The ecentric Pom and his Pumpkins - And tickling Tomato Flowers

The garden seems happy enough .. .Getting “weedy” again as our 4hr a fortnight so called gardener has been put on hold indefinitely ....Though I think we may get him back if only to keep the weeds down where I’ve worked ...

Pumpkin Hiding...Shot from Kitchen Window

Not that I’m doing anything like manual work at the moment ... Two weeks now I’ve been in trouble with a very painful and stiff Lower back. As per previous entries I slipped while carting a large bag of compost to the top of the vegetable patch ... Anyway – thought it was getting better but last night I woke up in agony and even more pain when I tried to get out of bed to go the loo.... Spasms had me crying out and hobbling like a cripple to the toilet .. And that was the end of the nights sleep of about an hour and a half. I gave up and went to the living room and watched TV and dozed a little ... McD was up around 6am worried about me and then off she went to the chemist to get me some stronger pain killers ...which worked ok really .....

So didn’t do much today ... read my gardening book McD bought me (as noted in her blog) and the newspaper and so on ........But we did visit the vegie garden !! Of course !! and McD duly measured the Pumpkin 131cm circumference – about 52 inches ......But the weather has gone mad and we are jumping around temperature wise ..really cold some days really warm others ...and now rain and humidity .... And it goes without saying – the start of the mildew on the pumpkin leaves and the cucumber leaves ..... Autumn is coming early to New Zealand..Well Wellington anyway

I’ve never seen so many cabbage white flutterbyes in the garden !! Talk about homing in on the cabbages etc .... Damn them and their greedy offspring ...

Tomatoes – now ripening .... We’re loving it eating them in sandwiches straight off the vine....But am disappointed with a number of the heirloom plants not setting fruit ...Just not a good season for them perhaps ....

McD thinks I'm a nutcase...No It's true !! Writing in her blog about the Eccentric Pom and his perversion for tickling tomato flowers etc !!!(McDinzie)

However, I’ve been proven right in some of my antics at least due to a certain book McD bought me ...... Conversations have often turned to the vegie garden between McD and Me as we travel too and from work each day... Generally all is fine and MCD often quietly listens as I plod on about having to do this or do that , or reminisce about my early days working with my father (who was a gardener himself) ... McD takes it in and then after a while you get the comments about how i’m so eccentric and “I can’t believe you want to do that !!” My recent talk on pumpkins and now almost daily measuring and feeding of said plants has shown McD another side of me perhaps .... A recent intellectual debate we had on the need for me to build shade frames over the tomatoes went something like

“Must build Some shade frames this winter for the tomatoes next spring season “

“Never!”

“This winter”

“Never!”

“This winter”

“Never!”

“This winter”

“Never!”

“This winter”

And so on – Stimulating discussions of that sort just enliven us after a hard days work being responsible managers in Highly demanding jobs ....

Such a conversation would possibly last the 40 minutes drive home, however we were already half way there so some faster thinking was called for

“Never!”

“This winter”

“Never!”

“I’m bigger than you, you know, and I’ve fought world champion Martial Artists”

“Flower Tickler !!!!! “

Well...Really, there is no right response to such an accusation driven home at you with the sharpness of a javelin piercing the sternum .......

The next morning or so, the conversation turned to the fact I had spent hours reading my google searches on blogs and news articles of vegetable growing and allotments and noting that I had really picked up nothing new from them. Then also noting that the sets of books I’ve bought held little as well...Mostly too basic and too geared up for the newer vegie gardener or written by wanna-bee so called master gardeners whose knowledge didn’t extend past what was learned at the local night class ......

Anyway McD again duly noted this and went off in search for a suitable book for me. And found one. Written by an old bald Kiwi with a lifetime of experience, Wally Richards, “Wally’s down to earth Gardening Guide”. The man is in the know, up to date and while the book is not specifically a vegie gardening book as it is a general gardening book he covers a heap of topics in a truly down to earth way.. And a local radio gardening expert as well .... Suddenly “tickling” tomato flowers was proven as being acceptable to McD and the need for a wider range of elements in the soils such as calcium was suddenly not only accepted but essential for our own plants ....

McD retracted just a little of her thoughts on me in her next blog entry (Mcdinzie) ........Though I have to admit that living with a Pom ..Well this pom in particular, must be one of the strangest things MCD has to endure :O) But at least she gets to have a laugh with it as well :O)

And of course we are eating the fruits of our labours daily as more and more tomatoes and cucumbers and the rest become ready for harvesting.

A Very Ugly Heirloom Tomato

Of course I have to admit that the desire to grow giant pumpkins is an eccentric activity.... At 134cm circumference they are yet to satisfy me in that the record breakers are huge monsters 666KG !! They look like huge orange alien pods ...... And of course MCD still wonders how we are to weigh them ....But she now feeds them and measures them and helps me build a platform for the one hanging by a vine on the side of the bank.....

Perhaps such eccentricities are catching :o)

I’m fed up with work ... Too much on....Too much politics.... But not likely I’ll get another job in this economic climate ..... Won’t be stopping me trying though and I’ve sent my CV to one agency and will do the same to another next week ......

Meanwhile the drugs are wearing off and this sitting at the keyboard is hurting like hell .... Time for a mug of tea, painkillers and bed perchance to dream ..............

A Year in My Garden - Tomatoes ala SFG

One of the important things with the Square Foot Gardening technique is the spacings of plants ... These are a lot closer than you would normally do in the traditional line by line garden... So for example you can grow 16 radishes in one square foot or 16 onions or 4 broad beans etc .... Tomatoes, it is listed as 1 per square foot ... Well thats what I thought it said ... It's actually 1 per square foot in a line of 4 ...Then you can grow the up a trellis and they have plenty of space front and back .. just not so good a spacing side to side ..... 

 

But I read 1 per square foot. And I planted a raised bed with 25 tomato plants .... It wasn't long before I realised this wan't such a good idea..Crowding of the leaves soon happened along with leaves yellowing badly from fungal growth ( i think) being wet and humid here in summer .... 

I also then went on to create two other raised beds on the front yard to grow even more plants ...I'm trialing a number of heirloom plants ..... And of course ther were all planted at 1 plant per square foot .....

 

They had to be staked as well of course and a cane stuck into a little over 6 inches of friable soil over tarmac was not going to hold a 6 foot plus plant and 6 or so trusses of fruit ..... 

 

There are cages you can buy for tomato plants and that was an option ...but for 50 something plants !!... 

 

And so this is what I've come up with ... A cage covering the whole tomato plant area... The canes are pushed in at an angle both ways so that as the plants grow up them they grow further and further apart from each other .....

 

Not a pretty look ...But it does seem to be doing the trick. It's allowing more space and its staying upright in the quite heavy wind we've had the past few days ... 

 

I had to do something with the base of the plants and the leaf die off. I needed to get an air flow through them (being windy wellington and on the side of a hill should be too hard a task) and so simply pruned the leaves away for about the first foot of the plants... I've seen commercial growers go further and take almost all the leaves off of tomato plants as it encourages more flowering ... But leaves produce sugars from the sun and photosynthesis and thats what I want in my tomato fruit...the taste of the sun.. ....Anyway they don't seem to be shy in flowering at the moment so higher leaves stayed on... 

 

I should also have cut the flowers from the lowest part of the stems to stop the fruit forming and lying on the soil ...But I didn't ...And now the fruit is starting to ripen I've had to prop them up off the ground ..not hard to do ..just time consuming and a pain in the butt...

 

This is one of two raised borders directly onto tarmac in the front yard ..... (The neighbours must thing we are pretty odd people ....)  8 inch wide planks of macrocarpa ....2 inches of straw on the bottom to retain moisture ...6 inches of compost soil ...The tomatoes are growing well and fruit set is growing well too... but the heat is a drawback and does suck the moisture right out of the soil .... Oh and I've two egg plants in the corners loving the heat .....

Oh and the other thing I did back in november was to buy a dozen plants from a church fundraiser (money maker and russian red).. Which is fine except that the 6 russian red are bush tomatoes not vine.. And not knowing I cut off all the lateral shoots (I thought there was a lot) ...Not so good a practice for bush Toms (but they would have rotted in the crowded bed anyways if I hadn't) ...so I will get a reduced harvest from them this time (not that we'll notice if all the others set fruit) ... I've let some of the side shoot grow higher up though where they have more space anyway albeit a top heavy plant they will be .... 

 

Meanwhile the heirloom plants don't seem to set the fruit too well compared to the others ...they are also more likely to have fused flowers (which is where the giant tomatoes in competitions come from) .. We also have some leaf curl in those plants .. .doesn't seem to bad and maybe more climatic or envirmental rather than virus/bacterial .. but I will research that tomorrow and see if anything can be done .....

Open to suggestions of course from those knowledgeable ones :O) The plants are watered daily ...

 

  Top tomato skin is shiny and smooth ... Bottom variety are almost hairy and dulled by the fuzz on them ....

And then there is the monarch catapillar .... We especially bought a defoliated swan plant just for getting a catapillar for the garden ... works out about $4NZ a catapillar !! :O) Since then we have two very happy monarch butterflies continously flying around the flower beds ...They love the dahlias etc ... more food than they could have ever wished for and a small forest of swan plants for their own catapillars ....

 

 Err - the left side is the head side ... You don't want to know what I saw coming out of the right side ......:O) But that must have been a lotta swan plant leaves eaten !! :O)    

A Year in My Garden - Gardening Despite Dumb Practices

I'm not well ... Last  weekend was the Wellington Anniversary weekend and monday a public holiday and i was ill right through it  .....

Felt a lot worse again  yesterday ...a Sore throat, aches, stingy eyes, tired ..... Better today .. Today I just have a Sore throat, aches, stingy eyes, and I'm tired 

It was raining at the weekend anyway ....So thats alright then .... I'd not been outside of the house. McD did ..She did a small shopping run and then paid a little visit to the vegie garden for a cabbage ....

 

 

McD slices it up and stir fries it with a little butter and a lot of ground pepper..... Then she adds roast chicken, roast potatoes and Kumera, Cauliflower from the garden and lashings of gravy and Bobs your uncle (that you never like to talk about ), you have a meal that rivals any meal in the swanky Wellington city restaurants and at a fraction of the price .... 

 

Won't reduce the waist line much though ......

 

I could eat it again now ... except it's 11:30pm and almost time for bed (as Zebadee once said) ....

 

 

But this weekend is fine and sunny...and the waikanae gardens are open for viewing....And in the week McD put her back out ...So she's walking around like there's an ironing board up the back of her blouse....And neither of us have slept for 3 or more nights now ....  

Anyway ......

The vegie garden has kept us stocked of food for weeks .. If the tomatoes were ripe and the bell peppers had actually grown more than a millimeter or two this past few weeks we would be amost self sustaining as far as vegetables go ... (Dunno know why ...They didn't move at all in the raised beds ... I've some in pots around the place that are the size you would expect and are in flower ...The raised bed ones are pale and still look like seedling ... Time to throw them out me thinks ....)

 Well that and the need for more room to grow more root crops such as the potatoes, kumera etc ... and perhaps carrots we could leave to grow to full size... But boy are they tasty carrots picked at 'gourmet' 'finger' size ... The Paris MArket are ideal for the raised beds as they grow round rather than long. Nutri Reds are my favourite but the white Belgian carrot, Purple Dragon and the karoda orange ones are sweet and tasty as ....  Well tasty as carrots of course...

 

Pumpkins .. I built a box against the side of the bank in the sunniest position and filled it with compost and horse manure and straw... and when it settled I planted two Pumpkin plants - oh and without thinking also planted a scallopini ...or maybe a butternut pumpkin .( So much for me labelling everything.. Dumb eh,  kind of, as you don;'t want that pollinating your oversized pumpkin ... So until I have the required numer of set fruit on the main pumpkins the male flowers of the unknown pumkin thingy are being sacrificed ...

 

*****  The update on this is that I've just found a very healthy small cucumber on the supoposedly scallopini plant .... We are very dumb gardeners ...Cant even label plants properly ...

 

Anyway

The idea was to grow the largest pumpkin I can, just for the hellovit... Pumpkin seeds bought from our trademe (kiwi E-bay equivalent) site ..Called "first prize" and came with claims of fruit up to and over 140 kg .. We'll see..Not that that comes anywhere near the 1,000 LB plus world record sizes .....

 

 

Anyway

The fruit I do have set is bright yellow rather than the orange I'm used to. I guess it changes as it ages that or I've been done ....McD is still asking the question "how do you get a 100kg+ pumkin down the hill to weigh it ??" Thats a problem to worry about in april/may says me :O)  We can always push them off the edge I guess and roll them down ....

 

And weigh the pieces :O)

 

 

 

But at this point the biggest is at basket ball size and will have to be removed because of its location far too close to the centre of the plant... The vines have taken off. One, as wanted, went up the side bank and is now making its way along the fence line ... if I can just get a fruit to set there that will be great ....

 

 

The other vine is heading down the hill, snaking it's way through grass and regenerating gorse to the house ...Which would sort out the transportation issue in april/may .. except it has decided to set fruit half way down hanging from the side of the hill ...Will have to bring the vine back up I think to a flat bit ....

 

 

 

 

 

I planted and tended for a number of climbing bean varieties.. ANd none of them have done well ... Don;t know what it is ..I even had one or two die back at around 5 feet high on the canes ... Some are finally looking more like a happy climbing bean plant, but the harvest will be small from them this season.

 

 

 

 

 

Courgettes/Zuccinis ... Well what ever it was that McD bought they are growing large, weighty, marrows a plenty ... By the time the female flower opens the friut is the size of a average courgette...by its flowered and you look again its now looking like a small marrow ...blink again and you have dark green, fat torpedos hanging over the raised bed.... 

 

McD and I made some marrow chutney as we have a glut of marrows .... First chop about 3 1/2 pounds of marrow the recipe says .... "Shall I go up and see if we have any smaller ones up there? " I ask .......   

Anyway

 The chutney turned out ok... A little too sweet for my liking ...One recipe was to have dates added to the ingredients ...Well thats just jam at that point people !! so we missed the dates out .... Although the end result, with the sugar caramelising as it cooked, does have a slight "date" after-taste to it .... 

The next recipe is with tomatoes which I think is a good idea .....

 

TAlking of which I must write about my tomato rearing escapades next time ......

 Meanwhile, we now have a few squares empty as we harvested the last of the broad (fava) beans and pulled out the plants ...along with harvesting garlic (Type unknown. Again from trade me. Found growing at the top of the south island and now propogated for sale. It's a wonderful garlic .. .not too heavy and overpowering in flavour just right and great for cooking with ). We;ve also havested the egyptian onions  and are ripping into the various coloured beetroot...... . 

So tomorrow is plant up the vegie garden day ... Some for eating in a few weeks and some for the longer term autumn/winter harvesting .....

 

 

 

 

 

Spose I should hit the hay then and get better .......As you can see in the pictures there is a major tidyup needed as well. The grass is growing high and I want to get the paths done with weed mat and bark ....   

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

">

 

 

A year in my Garden # 13 - Square foot Gardening

I don't think I've written anything on the whats and hows of what McD and I are doing with the vegetable garden ... In previous entries you've seen the gorse clad hillside at the top part of our garden (as high as our two storie house ). The vision has been to remove the gorse forest and create a vegetable garden. The problem with that is the plot slants not only from north to south (in the southern hemisphere thats not ideal) but also slants from west to east ...Add to that the fact that there is perhaps an inch of soil only ..then thats on top of solid clay. Though fortunately mostly very rocky shale-like crumbly clay. Mostly.

The obvious thing for us to do was to create a set of raised beds where we could level off sections of the bank easily and so create a set of gardens all accessable from the paths and all filled with the best mixed soil we could get ...

The fun then of course was that we had to cart soil and timber from the entrance at the base of the house up a climbing pathway to the back of the house using a wheel barrow and then soil in two handled buckets climb the stepped pathway through a small wood to the vegie garden the height of a two story house ...

Fit !! Let me tell you its the best but most tiring, aching, painful fitness session possible :O) Thighs like tree trunks we now have and just as hard :O)

It still looks rough.. We still have a number of raised beds to put in place. Our terrible wet winter and now spring has slowed us down and delayed everything. Weekend after weekend rained out, too muddy and dangerous to do anything....

But now we have a number of beds in place and filled with vegetables ...And Strawberries :O) I'm trying to use only heirloom varieties of vegetables ...So far the seeds bought from individuals via "trademe" etc (NZ Ebay equivalent) has been fine with more than adequate germination ...I thought it might be far less ......

We are using the "square foot gardening' method devised some twenty years ago by Mel Bartholomew, but probably taken from the French intensive gardening in existance for far longer ... by the by really, the SFG book was an all round success and twenty years later he has revised and republished his book. It's well worth getting ... The basic principle is that you divide your bed (he recommends raised beds of only 6 inches deep!!) into 1 foot squares(hence the blue string across the beds in the pictures). Then he plants accordingly different vegetables in each square depending on size etc ...So 16 radishes or 4 lettuce heads of 1 cabbage and so on ... What you then get is a variety of vegetables (and flowers) that with succession planting can continue throughout the growing season. Without the book to hand at the moment (thanks to stepdaughter tidying up (for cash of course)) Mel reckons about 3-4x4 beds will keep a small family in vegetables and have some to spare ... We'll see ... You won't be storing additional potatoes etc for winter on that. We have a vegetable garden that when finished (and don't tell McD this - she should have read the book when I told her) will be in the range of 210 square feet almost 3 times that. So we will have a little more variety :O) and some to spare for the Son & Stepdaughter (just where can she have hidden my Book dammit) ......

Of course that doesn't include the Strawberries in a pot AND also the potatoes in Buckets and Dustbins..... (see previous entries).

As we've built the beds we've planted them immediately ..no point having them empty. So we have garlic and egyptian onions and cabbages and the like all ready growing some since june (this really has been a laborious exercise)

The Broad Beans have flowered.. A handsome flower indeed ... And the Bumble bees agree I'm glad to report ...Broad beans for Christmas day I hope ......

Courgettes or zuchinis ... Mel advocates growing them vertically up a frame ..... As with many plants.. Vine tomatoes etc ...

Tomatoes - We all know about burying them deep - up to their first leaves to promote additional rooting... You can also bury them almost horizontally up to their necks for the same reason ...This shallower planting though has the roots in the top of the soil which is much warmer - and so faster rooting ... I doubt its needed in raised beds so some are planted horizontally the rest deep planted ... we'll see ... It's surprising how quickly the head of the plant will bend itself vertically and head for the sky ..no need to try and force them and rich breaking ...

In the front - My giant Pumkin seeds !! at the back cucumber seeds ....

And then there's the rest of the garden - Spring flowers .... Spring scents and a strangely misplaced Mug of tea !!!

This is a NZ native orchid growning on the bank ... there used to be more :O\ only about the size of your little finger

Jim the "so called" gardener informs us we shouldn't plant the dahlias until November... The dahlias have other ideas .... This from the man who left a whole dahlia bed to rot for us over winter ...long story - we aint happy ....

He comes for 2 hours each fortnight to clear weeds and do odd jobs etc ... Great but he's cost us $$$$$ in lost plants .. (Stay Calm djd...., breathe deeply....I am at one with nature and the universe..breathe deeply ....I do not want to do violence to ex ozzie immigrants ....breathe breathe breathe )

Damn those slugs & snails ...

Sunset from our balcony

The end of the day ... Now where's the sofa and a G&T !!!

vegetable garden, square foot gardening, potager garden, kitchen garden, allotment, pictures, Photography,