Growing Tomatoes

One of my favourite plants in the garden is the Tomato. I've grown Tomatoes a few times now so I'm becoming familiar with their ways, but as I've discovered there's always more to learn.
When the weather started warming up in spring I noticed a number of tomatoes popping up which had self- seeded from the previous year. Great! No need to buy Tomato seedlings this year. So instead I decided to splash out on a bag of Tomato compost ($14 - Ouch!) and some Tomato fertiliser ($10).

So I dug up all the homegrown seedlings from various places around the garden and prepared the tomato bed for planting by loosening up all the soil. I then gave it all a general dressing of the fertiliser. Then it was time to plant the seedlings so I made a hole for each seedling about 10-12cm diameter and filled it with Tomato mix and planted directly into it.

I counted more than 25 seedlings so I knew I would either run out of space or of tomato compost before I'd planted them all, so I selected the most vigourous ones first. (Planting date: Nov 7)

Here are a few snaps of how they've done since then up until the other day...

I've been making a point of plucking out the laterals as they grow which encourages better fruiting and restricts their growth to one central trunk, meaning they grow upwards not outwards. This would be important as I realised I'd probably planted them too close together. Anyway, the plants are now as high as me and I'm nearly 6'3" (187cm). As you can see I've staked them pretty firmly.

If there's one lesson I learned this year with my tomatoes, it's not to be too stingey when it comes to buying seedlings. Although I thought I was pretty clever not having to buy seedlings, the trouble with self seeded tomatoes is that you never know what you're actually growing. I had no clue what varieties I was growing. As it turns out they're my least favourite variety and they seem to be all the same. And although the fruit appear to be forming nicely, my recollection of this variety is that the fruit is small and the skins are rather tough.

Anyway it's all good fun and rather satisfying. I'm sure we'll at least have something to bottle.

Florence Fennel - Fennel Bulb

My wife Izumi likes me to try all kinds of weird and wonderful things in the garden. She kept asking me to grow Fennel so I did. Our first crop of fennel grew fine but it wasn't the variety she wanted – she wanted the Bulb kind known as Florence Fennel. We needed to grow it from seed because the nurseries didn't sell seedlings of such an unusual plant. It's popular with the asians and is usually sold in Chinese vegetable shops. But it's quite expensive – that's why we tried growing our own.

So here it is:

 

Technically although it's often referred to as Fennel bulb it's not actually a bulb — it just looks like one, hence the name. The cats seems to love rubbing themselves against the foliage which smells sweet like aniseed.

We grew it over the winter months and harvested it in September.

Here's what Izumi did with it:

She sliced up a couple of oranges off the tree...

 Then mixed it in with the fennel (the bulb part) which was also sliced up...

 Then she added a few pitted olives...

I think she added some salt and pepper and some of Paul Newman's salad dressing and that's about it. It was very fresh and full of interesting flavours. It goes well with just about any kind of meat dish you can think of including fish, steak, sausages... whatever you like really.

My first attempt at Cabbage

I really enjoy trying to grow new things. This year I tried cabbage for the first time. I decided to get serious about feeding the soil and WOW what a difference it makes!
At the time I harvested this cabbage (November 28) the ones they were selling in the shops were only half the size and cost about $4. Based on that I reckoned this one was worth about 6 bucks. We cut it in half and gave half to a mate up the road who sometimes drops in with some fresh fish.
We got 2 or 3 meals out of that half cabbage, including a fresh coleslaw, a lamb neck stew (with cabbage of course – done in the pressure cooker), and something else which I can't remember now. Altogether we got 3 green gabbages and 2 purple ones, altogether valued at about $16-18 — not bad for a $3.50 punnet of seedlings.
However if I'm to be completely honest about it, it also took about $1 worth of fertiliser plus a half bag of compost which cost about $5/bag, then there's all the watering...

Still worth the effort I reckon. Very satisfying of course, plus we have the peace of mind knowing there were no sprays used.
I think I'll try that again...

Establishing the Top Garden

One of the bigger tasks I set for myself this growing season was to establish the Top Garden area properly. I knew it was going to take a lot of work because it was covered in scrub and other garden rubbish and that's just what was above the ground. Then came the really important part of establishing any new garden and that is: getting the soil right!
The top layer of soil was kind of loamy which is OK but not far below that was some serious clay and a few stubborn tree roots. I wanted to make sure my new gardens had a reasonable depth of soil as I intended to grow potatoes to begin with.

What it needed was organic matter so I got a mixed load of mushroom compost and organic compost. Having gotten rid of as much of the clay as possible I then mixed the remaining top soil with the compost. I made sure the garden would drain properly by sloping the solid clay underneath.
It was quite a workout which I had to do over a period of a couple of weeks just whenever I had the time. My aim was to have it ready for planting potatoes on Labour weekend (25 October) which I managed to accomplish.

The Economy of Space

In the city garden there are many pressures on space. So the time comes when even the most precious of plants needs to be removed to make way for other things. For example, several years ago, a long time before I got around to putting the vegie garden in, I planted a shrub called "Pride of Madeira" . 

Every year around spring it would burst into beautiful purple blooms. As the years went by it got bigger and bigger and the display of colour became more and more spectacular as it grew in size. 

However my vision for the garden has changed since I first planted it and now it's turned out to be in the wrong place. As much as I would've loved to have kept it, considering the fact that it flowers for only about 2-3 weeks of the year and in view of the amount of space it takes up, I could no longer justify keeping it – in the afternoon it casts a big shadow over part of the garden.

So, out came the axe… and that was the end of it!

Thinking Laterally

How to turn the simplest job in the garden into a complicated one... 

Connecting 2 Hoses

Having added 2 new gardens at the far end of the property I came to realise that my hose wasn’t long enough to reach them and they were desperately in need of water. A simple enough problem to fix you might think... All I needed was a simple hose connector for joining 2 hoses together like the one pictured... 

As usual, despite the fact that I do keep all sorts of bits and pieces around the place I couldn’t find what I needed to do the job. It seemed rather a waste of time and effort (not to mention carbon credits) to go all the way to the shop to buy such a seemingly insignificant item. 

After turning the shed upside down looking for what I needed I discovered I had a number of other hose connecting paraphernalia including 2x 3-way hose connectors and at least a half dozen end bits – but what could I do with them? 

This is what I came up with...

As it turned out the whole exercise took about an hour which is longer than the time it would’ve taken to go to the shop and buy what I needed.

By the way, in case you’re wondering how I was able to take a photo of the connector I needed, I actually found one a couple of weeks later when looking for something else I needed! 

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Christening the BBQ

Labour Weekend (Oct 23-25) marks the beginning of the BBQ season for many Kiwis. I'd been looking forward to christening the new barbie since I finished building it last summer. So it was great to finally be able to do it and the weather was perfect. I started the fire about an hour before the guests arrived so there was a good amount of embers ready for cooking by the time they arrived.

The Ti tree I used was great. Being a hardwood it creates really hot embers that retain the heat well. There was a good variety of food to cook including chicken, steak, boorevors sausage, potatoes wrapped in tin foil and a huge snapper that my mate Bruce caught the day before, which we also wrapped in tin foil. The whole evening was pretty good for a trial run although darkness came all too soon making it difficult getting back to the house for some of the guests. There was about 15 people to cook for altogether including 3 kids. I'm thinking that cooking for a larger group (20-30+) will be quite challenging, but that's my next goal for later in the summer. I might have to organise a few lanterns as there's no power out by the barbie which is a good 30 or 40 metres from the house.

This is a Boerewors sausage before it's cooked. If you look carefully you can see it cooking on the grill (all rolled up) on the right hand side nearest the foreground.