May 2015 Part II - The 'Dirty Hands' part of Clean Food

I think the hardest work of all in a garden is getting a bed ready for its first planting... 

...that and waiting for seedlings to germinate. This is especially true in our case where we're trying to grow garden where previous property owners saw fit to dump builder's rubble.

"Dietes grandiflora or Fairy Iris" by Rojer Wisner
Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

So I planted the top bed a while back and my new seedlings were just about ready to be transplanted, so the time came to start up the second of the top beds. I wish I had taken a photo of this bed before I got hold of it! 

It was also full of rubble - many of the rocks you see making the middle path in the image below, I dug out from under the ground. The swales or mini-terraces on either side were also made out of the builder's rubble I extracted. 

"Rhoeo Tradescantia spathacea" by Tauʻolunga
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It was full of Dietes grandiflora (Fairy Iris), Chlorophytum comosum (Spider Plant / Hen & Chicken) and Rhoeo spatheca (aka Oyster plant aka Moses in the Cradle) and with a bunch of weeds in between.

I started by taking out the Rhoeo and Dietes plants and ended up replanting them in the front bed that was looking a bit spare. The Dietes is apparently indigenous, and the Rhoeo is referred to as 'naturalised' - and I haven't had a chance to figure out what I'm doing with that front bed yet, so it seemed a good spot!

Hen & Chicken / Spider Plants (Chlorophytum comosum)
Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons 

I dug down about a spade deep throughout the whole bed, except for a spot you can't see in the bottom left hand corner - the spot that gets the least sun. I got all the rocks out by hand then used them to make the mini terraces - something I had missed when irrigating in the bed above it. The terraces help to prevent soil from washing away in heavy rain, and help to dam water slightly, and I plant slightly taller plants (like peas) directly in front of the terraces for minimum shade impact on the plants behind them. 

Click on the image above to view a larger image.

I raised the beds slightly by digging soil out from the path. I also spread 4 bags of compost around - it didn't go as far as I'd like, but it will have to do until my own compost is ready. I did this whole bed myself in a day - I felt quite stiff and sore for a couple of days afterwards, but it helped me come to the conclusion that gym would be a waste of time for me! Gardening is a full body workout for sure!

Once the preparation was done I planted this bed with some brassica seedlings that were ready to go - Romanesco Broccoli, Sugarloaf Cabbage, Red Acre Cabbage, Green Sprouting Broccoli, and Chou moullier Kale. I also planted beets and turnips in alternating sections, as well as Greenfeast and Oregon Sugar Pod peas just in front of the terraces, lettuce bordering the path for easy reach and spinach wherever there was a space. Against the wall I planted some red onion seeds and some baby onion plants. In between all of these I put some nasturtiums, marigolds, comfrey and sweet basil.

In the picture below you can see plastic circles on the right - those were lids from polystyrene take away containers with a large hole drilled in them that I placed around the base of each seedling with the name of the type of plant written on it - all those brassicas can get confusing! It worked well until we had uncharacteristically strong wind for two days in a row... But by that time the plastic labels were the least of my worries! It does give you an idea of the spacing I used for the brassicas though.

The full side bed - view from my kitchen window!
Click on the image above to view a larger image.

Anyway, I was so glad to have that second side bed done. In this pic you can also see the herb garden in the top left hand corner. I want to use the little shelf below it for my larger seedlings - like my moringas. You can also see all the Rhoeo plants stacked up on the far left before we were able to transplant them.

In May we also did an overhaul of the bottom garden - the one you have seen most often in the blog so far. That involved cutting down the Natal Fig that was growing into the wall - you can see my gorgeous hubby working on it there - and also weeding the next batch of weed seeds that had come up. As much as it feels like a losing battle sometimes, every batch of weeds seeds that sprout and grow before I've managed to plant, is a batch of weeds that I won't have to pull out later!

The bottom garden.
Click on the image above to view a larger image.

There is still so much to be done in this bottom garden! We need to make some basic terraces, get rid of all the builder's rubble, and the syringas and possibly put some aquaponics / hyrdoponics gutters up on the wall... This whole area is about 500m2 altogether so there really is lots we can do! But, it all takes time and effort and sometimes a bit of cash too. So we are just taking it step by step  - increasing our own capacity as we increase our growing capacity. 

I feel like I haven't said very much in this post - but I think these images serve as important 'before' pics for the 'during' and 'after' pics that are coming soon!

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!