seedlings

All posts tagged seedlings

That Old Chestnut- how to grow new Water Chestnuts from old

Posted by gardenpathfood on August 23, 2013
Posted in: Food, Spring foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Jobs. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

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Yep, I know, I haven’t put anything on here for quite a while but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy.

What you see above is the progression of the Water Chestnuts.

  1. When the tall reed like plants die off in winter (that’s about mid-June here), you put a tarpaulin out on the ground and bring over your tub of dead plants.
  2. Tip them out on to the tarp so the pile is upside down then start sorting through it. Rubber gloves are good here.
  3. Then pop the dirt back in the tub as you sort, and some of the small chestnuts you missed will probably go back in. You will be left with a lovely pile of the larger chestnuts. See that pile of lovely chestnuts in the middle photo.
  4. Pick out a couple of the smaller chestnuts and push them back in to the soil in the pot.
  5. Put a little of the old reeds on top for a little bit of protection, fill the tub with water and keep it topped up about an inch deep until the new shoots appear in about September (although as you see from the photos below, my chestnuts in the horse trough in the full sun shot a lot earlier.  That is all there is to it.  I got about 3 kilos from 2 of these  small tubs and I store them in a lunchbox in the crisper of the fridge checking every time I use some in case there are rotting ones. So far so good.  What I have will probably last us until Christmas for stir fries.

The photograph on the right shows the emerging spikes in mid-August.

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Beanie Babies escape Jack Frost

Posted by gardenpathfood on June 8, 2013
Posted in: Background Information, Eating Seasons, Food, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

It’s been a very warm winter so far and that is the only way I can account for the fact that I still have bulk tomatoes and that there are bean babies coming up in the garden.  You might have noticed that we have been eating butter beans for about 5 months now and in spite of it theoretically being winter, we are still getting a small crop. Beanie BabiesWhen the crop was very heavy, I must have let a few stay on the vine and during a recent dry spell, I found a lot of dried pods with great seeds in them so I have stored them for next summer but….some must have escaped my eagle eye and…we have babies under the frost covers.

For those who didn’t notice that we have been eating butter beans, I am starting some new pages which will record what we are eating/harvesting and what major activities I am undertaking for that month. Look for the page ‘This Month’s Harvest’.

So, the photo below shows the foods which I have been harvesting in this month, although I have forgotten the lemons and limes.  I’ll put them in next months’s photos just so you know.   

June Harvest

One Tough Capsicum

Posted by gardenpathfood on February 13, 2013
Posted in: Autumn foods, Eating Seasons, Food, Health, Links to other sites, Spring foods, Spring Jobs, Summer foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Winter Jobs, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

‘I had a little capsicum’,  and I still do.

This little capsicum has been in the garden for almost two years and spent most of last winter hibernating beneath a refrigerator box, but even then, it still produced the odd fruit. It has continued to fruit all through summer, just as it did all last summer.  It produces just enough to keep us going and since we eat them on salads and in stir fry and in casseroles, that it not a bad effort for the one little plant.Capsicum

And, it has produced babies with a little help.  I talked about that at http://wp.me/p2tNt0-32

The Gardening Australia website http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s1866669.htm suggests that capsicums are indeed perennial, but usually we treat them as an annual. I sometimes wonder how much of what we assume as home gardeners comes from commercial agricultural practices and how much we need to relearn to be really effective home vegetable producers.  The garden is really your best teacher for this so just get in there and give it a go.

The capsicum is also an attractive little plant, so given that it is actually a perennial and that it has lovely glossy green leaves and can have bright green, red, yellow or orange fruit, it is a plant that you could easily use as an ornamental in a spot in which you can protect it  in winter.  That is, if you get frost as we do.They grow easily in a pot and this probably ideal as the plant can moved in and out of shelter in winter for an all year round boost to both your food dishes and your immune system.

Raw capsicum  contains high levels of Vitamin C and also  beta carotene which converts to Vitamin A, a great immune system boost.

Strawberry slaughter

Posted by gardenpathfood on January 26, 2013
Posted in: Autumn jobs, Eating Seasons, Food, Spring foods, Summer foods, Summer Jobs, The plants in my garden, Work Season. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment
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Discarded plants waiting for a new home

Strawberries are tough old things.  It has been over 40 degrees a lot of days here but I decided to thin my strawberry patch and plant the discarded runners somewhere else.  To tell the truth, I wasn’t too concerned if they lived or not, I was more interested in rejuvenating my strawberry bed and getting rid of as many cooch runners as I could.  Once I’ve finished thinning, I will behead what’s left.  It’s gruesome but my strawberry patch will love me for it.

Well, I forgot to water the ones I planted out but luckily a week or so later, we had our own personal town flood with 140 ml overnight just for us and no one else outside a ten kilometer radius.  Gotta love this weather.

Those poor little transplanted strawberries which had brown crunchy leaves, started to produce new leaves in their centres  et viola, I have a new strawberry patch in the outer garden.  How good is that!

So now, instead of the punnet or two punnets of strawberries we have been getting every morning for the last couple of years from August to Christmas, we can look forward to lots, lots more.

Strawberries are magic!

Spring has sprung

Posted by gardenpathfood on September 23, 2012
Posted in: Spring Jobs, The plants in my garden, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

It looks like the frosts are over are spring has arrived in a big rush.  It was 34 degrees yesterday and we’ve had our first thunderstorm of the season.

In one month we’ve gone from a frozen solar hot water system to thunderstorms and sunburn.

The good thing about this time of year is that the babies are out in the garden in full force.

The water chestnuts are poking their heads above water, the watermelon are up, and those tomatoes and capsicums I’ve nursed all through winter are well and truly producing.  Best things of all of course, are the strawberries and asparagus.

Those capsicum seeds that I sprouted in the worm farm have become two leaf plants in the garden and look quite sturdy, while the choko vine is already 1/2 metre tall.

Now, the greatest problem will be keeping the water up to the little plants.  They don’t need very much but they  need it fairly often as evaporation is pretty high and usually we are out of the habit of watering the garden as regularly as it suddenly requires.

I am off to build some little shade structures to try to stop my lettuce, spinach and cabbage going to seed quite so quickly, to transplant some very large tomatoes in to the garden from the pots they’ve been sheltering in all winter and to plant some corn.

Sci-Fi Worms

Posted by gardenpathfood on August 9, 2012
Posted in: Spring Jobs, The plants in my garden, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

My worms have recovered after their recent adventures, courtesy of the Dog, and I have made a wonderful discovery.

Hiding in the forest

Pumpkins love to sprout in the worm farm and so do capsicums and probably quite a few other things.

I end up with an absolute forest of pumpkin seedlings in there and the worms hide in there like elves in the forest, albeit snaky elves. I’ve observed these seedlings for a long time now and it will soon be time to plant them out, when the frosts are almost gone, so I thought I would see if capsicum seeds would do the same.

These seeds are fairly small, so I put them in a garlic bag, left over from that shooting garlic I had, and popped it in the worm farm.  Voilẚ,  I have capsicum seedlings starting.

Baby capsicums