Deems' Weblog » home

Veggie garden – one month later

Deems — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:54:56 +0000

If you remember, about one month ago we started our own vegetable garden in our back-yard. We’ve been working hard to tend to it each night for the last month. Making sure it gets water each evening, taking out the odd bits of grass that have pushed their way to the top and making sure they don’t get trampled on by the animals or eaten by snails.

And the result of a month of tender-loving-care? Well feast your eyes on the photos below.

The eggplant (aubergine) plants have had an extra growth-spurt, almost overnight. The corn is growing nicely and it husks have started growing so it won’t be long before we’ll have some corn on the cob. We’ve already had some of the lettuce leaves in a home-made salad. The pepper and tomato plants have started flowering so we should have some fruit from them soon – there’s already a little tomato on one of the plants. The watermelon plants we’re steering into the open area (as they’re creepers) but no fruit on them just yet.

Unfortunately, Max (our golden retriever) did get in one day and trampled two of our green pepper plants, but I’ve managed to get them to grow again (albeit a little slower than the others right now). We also transplanted the herbs (peppermint and parsley) into smaller pots and put them on the windowsill in the kitchen, next to the basil and they’re growing better now.

Hopefully in another month (maybe longer) I’ll have another follow-up blog post for you with more news and pictures

Home-made Vegetable Garden

Deems — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:30:33 +0000

My parents have successfully been growing their own vegetables in garden pots at home, since they don’t have an actual garden. And since they managed to grow them so easily, my brother was keen on having their own garden too.

So last weekend, my dad went over to my brother’s place and helped them create a vegetable garden in a section of their garden. Dina, suggested we should have one too. Little did I know the amount of pain I’d be in afterwards.

We decided that an 8 sqm (24 sq ft) area would be big enough for a vegetable garden with a large enough variety of vegetables to be planted. It sound like such a small area, well it is a small area, except if you struggle for 3 hours to remove the grass. Who knew that grass roots were so resilient and tough!

So after pain-staking 3 hours of work, this was the result of phase 1:

Now that the grass and remaining roots have been removed began the easy job, for my dad, planting the various seedlings bought. We now have mielies (corn), green and purple lettuce, peppers, cherry tomatoes, rhubarb, aubergine (eggplant), spinach, watermelon, parsley, basil and peppermint.

So this is what phase 2 looked like – looks good, doesn’t it?

And then just one more final touch to keep Max from walking all over the plants and crushing them, a little protection was needed:

So, hopefully in a few months time we’ll be able to reap some fruits vegetables of our labour and I’ll post some more pictures and an updated post.