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Wrapping up, packing up in Canberra

We haven't blogged in a bit, having just come back from Christmas holidays and prior to that being flat out with work and life generally! Has been great to have a cooler December in Canberra, as we've had a good start to the summer vegie crops! The toms are going well, the mini eggplants are starting to kick off too, and the corn, although small in stature, already have some flower heads coming on. Of course, with the rain, it's hard to keep the weeds down around the garden too :o)

Well, we are also in the throws of packing up our house and making to move to the West coast! A big change and back to our roots. The gardening conditions in Perth are very different to Canberra, so we are up for another gardening challenge of a different kind once we set up house there! It's going to be fun!

We'll kick off a new blog (will post a link here soon) for our Perth gardening experiences and will certainly be referring back to some of our Canberra projects in rebuilding a garden once more!

So, with that in mind, we will be signing off our blog here. A BIG thank you to those of you who have posted comments and others who we've met in person and shared our blogs - it's been great fun!

More late Spring plantings

We planted some super sweet corn seedlings today after we cut back the peas and broad beans. We used a barrow-load of compost, a tray of worm castings and some pelletised fertilizer to beef up the soil too!

We also planted some Mini Lebanese eggplant seedlings with the corn. Am hoping they'll be nice and share the composty goodness. ;) Planted them relatively close too, to see how they go in a smaller space.

It's great to see the compost exchange; digging in lovely broken down compost then filling the heap up again with old beans and peas and other trimmed off-cuts to start the process all over again.

We'll put in some corn seeds too just to stagger the harvest with a late crop.

Simon also picked up some tomato seedlings; Grosse lisse (scroll down to 'G') I think they are called. A large plant and fruit with good flavour, and for coolish climates.


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Harvests from the garden

We've been picking a heap of things from our little backyard garden in the last couple of weeks. We got a big crop of sugar snap peas - it's the first year we've tried them and we highly recommend them if you have kids; Clancy would pick and eat them at will! We also planted them close together given the small space we have for climbing veg and whilst there's a risk of mildew we did okay in fact. The crop was good too.

We picked our broad beans too. Not so many this season but then we didn't plant a huge patch as gave up the space for the peas. Broad beans were yummy with leeks and garlic and butter! We froze some too (parboiled) to make a dip with later.

We picked some small beetroots. Lovely earthy flavour - an organic variety. More to come on soon. The leeks are planted in various spaces around the garden with better results looking likely in the well-drained bed by the side fence. This area also gets regular watering so the crops seem bigger. Not huge leeks eventhough they are the Elefant variety! :)

Carrots are starting to come on as well. Small at thus stage but very sweet! I'm excited :) Clancy is going to enjoy pulling them up too!

The garlic are about to flower and wilt. Will try to save some seeds this time.


The herbs have gone mad with all the rain we've had as well. We will need to pull out the lemon balm as it's encroaching on everything!

The lime has fruited for the first time as well. It's a Tahitian lime and the limes have a lively spritzy flavour. The lemon are bursting with flowers too!

It's great to see what does well in the garden especially at this gorgeous time of year. We've had the added bonus of great rains over the last two months or so which makes such a difference.

Happy happy Spring!



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What flower is this?

What flower is this?
Originally uploaded by margoc

Found in Phillip ACT. Anyone know what it might be? Looks like it may be native. Leaves are soft velvety grey-green. Flower is papery and mauve with small yellow stamens.

My mum thought it might be from the Solanum family (nightshades, etc), but the flower seems to come off the same stem as the leaves.

If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them!