Saturday, January 12, 2008

Holiday Roundup

Welcome back for 2008 and may it be a year of blessings for us all!

I've been having a pleasant holiday visiting relatives and friends, helping The Twig learn to swim, doing a bit of gardening (and garden eating -- hooray!). It has been a good holiday, but it's back to work for me on Tuesday.

Why Tuesday and not Monday? Because on Monday, The Twig is going to vacation care and The Sprig back to day care. I am having Mother's Day Off! I just hope I can figure out something nice to do with it. I suspect it will involve a Festival of Sydney event, or a visit to one of Sydney's cultural institutions, but we will see.

But what, you say, of Chookie's Back Yard?

  • The kikuyu invasion in the vegie patch became so bad that I sheet-mulched 4 square metres with newspaper, moo poo and lawn clippings. It has been planted with sweet corn, cucumber and watermelon seeds, which are not yet up. I have again attempted a perimeter planting of lemon grass, and some of them appear to have struck. Roundup has also been sprayed about with abandon so that I had somewhere to put the aforementioned lemongrass divisions.
  • Yesterday, the kids and I planted a small bed near the house with 'Teddy Bear' sunflower seeds and 'Cream' Californian poppies. We have fenced it to keep the chooks out; I Can guess how many sunflower seeds we'd have left if we didn't!
  • We have eaten our first tomatoes; I'm pretty certain some were 'Jaune Flammee'. The others were cherry-sized, but didn't look like the pictures of 'Tommy Toe'. The chooks got in and ate my first truss of 'Broad Ripple Yellow Currant'.
  • Other harvests have included 'Stringless Dwarf' and 'Italian Romano' beans, 'Spacemaster' and 'Mini White' cucumbers, and 'Golden Bantam' sweet corn. It has been a long time since I felt up sweet corn to determine its ripeness, and I've lost the knack -- three of the cobs were immature, but eaten by The Sprig nonetheless.
  • I have seen green chillies.
  • What can I do with perilla aside from making Asian-style salads? The plants are 60cm high!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would you like some comfrey plants as your barrier?
Darla

Chookie said...

Hahaha! No thank you!

Comfrey is a weed of legend. Interestingly, though, my Dad has had a plant for years and it has never spread. It is in a rather dry spot; perhaps the lack of water has kept it in check? Or perhaps he's never tried to remove it, therefore it is nice to him?

Anonymous said...

I have been using comfrey for years.
The only place it is out of hand is where DH rotary hoed it, after I warned him.
Where I have planted it, it has stayed put and not spread. Seems to me breaking the roots is the problem.
Darla