How does your garden grow?

I finally got my vege and herb garden up and running with much family and friend help a couple of weeks ago. There was a family outing to Bunnings to purchase additional seedlings (yes, not organic but about to be raised organic, so let's see how it goes...) and buy different types of soil. Then a couple of days later Phil and Neibi came over for dinner and a nice quiet meal of lasagne, garlic bread and salad gained the addition of seedling burial and branch removal. Awesome fun.

Everything seems to be surviving okay - some funny coloured and dying leaves, but new growth popping up everywhere. The only real casualty of the whole experience has been three strawberry plants. There's one left, and it has a new couple of leaves growing, so fingers crossed.

The garden makes my courtyard look so much more...useful...even though the garden beds are styrofoam boxes!! And I'm still minus a planter for the herbs, so they're still all in pots. But they'll be replanted prior to Xmas...

So! Pictures!

Even though I got the cats cat grass to distract them, Squeak still attempts to eat the lemongrass. *sigh* And isn't my red watering can fabulous?

Tomatoes, basil and marigold (go, companion planting, go!)


More tomatoes, basil and marigold, with a sneaky radicchio

Squash (with a mixture of unhappy looking and happy leaves), radicchio, coral lettuce and marigold

Mostly spinach, with a lone strawberry and marigold. There are a couple of strawberry plants that just aren't doing anything, so I think I might yoink them and put in the cucumber seedlings I have before they get completely destroyed by snails.

Okay, mostly herbs. Basil, sage, coriander, lemongrass, cucumber, parsley, mint and some worm wee in the wine bottle at the back.

Baby peas and capsicum and the ever-present marigold.

And as you can see by the tags, onions (gnawed upon by Squeak) and eggplant.


All the seedlings have pretty much doubled in size in the last 2 weeks, and my first crop should be sometime towards the end of December/beginning of January - which is really exciting!! I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens with the plants. I'm happy that the cats have chosen to ignore the boxes (this might be due to the sheer preponderance of plants and sticks and stuff we put into the boxes) and I hope that continues. I'm carefully saving water from rinsing veges, draining pasta etc, and using that for watering the plants.

If you haven't already, I heartily recommend starting a vege garden, even if it's one tomato plant and some chives and basil. You'll have the ingredients for a pasta sauce in no time!!