The garden is in bloom.
You only have to blink at this time of year and the garden can get away from you. By which I mean that the weeds suddenly.....almost over night....run wild and completely take over. Thankfully I have a secret weapon....Lizzie.....the dynamic weeder! I point her at the garden, set her loose and she's like a tornado tearing through those weeds leaving me with a nice clean garden bed to replant.
It's almost the end of October. November is just round the corner and is the last month of the New Zealand Spring. Soon will come the heat and dryness of summer and the weather man is saying we're in for a very dry summer. Having said that, he also said that the last 3 days we were meant to be having heavy rain. We've had blue skies and sunshine and temperatures between 22 and 26 degrees C. AND guess what the weatherman predicted for today? Rain and thunderstorms. So I've been weeding and re-potting some seedlings into bigger pots in the bright sunshine. Who knows what the weather will do....we gotta have rain sooner or later though....surely.
This morning I've been taking lettuce and tomato seedlings and re-potting into individual small plant pots. They will go back into the cold frame for a week or so longer before I plant them into the garden proper.
I already have 14 tomato plants in a garden bed out the front of the house and another 5 plants in a mixed bed with beetroot, turnips, radishes, carrots and onions....and a couple of large parsley plants out in the garden behind the house. I have another 14 or 15 tomato plants ready to plant out in another bed out front, once I have cleared out the old lettuce and celery plants....a job for either later this evening or first thing in the morning when it's not quite so hot.
Our runner beans are doing OK. The first lot I put in have suffered a little frost damage on some of their leaves, but are otherwise doing OK and climbing up the framework. I have 5 large frames of runner beans combined with French beans this year. If the slugs and snails will leave them alone I should have a good crop from them.
My spuds are all up and showing plenty of top.....hopefully there will be some new potatoes developing under the soil as I want to dig some of these up for Christmas lunch. There's nothing quite like new potatoes in melted butter and rosemary.
I've also been busy moving plants and trees around the garden. The guava was in the way of one of my strawberry beds, so now it's been placed in it's own big planter. Hopefully it will take well to the move and thrive.
Thanks to my father-in-law and his neighbour, I had a bit of new wood to split and stack ready for next winters fireplace.
And I've been saving seeds from the spring onion plants. It's amazing how many seeds a single onion can produce when let to go to seed. One seed head will give me hundreds, if not thousands of seeds......some of which I have already put into seed trays for this seasons crop.
Something has been attacking my peach-cot tree, but otherwise all the fruit trees are looking pretty good. The citrus are nearing the end of their run (and starting to bud for the next lot of fruit) and the peaches will be the next taxi off the rank.
The strawberries are coming along nicely and I am almost positive that we'll be able to pick our first breakfast of them tomorrow. Yay!
I love summer fruit. The cats....ours and the half dozen belonging to our neighbour's seem to want to use my strawberry beds as their toilet....so I've been busy building up edges around the garden out of bits of wood and old hosepipe and then pegging nets around them to protect (hopefully) the strawberries.
My cat however has been trying to use the net as a hammock. Guilty Hector....even if you do look angelic.
The raspberries have gone crazy.....abundance in Spades! They are still in the process of transitioning from flower to berries, but there should be thousands of them. The plants have been alive with bees pollinating away like the true little workhorses that they are.
I covered the raspberry canes with bird netting and on one frame of raspberry plants the growth rate has been exceptional.....so much so that the canes have pushed through the top of the netting.
I may have to put an extra net over them once they stop growing. The other two netted raspberry frames are just fine. Growing well, but not overly tall.
This post however isn't just about the veggies and fruit.....the garden is in bloom with lots of flowers. They help attract the bees to the other plants. So here are a few pics of the blooms in the garden...or the garden in bloom.
So that's all for this post. Unless anything dramatic happens in the garden, I'll do another update in 4 to 6 weeks.
Until then, Life is Good.
