It was like a horror film for gardeners...

It was a hot and still night towards the end of February. The kind of evening in which electricity crackles in the humidity and hairs on the back of your neck stand up making you feel like something is about to happen. Something happened to me. Something very, very bad. This is the story of the nightmare on my street:

 

 

Now, this is a nightmare in two parts... so stay with me here! Above is what you call root knot nematode. Try saying that one five times fast! Soil is full of all sorts of nematodes, little microscopic things that live in the soil and generally do good things. This one doesn't do good things. You can see what it did to the roots of my cucumber, it gets inside them, lays eggs and stops the roots from transporting water and nutrients to the plant. Bad. Very bad.

 

So, apart from sinking to my knees in the garden and shaking my fist at these horrid critters, I sent the photo off to the delightful Sabrina Hahn... who came back and confirmed my not-so-delightful suspicions about the RKN (for short). Unfortunately there's not many ways to get rid of the RKN from your soil. In the old days they used to fumigate the soil with some horrendous and dangerous chemical that you probably can't even buy now. So my only options were to plant out a field of marigold or mustard. Here's my mustard patch:

 

 

Not to bore you with details... the mustard exudes a gas from its roots, which drives the nematode away. Sabrina told me to leave it about three months (I was sobbing at this point, because I was just about to plant out all my Autumn vegetables, being one of the most important seasons in the food garden and I was powerless to plant anything!) then slash the mustard plants and dig them into the soil. As the plants break down, they also exude some gas and hopefully drive those little suckers away!

 

But the nightmare didn't end there. I went through the vege garden and pulled up deformed carrots, ripped out the cucumbers, which were still trailing their way up the tree, and all of the other plants in the bed, ready to sow a mass of mustard seed. Then I got an email. It was from the Garden Guru television show. They want to come and do a profile and film my garden. IN TWO WEEKS.

 

I was back to the sobbing stage by then. All I had was a bed of mustard to show! What was I going to do? I can't plant anything and my garden is barren. Still, they insist it will be ok and want to come around.

 

Here's my confession. I have cheated. I like to grow most things from seed. But with two weeks until filming, I don't have time. I went to the nursery and bought punnets of vegetables. I planted them, but I'm still worried about the nematode, so I have planted everything with rows of mustard in between, to help out. See below:

 

 

So I have spent the past week frantically trying to get my barren patch of nematode-ridden soil looking like a vaguely productive garden. I have been feeding it up with worm castings and seaweed solution, I'm trying everything to spur those plants along! (Apart from using synthetic fertilisers, of course!) So there's my dilemma. I will keep you up to date with how things are going in the lead up to my Garden Guru debut. Hopefully it won't include shots of me staring at my soil, quietly sobbing to myself!

Tree cucumber?

Like my wonderful fig-sharing neighbour, I too have been sharing the food garden bounty! As the tomato plants have started to die back and I pulled out the dead corn stalks (it was just too hot this summer to grow the beans up the dead corn stalks) some of the other vegetables are just coming into their own. Like these Lebanese cucumbers that are so vigorous, they're climbing our bottlebrush tree:

Now we have cucumbers hanging out of the tree!

Cucumbers are a bit like zucchini in the way they like to hide and secretly grow into giant monster vegetables. I can monitor their growth from my kitchen window and when I see one is the perfect size for picking, I go and hunt for it. Do you think I can find them, though?? How do they do that?!

Consequently, we're eating a LOT of cucumber, which is great because it's such a tasty vegetable. We eat it in chicken and salad wraps, I make it into salsa, I make a chunky tzatziki by mixing cucumber cubes with Greek yoghurt, fresh mint and crushed garlic, it makes a wonderful side dish for bbq lamb cutlets, another recipe with yoghurt, I mixed diced cucumber with halved cherry tomatoes in yoghurt with some chermoula spice mix. Yum! Of course there's always cucumber in vege stir fry, salad and of course, the jug of Pimms. But a family of two (the beagles don't like cucumber as much as they like other vegetables) can only consume so much cucumber. So I have been leaving a few specimens with my (non-food growing) neighbours with the last of the cherry tomatoes and an invitation to help themselves to basil or herbs from the herb patch to make up a salad.

The picnic

Going to Perth's outdoor cinemas in summer is one of my favourite things to do. Last week I packed up a picnic and we went to see a comedy with some friends. As the sun went down, we snacked on a whole range of things from my garden:

 

 

We had delicious home-grown and home-made; basil pesto, semi dried tomatoes with thyme and garlic, mini zucchini and bacon quiches... and at the top of the picture are slices of fresh cucumber, with a dollop of cream cheese mixed with chopped chives, with smoked salmon on top, finished with a sprig of dill. Fresh and delicious. The picnic was a big success!