Vegetable Garden Take Two

After last year’s somewhat sad attempt, it’s time for round two of ‘Beverley gets all enthusiastic about growing vegetables for about a month then gets lazy and abandons the garden to the weeds’. That being said, we did have some successes last year: We got a tonne of chillies, a healthy harvest of beans (though we left them a bit late to pick), some tasty (though mutant) carrots and our early lettuce leaves were tasty.

This year I’m trying more of the same plus some new colourful things to hopefully make our dinner plates more interesting. Now that I come to think about it, most of the new crops are purple. I’m planting purple varieties of beans and carrots plus this year we’re trying out beetroot. After the success of our cayenne pepper crop, I’ve started growing thai chilli seeds too. Not because I have any desire to eat more chilli flavoured food, but I do like the look of the plants covered in bright, shiny red fruit (or are chillies vegetables?).

The other red offerings will be strawberries (Just finished straw-ing the strawberry patch), radishes and tomatoes. We failed miserably at generating tomatoes last year. I grew wicked looking seedlings of both cherry and moneymaker varieties but they never really took hold once they made it out into the garden. We think this was due to the shallowness of the garden, it was really only about 20cm deep. Late in the season we tried moving our pathetic looking plants into large pots with more depth, but by that stage it was too late. Though the plants did bounce back a little, they never yeilded a satisfactory harvest and were eventually left to be consumed by the weeds behind the garage. So, on my little seedling rearing shelf in the garage, I now have two new breeds growing, Italian and Roma. I’ve started several months later than last year on everything, but hopefully I’ll get some nice strong plants ready in time for the summer sunshine.

So that’s the plan anyway. Here are some pictures of various pieces of the garden thus far.

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