Growing Challenge Update #9

It's Sunday so it must be time to do another Growing Challenge update :-)

Phew! It was a busy week sowing seeds this week. Well, not really - for all the seeds I sowed for my tiny garden, it took me probably two 15 minute sessions, LOL. Well worth the tiny effort for the big rewards I hope to get :-) If I can fend off the snails that is (hurumph). Once again this week, I came out in one morning to discover three fat snails still sitting in my seedling tray, burping loudly after having grazed their way across my entire tray. Not. Happy. Jan. Revenge is a dish best served cold I am led to believe, and I am fairly sure that the sole of my right boot wasn't particularly warm at that hour of the morning...

Anyway, this week I sowed more Richmond Green cucumbers, California Wonder capsicum, Strawberry Spinach and Minnesota Midget Rockmelon seeds into cardboard toilet rolls to compensate for the ones the snails got to. Then later in the week I sowed Amish Paste and Brandywine Pink tomato seeds, Jalapeno chillies, Early Long Purple and Udamalapet eggplants (don't you love the name "Udamalapet"?), Cape Gooseberries and Lebanese cucumbers into cardboard egg cartons.


I've never grown any of the new seeds before, so I'm really racking up the "grow something new" points in the Challenge this year LOL. Lets hope they all do as well as the Golden Squash seedlings, which - in usual squash fashion - are practically growing before my eyes.

I also took advantage of the new garden beds my DH built me last weekend. He filled three of them with soil for me before he had to go back to work, so on Wednesday I planted out two of my Tommy Toe tomato seedlings, three Rouge de Marmande tomatoes, two California Wonder capsicum and four Listada da Gandia eggplants. DH has finished filling the remaining beds this weekend - as well as digging up a heap of grass, laying old broken pavers as stepping stones, and filling in the rest with gravel! When I get time, I'll be transferring my ginger, turmeric, galangal and cardamon out of foam boxes and into one of the beds, and planting out mini-watermelons into another.

In other garden news, the yacon has finally sprouted! Yay! I was at the point of digging it up to see if it had rotted, but nope, there's new growth poking through on all of the tubers I planted in the front yard :-)


One of the orange sweet potatoes is sprouting too, which is great...


... and the Queensland Arrowroot is coming along really well...


...but there's not a single sign of the West Indian Arrowroot or the white or purple sweet potatoes :-( Perhaps if I stop checking twice every day they might come up when I'm not looking, do you think? ;-)

On the up side, I have my very first raspberry forming on one of the bushes. That one's got my name on it ;-)


One of the Pinkabelle apples has started flowering too, and the other isn't far behind.


The land cress is also going to seed with a pretty yellow flower:


But I'm particularly enjoying the flowers on the chives, they make a lovely border around the strawberry patch at the moment :-)



Finally, yesterday I collected the seed from a lettuce that had self-sown in the garden and bolted straight to seed in the hot weather we've had recently. Talk about easy - the Seed Savers Handbook I got hold of recently advised to wait until the flower head was about 3/4 full of fluffy seed heads, then pick it and pull the fluffy bits out of the seed heads over some paper - the kids thought this bit was great fun ;-) You then separate the little grey seeds from the fluff and store them somewhere cool and dry, labelled of course. Neat-o.