Jan 2011

My favourite type of vegetable - 'cut-and-come-again'.

A surprise addition to my backyard - mango tree.  This one just pop-out of the compost.  If I have a greenhouse, it might survive the cold, frosty winter of Melbourne.

Just harvested my very first cherry tomotoes this summer.

We finished our first batch of beans.  This is the second batch - you can see the baby beans sprouting out just under the flower.

The eggplants have lots of flowers but I don't have many eggplants.  I have noticed that there are not many bees in the backyard this summer.  Consider keeping my own bee hive in the backyard.

I thought we didn't have pumpkin this year, next thing I know I have pumpkin popping out everywhere (literally).

Among the bush below, there are two rockmelon plants growing.

Here is a cucumber almost ready for harvest.  We have harvested a few of them and stirred fry for dinner.  The kids love it.

Bitter gourd

Asian vegetable - great for cooking tom-yum soup

Zucchini

Almost time to make chilli sauce.

Another species of chilli plant

This watermelon plant was a real surprise.  The seed was mixed in the asian gourd seed pack we bought.  Hoping the plant will make it to fruition.  No flowers in sight.

Asian gourd - not flowering yet.

Red Russian (planted from the seeds collected from previous season)

Carob tree - hasn't it grown?

Dec updates

We took some Carob seed from Coffs Harbour during our last Easter visit there.  Four of them has germinated beautifully.

Beans are starting to flower ...

Eggplants and capsicum are planted together (no idea if they make good companion plants).  Well, they don't seem to mind each other.

We harvested some snowpea leaves for dinner the other day.  Waiting for the snowpea to flower soon.

Zucchini has lots of flowers and I can see one tiny zucchini started to grow.

Asian melon is growing nicely.  The reason I am growing this is hoping to dry the melon and use it as sponge for washing the dishes.

Cucumber has started to flower as well.  We were not successful with cucumber previously, so hopefully this season we might have some success.

Tomato is coming along nicely.  Since my last update, I have a few more tomotoe plants coming out of the compost.

Started growing next batch of coriander.  I have collected some seeds for next season as well as for cooking. Just checked online, they are selling 20g of coriander seeds for $4.50.  I collected just over 20g.  Guess you can't get rich selling coriander seeds!

Biodiversity at works?  The nectarin tree grown with all the vegetables around it (beans, silverbeet, lettuce) seems to be doing better than the others that are on their own.

Asian green.

4 weeks later

I saved some rockmelon seeds last summer.  So far only 3 of them have come out.


More nectarin trees growing out of the compost.     Keeping coriander seeds for next season.

Cucumber

Only one tomato plant coming out of the compost this season.

Oct 2010 updates

Finally we can see the fruit, it's nectarin!

The greens are coming along nicely.  (Have been eating sushi at least once a week.)  This is growing on the patch that the chicken has been 'working' on for the last few months.

I bought some organic seeds early this year, the lady who sold me the seeds said it's called 'Red Russian'.  Guess what, it's very green.

The beans are starting to come through.

Another Asian green we are planting this season.