Sorry have been a bit busy this week, will have some other updates soon..
But for now, here is an update on my Zucchini! They are enormous!
Little kitty checking them out – they are nearly as big as she is, and she is pretty rotund lol.
The patch is looking a little ratty now but there are plenty more enormous friends growing in there.
Made a Zucchini soup with these two, plenty of herbs and a few potatoes.
Zucchini plants have gone nuts!
There are some lettuces – the ones the chickens did not get to when they escaped to the “outside world” while I was giving them a treat before leaving for work – and I could not get them back in. Out of 5 only 2 lettuce survived.
A couple of secret tomato plants have sprung up. I did not plant any – these plants grow from the seeds the chickens have eaten.
The yellow Zucchini are not quite as successful as the green ones. This could be because instead of growing just one zucchini at a time, they are trying to grow many!
So that is a yay!!
It has been a long time since I have blogged here but I am still reading the majority of the blogs I always did in my google reader – I don’t have the time I would like to comment but believe me I am still there keeping up with your goings on.
My goings on – not a great deal. I hibernated for the winter. The chooks got their large “free range” area (how can it be free range if they are locked in a pen lol) but it is a huge space and they really enjoy it out there. Well they did until we put the sand down – now they think we have done something bad to their space and are kinda freaking out about it. They’ll get used to it, like humans, chickens are not a fan of change.
Once a month or so we make a trip up to Sydney to visit Costco and Ikea and all the amazing food places I am always reading about on the food blogs. Wow there has been an explosion in that, hasn’t there!
I’ve planted some Zucchinis and lettuce and still have work to do on the rest of the garden – much weeding and removing of old plants.
That is when I planted them – here is how they look now – with added solar lights from Kmart –
They have baby zucchinis already! These are a yellow zucchini so look for the yellow thing with the zucchini flower attached. ;)
I’ll put up some pics now. :) So yeah, now it is as easy as typing the text in here and saving as a draft, and then using the iphone to upload my pics, probly you will hear from me more often. :)
I have never been a fan of regular lettuce. I prefer baby spinach or rocket. One day at the garden centre I found Mizuna which is apparently another kind of lettuce but I’d never heard of it, so I thought I would give it a try..
On the 11th of November this is little kitty sniffing them to see whether they are worth chomping on. She has a thing for grass and things that look like grass but she chose not to chew at these. They’d been in the ground for maybe a week.
I fed some to the chickens over the following days, picking from the centre of the plant as I hoped they would bush outwards a bit. This apparently encouraged them to flower. Here they are on the 22nd November –
And here they are just 3 days later on the 25th –
I had no idea they would flower. They taste great, and have the advantage of growing quickly and also tall away from the ground so they are easy to keep dirt free and rinse off when it is time to eat them.
According to Wikipedia they are resistant to cold and grown in winter in Japan, and you can eat them hot or cold. I’ll keep an eye out for them at the garden place and if I see more I’ll be buying them to plant in some of the large pots I have which are plantless. I think Mizuna would do great in a pot as well as in the garden and if it is close to the back door I can just pop out and cut some for salad.
The chooks absolutely love it – probably it is their second favourite green thing to eat after Kale.
This beetroot apparently has a complaint about the kitty climber planks we put over the top of it. But it has found a way to get to the sun in any case..
I discovered a mutant cauliflower. Well all of my cauliflowers have pretty much been weird but this one certainly takes the cake so far. I’m not growing them for me – they are for the chooks and the chooks don’t seem to mind the oddness, or the caterpillars which have (irritatingly) overtaken these plants.
We had a couple of super hot days and then quite a bit of rain. The plants seem to be loving it, I can see real differences between photos I took on Friday and photos I took today.
Newly planted, can’t wait to see how they do.. ;)
Even though it is a rainy day here today nothing keeps us from the awesomeness of the backyard for too long, so in a break from the downpour when it was just spitting and rain was falling like flakes of snow instead of water, I opened the door and the kitties rushed out, then I followed with a tomato and apple treat for the chooky girls.
The Other Half was doing some weeding around the water feature when he thought he saw the body of the fish which died a few months ago. Turns out it was not a body it was a live fish! It has been existing in there, feeding on algae for several months without us feeding it fish flakes. I gave up when I kept not seeing it and figured it had expired.
It does not like people so it just hides under the fountain part of the water feature and that is why we never saw it..
We did some re-shaping of the garden
I put in some beans, celery, pumpkin and mizuna as well as cat grass, cat nip and tansy.
These plants have not enjoyed great weather, they have been rained on extensively and have suffered a bit as a result. Here is hoping for some better weather so they can go forth and prosper like the rest of the garden.
Which as you can see, is doing quite well.
Except we are having a little caterpillar issue.
The chickens enjoy eating them!
I have a few updates – lets start with the garden..
It once looked like this.
It now looks like this.
A lot of weeds had sprung up, so I have been slowly weeding and mulching. This is the half of the garden I have completed. I’ve put down sawdust formerly from the chook laying boxes, and also Zeolite and rice husks formerly from the run and coop.
A slightly closer view – you can see how much the seedlings have grown. What you can’t see is that my zucchini plant has flowers and a baby zucchini on it! I spotted that while out there today but couldn’t get good photos.
Strawberry flowers!
The chooks have been enjoying greens from the garden for a few months now. When they see me get in there, they go nuts bagerk-ing and took took-ing, hoping that greens will come to them as a surprise.
As you can see, there is still some work to do.
Unfortunately the weather has now turned to shyte, so it may not be done as soon as I would like.
Yes, that is a storage box full of weeds which I removed from the garden. :)
There is also a chook free ranging tent. That will be the next update.