It's not terribly glamorous but I thought I'd show you my compost bin. We have a little round tin on the kitchen bench where we put all of our veggie scraps and paper towels. I also add leaves from the garden and sometimes strips of newspaper. The thing that really gets it going though is lawn clippings - a bit of cut grass really starts it "cooking".
There's a bit of a recipe to "cooking" compost. You need a balanced mix of soft, green things (like kitchen scraps or fresh grass) and drier, brown things (like dead leaves or newspaper). It also needs to stay slightly damp, and it helps if it's warm outside. And the main bit of work is you do have to mix it up a bit at least once a week. But personally I find it rewarding, I've already gotten a bucket's worth of compost to put on the rhododendrons.
Oh and if you thought it wasn't much to look at from the outside, the inside's no better. This is a mix of grass clippings (already pretty far composted) and grape leaves.
There's a bit of a recipe to "cooking" compost. You need a balanced mix of soft, green things (like kitchen scraps or fresh grass) and drier, brown things (like dead leaves or newspaper). It also needs to stay slightly damp, and it helps if it's warm outside. And the main bit of work is you do have to mix it up a bit at least once a week. But personally I find it rewarding, I've already gotten a bucket's worth of compost to put on the rhododendrons.Oh and if you thought it wasn't much to look at from the outside, the inside's no better. This is a mix of grass clippings (already pretty far composted) and grape leaves.
I have my friend Heather to thank for this idea. Apparently in Queensland they make mesh bags you tie over banana bunches to protect them from fruit bats. I asked at the B-store and they didn't sell anything like that, so I made some myself. I took a second bird net and cut out some large squares, then stitched together one side with outdoor twine. I dragged them over the ends of branches with figs that were near-ripe, then closed the end around the branch.
To be honest, it's a pain in the bum. Each of those bags has one, maybe two figs in it - a lot of work for just a few fruit. But that's just the breba crop. On the tips of those branches are another 3 or 4 of the main crop which will ripen in the autumn. So if this works, I can either keep them on all summer, or take them off now and re-use them closer to the autumn.
But the rest of the bags seem to be working. Here's one of my beauties - it looks ripe but I'm going to give it one more day. I think it's safe, or else it would have been pecked open by now. Next to it are two of the autumn crop slowly ripening.
Did you know they also put on quite a show of flowers? I didn't know that, not until I saw a bunch being sold by an old lady who sells plants at work. I saw these bright yellow-orange flowers and thought they'd be lovely for the office ... then looked down and realized they were coming from a succulent! This one is home for the holidays but it'll go back to work, at least until the flowers fade.
In fact there were so many babies on the aloe I took out all of these and you can't even tell the difference.
Some of my favourites are these 
I love these ones too, they're like big fat rocks. I think they're Pachyphytum. I'm not sure if these are the same kind of plant or two different plants because they were in different pots.
I've also gotten my first baby Tumbler Tom tomato coming in. It'll be about a month before I start harvesting these babies, but they should be nice and sweet from the heat of January.
My other tomato, the Better Boy, is setting a fair few fruit. It won't make as many as the cherry tomatoes but they should be nice and big, your traditional round red style. This is the biggest on on the bush so far, and still growing. They probably won't ripen until February.
Next to the tomatoes I have a jalapeno plant. It started out a bit slowly from the cool weather and it was also in pretty poor potting soil, but I've now got my first baby jalapenos on it. Just look at this lovely!
And around the back my pumpkin vines are going bonkers. There are at least twelve baby pumpkins and more coming, if I keep letting the vine grow. Here are the two biggest ones I could find, and they still have the flowers on them.
My first surprise was just how small the thing was. I call it my "designer twig". I had been saving a huge pot for it so it had lots of room to grow, but it's so small that I'm starting it in a smaller pot. And it's going to be a few years, at least, before it'll be strong enough to let it make fruit.
The fig wars have begun. This is why we tried to net the tree, birds and possums adore figs. I scoured the tree and managed to find two likely figs. The on one the left is the dark plum colour of a ripe fig, but as you can see has split open (I don't know if it's from the rain or if it was just a retarded fig, but it wasn't an animal). The one on the left was another big, unblemished one that I thought might be ripe ... and I certainly wasn't going to leave for the birds to get to first.
The freaky-shaped one was indeed ripe, I got one small spoonful of jelly-like goodness from it, but the rest had dried out where it split open. So I know the flavour will be lovely, if I can ever get a whole one to ripen before the birds get to them. I'm told that a big tree will make so many fruit that the birds and possums can eat their fill and still leave plenty behind, but for now it's just frustrating because I haven't been able to eat one for myself!
I first noticed this nondescript little shrub when we moved in. I assumed it was one of many plants the previous owners planted just to make the house salable, without caring about whether it was a good location and without watering the thing. It was so sickly I just assumed it would die and I'd figure out something else to plant there. It's a horrible spot, in a south-facing corner (eg, almost no sun) and in the rain shadow the neighbour's garage. Why bother to find out what kind of shrub it was if it was just going to cark it?
A few weeks later, and my little gem looks like this. Six weeks of steady rain and a bit of pampering has paid off in spades, look at that light green new growth! And how fitting for the Christmas season, a single white blossom has opened at the top. Just like a Christmas star.
Actually I've been harvesting herbs and lettuce for months now. Here's one of my prideful joys, my Frilly Pink lettuce. I grew another variety too but I like this one better - slightly crisp, the leaves are pretty but flat enough you can wash them without much hassle.
My first tomatoes of the season ripened about a week ago. To get tomatoes before Christmas is not a bad feat. 
These are my Yellow Pear tomatoes, when still unripe and again when I got my first harvest.
The temptation was strong to rip the whole plant out of the pot in utter frustration. How horribly ungrateful of the thing, after all the coddling and care I've given it, to give me back mealy tomatoes! But I've been patient, and the next two tomatoes were better. Still a bit bland and mealy, but you now get a bit of flavour kick from the jelly bit around the seeds. And here is why I grew them in the first place. Look how beautiful they look in a salad, sliced up next to store-bought red tomatoes! With a bit of luck, the rest will keep getting better. They'll never be a strong, sweet-tart knock-out, and I won't grow them again, but they've saved themselves from the compost heap.
My other recent harvest is my first ripe pea pod. I got excited and picked the first peas when they were still under-sized, but these ones were big and sweet. I get to be greedy with these and eat them fresh from the pods, because Tom doesn't particularly like them. I'm not wasting these beauties on him!
And finally, I thought I had my first ripe fig. I don't know what kind of fig tree I have so I don't know what colour they're meant to be when ripe. Some figs are green when ripe, some so dark purple they're almost black. Mine have been getting purple-brown streaks, and yesterday I found this monster, soft and inviting on the branch. It felt soft enough that I thought it was ripe .. and look how huge it is! One of the biggest on the tree. It must be all the rain we've been getting in the last month. Figs prefer it to be hot and dry when they ripen, that's when they're sweetest. I'm just glad they haven't split.
Anyway, the sad end to this story is that it wasn't ripe after all. The seeds inside are meant to be thick and soft like jam, and usually dark red depending on the variety. There isn't meant to be a big cave in the middle and that purple/white outline isn't mean to be that thick. It smelled nice, like a fresh pomagranite, but it definitely wasn't ripe. Good thing I only picked the one.
So how do you support tomatoes in a pot? The first method I tried was advised by a tomato expert - rig together a frame. I took a flat off-cut and screwed in two long garden stakes. On the sides of the stakes I half-screwed in a row of screws. Then you put the pot between the stakes. As the tomato grows, you wrap string around the stakes to hold the whole thing together. On the left you can see the Yellow Pear when it was younger, with just one layer of string (and about to put on another set of string). At this point I still had a small bamboo stake up the middle for extra support.
Well I eventually figured out that "I'll just put a stake down the middle" doesn't really work in a pot. As you can see here, the better boy got pretty lanky. I tried to tie it to the stake but the stake just flopped over. It's not easy to see in this photo, but now it's actually tied to the porch column!
It's almost too late to start a new plant ... but not quite. And so in another fit of impulse buying, I bought another variety of cherry tomato. Once again, I didn't do my research beforehand, I just snapped it up from Bunnings. I bought a kind called Tumbler Tom, because they grow flat, which meant I didn't need to buy stakes and I already had a slightly smaller pot that it'd fit into. No guilt, right? Just the cost of the plant ($2.50) and bit of potting soil, and with a bit of luck I'll have juicy red cherry tomatoes later on in the season. From what I read (after the fact) the flavour of these guys is good. And despite its small size it already has about a dozen flowers on it, which means it's fairly advanced. It should grow over the side of the pot and down the steps, eventually.
This is a mole cricket. I found it when I was digging up the raised bed to make it a veggie patch. Scared the crap out of me at first because it was so big and freaky and I had no idea what it was (it's a few inches long by the way). I even thought it was dead, it wasn't moving at first but woke up a bit after a while. After a bit of research I learned that they're nocturnal, silent crickets that generally live underground or in mulch. They can chew on roots, but generally they don't do much damage and you should let them be. I put him back in the dirt.
This next critter is a shining cockroach. Mostly I see them outside - under the lid of the recycling bin, in the garage door jam. But once I found one inside the rim of the dishwasher, which freaked me out and made me worry that they were the "bad", indoor kind. But no, they're wingless, native to Australia, and they prefer the great outdoors. They don't eat people food, they don't breed inside, and they don't carry disease like the German cockroach that infests kitchens. This is the one I found inside, but I just put it back outside where it belonged. They're also fairly long, over an inch long, which is bigger than the German roaches.
Once I even found a big fat grub in the ground under the pencil pines. I didn't take a photo, so I'm borrowing one from another website to show you how nasty they look. It went in the bin, they munch away at roots and are pests. 
These two are still practically babies and should be with their mother. The one at the top of the tree was making little alarm calls, but they didn't run away when I took photos. I hope they wound up OK, I'm a little worried their mom may have been hit by a car, but they weren't there the next day.
It didn't really work.
In the spring, the tree puts out new leaves and new growth. On this growth, another, heavier crop of fig buds appear. These figs ripen in the autumn and make up the main crop.
As you can see, my breba crop is almost ripe! Some of them are downright huge, too. This one hardly fits in my hand.
For some reason some of them are looking "club-footed" and I don't know why. I'll have to ask over on the Ozgrow forum and see if someone can tell me.
