More Gardens

Most of our crops have finished for the summer.  We still have some eggplant maturing and we also have a whole garden of sweet potato that is coming along well but won't be ready till around April (I think).  A couple of weeks ago we planted an Okra and a Chilli bush.  We still have loads of basil, parsley, oregano and chives but that's pretty much it.  We pulled out the rest of the tomato plants and the silverbeet and fed that to the chooks.  We have a couple of pumpkin plants but no pumpkins yet.  This time last year we had about 7 pumpkins ready for picking so it's disappointing not to have any this year.  The bees haven't been doing their job at all.  Last year we helped the bees along and hand pollinated a lot of plants.  This time we haven't found as many open flowers so this has been a little hard to do.

 We've (mostly Garry) been working on improving the soil with loads of organic compost, and because our natural soil is basically clay we also add a lot of gypsum to break the clay down.  That with many wheelbarrows full of chook manure from the coop should do the trick.

We've added three new gardens which you can see in the photo above.  We decided to be economical and take the top layer of 3 of our existing gardens to create these 3 low gardens.  It is luxury to garden at hip height but the reality is the wood is expensive and the gardens require a lot more soil.  This way we have more gardens to grow our next crops. This year we are going to plan the planting a bit better and try to provide for the 2 of us for as long as we can.