April 2015 Part I - Colourful Carrots, Spectacular Sunsets, and the last few tomatoes

Spectacular view from my veggie garden!
And coincidentally, all the colours
of the carrots I'd like to grow!

So lets start with the carrots... I'm trying to get my girls to eat more vegetables, so when I ordered my seeds from LivingSeeds I deliberately tried to get the differently coloured varieties - usually purple or pink varieties because my girls will eat anything pink! I kid you not, one of their top favourite foods is beetroot - and the more the beetroot can change the colour of the food around it, the better! Pink rice, pink meat, pink everything!

Here in South Africa we generally eat beetroot pickled i.e. boiled, then coarsely grated or sliced, and preserved in vinegar. It is served as a condiment or side dish with a main meal.

Speaking of pink, did you know you can get a fantastic variety of carrot colours? I ordered three different colours - standard orange (Cape Market) - and the grandiosely named Cosmic Purple and Atomic Red (There's also Lunar White and Solar Yellow - next time!).

The first batch I planted in the previous post didn't do too well. The planting instructions said to use hessian / sackcloth to cover the seeds once planted to prevent drying out, and to remove it once the seedlings were showing. All good, except I only had sheets of cardboard (still left over from the move) and even though I did make sure they were soaked I think they didn't let enough light through, or something, so my many of my baby carrots just didn't make. I had a severe case of gardener's guilt. 

The few that did come up out of the 100+ seeds I planted, which was about 9 or so, seem to be doing well. We did have another little hiccup in our vegetable garden. As much as Ali, our once-a-week garden muscle man, is incredibly helpful, transplanting beetroot seedlings into the spaces left by the other plants I managed to kill in my vegetable garden was not one of his most helpful moments. Apparently you shouldn't transplant beetroot seedlings or plants as the root gets bent and the beet doesn't grow properly. I got to see this for myself! But I guess we're all on a learning journey, and so we soldier on!

Back to carrots though, I planted carrot bed #2, and used an old, nearly transparent bed sheet torn in half to provide the cover this time. 

This is the spot where my first batch of tomatoes grew (you can see them here). As they died off I thought this would make a good carrot patch, so I used our old burglar guards to let the remaining tomatoes keep going in the background - apparently carrots and tomatoes are good companion plants, and you can also see a couple of Jalapeno chilli plants that I didn't have the heart to pull out also carrying on there.

So I weeded the bed, raked it, used the stick part of the rake to press lines into the bed, sowed the carrot seeds quite thinly, covered them over with a little sand, added the bed sheets (anchored with rocks) and kept the bed moist until the seedlings came up. Let's hope this batch is more successful than the last! 

If you were standing in my garden looking at my carrots, and you took a few steps back, this is what you would see:


Carrots and tomatoes are on the far left, with the struggling melon patch with some more tomatoes and Jalapeno chillies to the right of that. The orange shelving was in my daughters' room, but has been co-opted to house my seedling trays. You can see the land slopes away from there - more on that bed later! Closer to the front you can see some grass was taken out - that was to make space for my checkerboard herb garden- which you can read more about here.

One thing I love about gardening is the colour of it! Seeing beds change from brown to green, tomatoes from green to yellow, or red, or just staying green because it's okay to be a green tomato, it's all beautiful!

Some yellow pear tomatoes from my aquaponics setup. I just missed one of the fish lurking in the background!

The last of my tomatoes from my inherited tomato plants. You can see a patch of minor sun scald on the big one at the bottom and right in the center. They tasted great though!

Don't forget to have a look at my herb garden here, but before you do that, please do subscribe!

January 2015 - Our inherited (not heirloom) tomatoes get sun scalded

Save the tomatoes!

So if you say that a sun burnt person is 'as red as a tomato', what do you say about a sun burnt tomato? 

I have two answers: 

1. Not all tomatoes are red - you get yellow ones and pink ones and striped ones and black ones as well as red ones... mutter mutter erythro-normative mumble mutter 
2. But for all of them, no matter what their colour, the proper term for sun burnt tomatoes is 'sun-scalded'.

I figured that out this month when I tried to ask Google why my tomatoes were getting little soft spots... Along the way I also discovered how many things can actually go wrong with a tomato and that nearly put me off altogether! 

In case you are being very observant and you're wondering how I have tomatoes after only being in our new house for just over a month, our delightful predecessors planted some tomato plants before they left - which in my eyes has almost redeemed their various other quirky DIY efforts. 

I'm really grateful that they did otherwise I'd have very little to show for January! We also seem to move between August and December - so we miss have missed the spring planting a number of years in a row - but now that we have our own place *happy dance* - we ain't going nowhere! Now to just get everything ready for August...

Back to January... So in the busy-ness of the festive season, the tomatoes didn't get any support and just started spreading across the ground, as tomatoes do. I looked under a mass of tomato leaves one day and found this:

So being the conscientious tomato gardener that I am, I decided to hoist them (gently) onto some supports made from burglar guards we replaced in our tenant's flat.

Gold stars for recycling, except that all of a sudden, the leaves that were providing shade to the tender tomatoes suddenly weren't in the same spot anymore and my poor babies were exposed to the blazing January sun in all their unripe nakedness.

I hadn't realised this would be a problem so I was horrified when I found a little wrinkled soft spot on the 'shoulders' of many of my tomatoes. No, they weren't going soft on the bottom, that would be blossom end rot, and no, there were no worms nibbling at the skin - it was a classic case of sun-scald. I promise I'll take pics next time. 

And so another set of burglar guards was enlisted to support some shadecloth to protect my traumatised tomatoes. (Excuse the unmowed lawn in the image below.) The plant on the left of the image below bore yellow tomatoes (on purpose) and the one on the right bore red tomatoes. The sunscalded individuals survived (mostly) - we just cut off the sun scalded bits - and those that were beyond the point of no return were thrown back into the soil to give some nutrients back to their peers. 

I must admit that despite these hiccups, the tomato plants are bearing beautifully and I feel it is quite an auspicious beginning to our garden that I get to reap where I didn't sow. 

One thing we did manage to bring back from our old garden was these little violas which my girls grew from seed in a little window box planter. They love the bright colours and are delighted that they even get to eat them. Every visitor gets directed to the 'eating flowers' for a taste. (In case anyone is having heart failure - they have been taught that they can only eat plants that I show them are edible.)

On that cheery note - subscribe via one of the subscription links to keep up to date with our adventures in aquaponics and our various explorations and excavations!

PS Erythro-normative is a word I made up to describe how red (erythro-) tomatoes are seen as 'normal' and others are abnormal. If I ask you to draw a tomato, most of you would draw a red tomato. As a society we need to acknowledge that tomatoes come in many colours, and every colour is valuable and has its own unique flavour to add the the tomato universe - and I dream of a world where tomatoes will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their fleshy bellies.

The start of 'Dirty Hands, Clean Food'

Sharing a bit of bubbly to
celebrate being homeowners...

As of December 2014, we finally have our own house - complete with almost 500m2 of land that is perfect for a vegetable garden. So now we can grow all our own food and get chickens and some goats and make cheese for the whole world and never need to buy wrinkled and wilted fresh produce ever again... Um, yah, once we've fixed the plumbing and mended the roof and painted the wall and and and and...

Ok, so home ownership is not for sissies! But gardening keeps me sane in the midst of it all - so I decided to start slow, but at least I decided to start!

I'm going to be honest from the outset - this blog is mostly for me to keep track of the before-and-after moments as we transform this suburban space into an oasis of edible greenliness.

Almost 500m2 of sand, builder's rubble,
weed seeds and syringa berries.
Watch this space!

You are welcome to join us on the journey but I must warn you - I haven't had a very good track record with gardening so far! My  green-fingered father has been known to hand me plants rather gingerly with plaintive requests of 'Please try not to kill this one.'

But it isn't all bad - somehow we've managed a few successes - so to make myself feel better about all this I'll include some pictures below.

Because I'm not very good at watering plants, we had set up an aquaponics system at our previous house, and got some peppadews, basil and tomatoes growing quite successfully.

Aquaponics is a mixture between hydroponics and aquaculture - use fishpond water with fish poop in it to water and fertilize your veggieswhile growing fish at the same time. The veggie planter acts as a filter for the fish and so the cycle continues.

The aquaponics system shown below is *not* our aquaponics system - but it was the first (and only) one I'd actually seen in real life before we started ours! I found it at the CT Organics outlet at what was then the Dunrobin Nursery in Pietermaritzburg.

We have a very rudimentary aquaponics system on the go at the moment - but we'll definitely pursue the aquaponics thing again - we (My husband Hans and I) really feel that aquaponics is something that can form part of the solution for hunger and poverty in our country and continent. So we are experimenting with various ideas as we can afford them! Currently our biggest expense is the pond pumps that don't seem to like fish poop too much but we have figured out some cheap and effective pre-filtration systems that seem to be doing a good job.

The photo below on the left shows some tomatoes from our system, with some basil photobombing in the corner there. There is nothing quite like a home grown tomato! I had despaired of ever eating a fresh tomato again as all the tomatoes in the shop seemed either underripe or mealy - but since we started growing our own I find myself just eating freshly picked tomatoes with a little salt as a snack! And basil, ah, basil... my most favouritest herb! Basil is a good enough reason to do aquaponics all by itself!

This picture below includes some of our aquaponics tomotoes along with some not-so-baby marrows from our veggie garden turned pumpkin patch. It just took over and by the time I managed to get into the veggie garden again, these 5 marrows were peacefully nestling  in the spots where my bok choi used to grow. No matter. At least they weren't just weeds! And we got some good mileage out of these marrows! I'm actually looking forward to growing some more this size.

I cut them in half and took out the seeds, the roasted them in the oven until soft, then stuffed them with cooked minced meat, covered with cheese and baked until heated through and the cheese was bubbling. You can also freeze them once they are stuffed and cheesed for a quick supper another night, and you'll probably need to do that anyway because unless you have a family of 6, including some ravenous teenagers, it's unlikely that you'll use both halves at once! Next time I have some of these I'll do an official recipe.

  

These beauties just popped up on their own in my herb pot so I honestly can't take any credit for this bunch. Fortunately my mom was able to identify them as some long lost seeds of hers that somehow got into my herb pot, which was situated in what had been her garden.

Apparently they are San Marzano Redorta tomatoes - well known for having a low juice / seed content which makes them ideal for making tomato paste. They are also bigger than the regular San Marzano tomatoes. (If you'd like some seeds you can get some online from Living Seeds.)

So those are some of my previous successes... join me as we trust for more!

You'll notice that for the first few posts, the date of posting doesn't quite match up with the content that is posted - so most of these pics were taken in 2014 - but as the blog catches up with reality the content dates and post dates will converge and it will be a bit easier to follow.

Please do subscribe if you want to be notified of new posts - you'll get to hear why I choose to garden the way I do, and you'll get to see how our little garden expands, and you'll be able to share our tragedies and our triumphs. If you don't subscribe, you might miss the links on Facebook and that would be truly tragic.