Wednesday 7 May 2014

What's growing in the autumn fruit and veggie garden?

Last post was a bit all over the place, my apologies for that. It will take me a while to get over the loss of my beloved Quentin, so please bear with me. When I arrived home last time, I was greeted by this magnificent rainbow straight behind our property. To me it's a sign that Quentin is still around in spirit and I felt happy knowing he's here.
I planted some veggies when I was at home and want to show you around our autumn garden. For me coming from Germany, it's amazing to plant, grow and harvest fruit and vegetables in autumn and winter. I just love the Central QLD weather!

The Passionfruit is fruiting and flowering and is now really taking off.
Passionfruit flowers are just beautiful and it amazes me every time how they develop from a beautiful flower to a yummy Passionfruit.
Steve planted a Tropical Apple Tree for me. I cannot eat fresh apples from the Supermarket, they need to be organic as that wax layer give me a bad allergy. So I hope I will be able to harvest our own soon. Plus the birds and chooks love apples too, so we always have some in the house. I like the look of this tree as well, it has beautiful silvery-green leaves. A nice addition to our orchard!
I've been growing and harvesting eggplants. They were very easy to grow, maintenance free and one bush is more than enough for us two.
When I renovated the laundry, I recyled the laundry tub to a worm farm. I got the idea from another blog and thought it's a great idea! I collect the worm pee for the veggie garden and sometimes feed some worms to the chooks as well.
On top of the worm farm I have my 'solar dehydrator'. Currently I'm drying out chillies to grate them into chillie flakes. I might try chillie jam next, we have so many chillies! the Ringnecks loves them and I use chillies to make my worming mash for the chooks and birds.
This Lemon Tree is only little but it's producing an abundance of fruit. We love lemons! You can do so much with them - I can never have enough lemons.
I planted our autumn vegetables: Strawberries, Peas, Beans, Sugarpeas, Beetroot Capsicum and Silverbeet. The treated greywater keeps the gardenbed moist and I'm looking forward to harvesting and preserving.
In this gardenbed I planted 3 varieties of tomatoes, different kind of onions and corn. Curious how that goes. I've got some great ideas for the next growing season and will prepare some more gardenbeds over the autumn and winter period.
This Lemon Tree is just starting out to grow lemons and I've been busy removing flowers and fruit to grow it into a stronger tree first. Fingers crossed this is the right thing to do.
And this is our fruit orchard and veggie garden. I have about 10 different citrus trees here. As we have a rather large property, we need to mow this area by hand as we can't get the ride-on around the trees. My dear readers, do you have some ideas on how to transfer this area into a more maintenance-free area (in the sense of mowing). I'm looking forward to hear some suggestions form some experienced gardeners. I'm only a newbie and this is my second time I grow something, so I'm looking forward to some ideas. Thank you!
And this is looking at it from the other site. I think I will create a garden bed around the tank and plant the corn there but I'm open to suggestions.
As everywhere - there's beautiful views from the veggie garden to the mountains which I love so much!
More Lemons...
Yummy Blackerries are growing in the Chook Pen.
And lots of fresh herbs growing in containers. I even put a Pineapple in a pot but I guess I have to re-plant it into the ground soon.
Just before I left, I can see the progress of my veggies. I cannot believe how fast they're growing!
Steve also planted a Tropical Nectarine which started flowering.
As you can see there's lots going on in the garden right now and I can't wait to go home (in 3 weeks and a bit) to have a look how everything is progressing. In the meantime, I'd like to collect some ideas on how to transfer the whole area into a food garden, so we don't have to buy fruit and veggies anymore.
How do you plan your food garden?

4 comments:

  1. Thank you Damaria! We do our best - Steve is a much better gardener than me.

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  2. What a delightful area you live in and both such excellent gardeners!

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  3. Thanks Sue, it's delightful now where we had some rain. It only rains Jan - March. We had a bit over 400 mm this year, so this needs to last until next year as we're not connected to town water.

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