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Monday 4 January 2016

Benign Neglect

The soil, though bolstered by several buckets of chook manure and straw, is predominantly clay. The easterly aspect is sub-optimal (and the hill behind us makes it worse). The fences block access to the inquisitive chooks in only a theoretical sense. Despite these setbacks, the zucchini, tomatoes and lettuce are doing well (it is best not to dwell on the subject of beans, capsicum and cucumber). So well in fact, that they even survived without me for 10 hot summer days and almost no rain.

Garden on 21st of DecemberGarden on 4th of Jan

Most of the plants are fruiting and the signs are looking good that something edible might be produced!

Yellow zuchinniGreen tomatoes

The real test will be if they can survive now that I am here to look after them!

4 comments:

  1. Hi Damo,

    Your tomatoes are about the same size and the ones growing here - I'm 700m above sea level so it is pretty similar to your climate without all of the rain though. It will be interesting to hear what you reckon about the yellow zucchini.

    10 days without water and no rain is excellent for this time of year and no doubt not getting the afternoon sun helps a lot with that. I have problems with capsicum too as the growing season is not long enough, but a local person is growing a small variety which seems to do quite well.

    The straw and chicken manure mix is excellent and it is good to see that you have almost total coverage of the vegetable beds. At least the chickens will help eat some of the bugs that develop. Blue wrens live in the vegetable beds here and they annihilate every pest known to man!

    Incidentally your blog dropped off my reading list for some reason - who knows why? I do like the new format though.

    Once all this lot is done you can get mustard greens, broad beans, more lettuce, and brassica species in for the winter.

    Cheers

    Chris

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  2. We have a lot of Blue wrens about but unfortunately I never see them bouncing around the vege-garden. On the other hand, so far there has being no real bug problem so maybe they are doing their job!

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  3. Hi Damo, thanks for commenting to my blog; now I have found yours and have bookmarked it.

    That is some zucchini! Should keep you fed for ages. Have you ever tried the chooks on zucchini? I'm going to try mine on cucumber, I have so many.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, our chooks are pretty good and will peck at the zucchini. I think they prefer tomato though!

      I wish I had cucumbers, but none of the seedlings took this season.

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