and onion chives, parsley, chervil, oregano, lemongrass, tarragon and chillies. I have a wonderful colleague I often go to for gardening advice who has been leaving gifts on my office desk. I'll often arrive at work to find a pot of mint, or thyme or lavender seedlings for my garden. Last week she passed on some Thai basil seedlings, that went straight into the herb patch. The mint is a special case. There are sometimes you can't grow enough, so I've planted some in pots and I dug the sand out of a patch by the side of my house and replaced it with the amazing soil and planted the mint there where it can get plenty of water... and it can't escape and invade the rest of the garden. We're looking forward to mojitos this summer!

Pamela and the Beanstalk

Seeds always amaze me. Particularly bean seeds. The rocket is always the first out of the ground, of course, coming up within three days sometimes, true to its name. Beans take a little longer, but when they do pop their little heads out of the soil, and unfurl their seed leaves, I marvel at how much material they can store in a dry, shrivelled seed. Here are some of my bush bean seeds that sprouted this week: 

 

 

Where do they hide those leaves inside a tiny seed?

 

My bare patch of soil is no longer bare at last. Below you can see more seeds bravely showing themselves. Apart from the bush beans and rocket, I have carrots (orange and purple), radish (they grow so quickly, we'll be eating them in salad in a month), lettuce of all different sorts, red kale, spinach, beetroot and cucumbers, among other things. Give it another week or two and this bed will be a sea of green foliage!

I admit I find this time of the year when everything is sprouting so exciting. I can be seen wandering around the garden with my cup of tea, bending down examining what to some people may look like mulch... but I can see the tiny seeds coming up through the mulch and get a small thrill each time something new appears. Ahhh... Spring!

Chilli

Here's our little girl, Chilli.

She once ate all the chillis off a big jalepeno bush. Seriously.

My mulch brings all the worms to the yard!

I've been working so hard in the garden over the past week, I've not had time to update you all with the progress shots... so here's what's been happening at the Pink Flamingo (that's the nickname we've given our new house. Our previous house was known as Margaritaville, so we're sticking with the Vegas theme).

Firstly we filled it up with soil... and ran the drip lines:

Then I spent a morning putting the lupin mulch on the soil. This stuff is fantastic... it matts down better than pea straw, which tends to blow around a bit. And it will attract every worm in a 2 kilometre radius to your garden! (Shout out here to GM for the awesome title to this post)

I planted my first batch of seeds on Wednesday... by Saturday the first lot were up. Rocket of course wins the race... followed closely by the red kale and radish seeds. I'll keep you posted when the rest make an appearance.

Here I cheated and bought some seedlings. I can never be bothered raising my tomatoes from seed. I planted a couple of Grosse Lisse. I'm hoping to get my hands on some some Tommy Toe or Sweet Bite cherry tomatoes... and i might even try my hand at some of the heritage black tomatoes, just for some extra colour on the dinner plate!

And finally... the fruit trees went in! About six years from now... I might be able to harvest my first avocado! We planted a Hass and a Fuerte, so they can cross pollinate, along with a Satsuma and a Mariposa plum. The plums went into one hole... according to the people from the fruit tree nursery, this helps them cross pollinate as well as keeping the trees a little bit smaller.

We also put in a valencia orange tree... I can't wait to have a glass of freshly picked and squeezed orange juice for breakfast one day. And finally we put in a Black Genoa fig. Yum. Fig trees start producing very early.