My aims for this weekend were twofold: to attend World Vegan Day, and to finally tidy up our rather disgraceful back porch (I’d do a before and after post, but I am far too ashamed of the before state to provide photographic evidence).
Well, I did have one or two other aims, mostly involving singing practice and sleeping a lot, but those are pretty much my main goals every weekend so they don’t count. I achieved them, by the way.
Posted in Food festivals, garden
Tagged events, food festivals, garden, world vegan day
I’m running very late with my gardening this year. I pretty much let it lie fallow from mid-summer, because cycling was taking up all the energy I normally use for gardening, and Andrew is not confident about identifying weeds versus vegetable (let loose on a garden bed and told ‘this needs clearing,’ however, he works wonders).
So today – my first free day in about the last two months that wasn’t raining – was clearly the day to get started on it. Fortunately, Andrew has made a start on all three garden beds recently, getting most of the weeds out of them and making the whole thing look less scary. So this afternoon, it was off to Poyntons for us, to search for interesting seeds and a few seedlings too.
Posted in garden
Tagged asparagus peas, beans, gardening, herbs, planting, purple potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini
Another week with very little blogging, this time because I’ve barely been home – since last Sunday, I’ve either had dinner guests or been out myself every single evening (including this evening, in fact – yay, paid singing gig!), and as a result, I’ve scarcely had time to look at the kitchen, let alone cook in it or write about it. And today, of course, was the first decent weather we’ve had on a weekend day for quite some time. I had to make the most of it. Besides, every Melbournian knows that you have to get your tomatoes in before Cup Day – so I’ve just barely made the deadline.
Behold! Tomato plants – and Cup Day isn’t until Tuesday. And yes, I know they look terribly, terribly dry – it was a very hot, sunny day, and I didn’t want to water until everything was in shade. Now, of course, it’s raining.
So today you get me nattering on about all the vegetables I hope I will have in a few months. Because pretty much all I’ve done today is garden and then sing. Tomorrow, there will be more singing, and also baking and hat-making for work purposes. But I’m hoping that next week I really will get back into the swing of blogging – I’m missing it.
I’m a rotten gardener. I have absolutely no attention span for things like weeding or watering, and when it comes to feeding plants, or mulching, or pruning, well, for one thing I’m not really sure how, but it actually doesn’t matter because even if I did know how, I probably wouldn’t ever do any of those things anyway. And I’m really bad at staking tomatoes.
Plants in my garden need to be the kind which cope with intense, freakish levels of interest in their early stages (I’ve never *quite* dug up seeds to see if they were sprouting, but I have been known to gently disturb the earth above them, just to see if they were about to poke out of the ground), feverish watering and weeding in their first month of life, and total neglect thereafter.
Self-seeding plants are my favourite kind, and I do quite well with nasturtiums. And we aren’t even going to talk about Jerusalem artichokes.
But when it comes to planting things that I might actually get to eat one day, my attention span can expand to as much as several months. Continue reading
I’ve noticed a distinct trend in my occasional forays into vegetable gardening: if it’s easy to grow and doesn’t get eaten by caterpillars, you can guarantee it is monstrous to prepare (I’m looking at you, broadbeans).
It must be confessed that Jerusalem artichokes (also known as sunchokes) do partake somewhat of this tendency. But they have a lot going for them, too.
Posted in cooking with vegetables, garden, low glycemic index
Tagged jerusalem artichokes
