Taming the Wild: Our Garden

For some time now, we have had a ramshackle vegetable garden on the go. It is not quaint and neat, there are no beautiful raised garden beds and timber retaining walls, and things aren't planted in lovely, marked rows.

We are not green thumbs from way back; growing our own food has been one of the biggest changes we have made to our lifestyle. If lawn was food, our yard may look a lot nicer, but as it is not, we pay little heed to maintaining it.

We had let the garden go to seed after last season, as we thought we would be moving on. However, we will after all have enough time to see another harvest from our little garden. Last weekend, Nath and the girls planted (from organic seed) radish, turnip, pumpkin, rockmelon, tomatoes, rainbow chard, cucumber, bush bean, cabbage, habanero chilli, roma tomato, cayenne chilli, rocket, silverbeet and zucchini. We already had some capsicum and cucumbers growing, as well as a variety of herbs. I am looking forward to harvesting it all, and hopefully we will have enough to preserve some for when these foods are not in season.

 Our capsicum plants are going well - I wish we had planted more!

The cucumbers that were already growing are going mad - so we will have enough to eat fresh, and, with the ones we have just planted, enough to pickle for the rest of the year as well.

One of our bean plants sprouting.

 One of our pumpkin plants sprouting.

Some lemon basil drying in the kitchen.