Random Garden Updates – Maybe A Regular Feature?

So, the Spousal One and I would really, really like to one day have a small hobby farm. This is a Thing. It nearly actually became a Thing back in 2017, when we were the underbidders on a gorgeous hill’s worth of land, but alack.

We keep talking about this dream, though, and how, once we get some land, we want to chronicle its progress. In various conversations on the weekend, blah blah, context, details, I decided I’m just going to start doing garden updates here-and-now, with the hope and expectation that one day, I’ll have a much more exciting garden to blog about.

In the meantime, this keeps me motivated to tend what we do have 😉

So.

It’s growing season here in Australia, and if I’m going to plant a summer garden, I’m running out of time. The problems are that a) we are renting, so can’t add any new garden beds; b) what space we do have is Not Great Soil; and c) it’s tiny, so I can really only grow one or two things, which in Amy!brain makes me question whether it’s really worth the effort at all.

Which is silly, right, because a little of what you love is still better than none.

I have some herbs in pots doing alright, having survived my winter neglect – the sage and rosemary are doing great, the marjoram has survived – and all the fruit trees are started to get lil tiny fruit buds (if they haven’t already). The apricot isn’t as lushly covered as last year (they tend to have one great year followed by a quieter year, rinse-repeat) but there’s still a decent amount of fruit there for how tiny the tree is, and I’ve been delighted to see that the pear tree is, for the first time ever, bearing fruit! Yay, reaching the age of maturity!

We also have a bunch of tomato seedlings that we’ve started indoors (along with a bunch of other things from when one of the major supermarket chains was doing a ‘free seeds with every $50 purchase’ promotion last year, but the tomatoes are the only things that have actually come up), and I need to make A Decision about where they’re going to go outside and actually start hardening them off during the day and planting them out…

And then decide what I’m going to put in the small amount of space we have left.

Do I just double down on tomatoes, which at least we can preserve? (Spousal One makes GREAT pasta sauces, for example.) Do I throw in some beets, which are at least fast growing? (I’d do carrots, but the soil is too heavy and they’ll just end up mutilated.) Eggplants (aubergines) and capsicums (peppers) are options, but I’ve tried those (once) in the past and they needed a LOT of babying to get even tiny edibles. (Our soil is Not Great, did I mention that? :P) Lettuce and silverbeet would be useful, I guess, and the silverbeet did okay last year in the poor soil. (Usually, spring onions/green onions would be a gimme, but they did terribly in the soil we have here, so…)

…I guess that means it’s tomatoes, beets, and leafy things (silverbeet and lettuce) for now then, doesn’t it. Ha!

See? This is very motivating. Next weekend I’ll spread through some of the leaf compost we semi-accidentally made by coralling all of autumn’s leaf fall in a pen (should have spread this out a month ago to let it get into the soil before planting, but better late than never) and start hardening off the tomatoes, and then I’ll go get some lettuce and beets to add to the tomatoes, I guess.

And then sit down and write a second-daily reminder in my diary to water the plants, because if I don’t do that they’ll go a week between waterings and the seedlings will give up and die before they even have a chance :’D