late harvests

Well summer has most definitely turned to autumn.  In a normal or warmish year I'd still be letting the summer veg mature and finish up, but this year has been a bit cool and so humid that disease has ended the season early.  For example the watermelon vine completely died off, leaving only 4 watermelons in total.  And even though they all looked nice and sat on the vine for ages, they were all underripe.  Quite disappointing.

I only have two canteloupe on the vine but it's a race against time, the vine's pretty quickly dying to powdery mildew.  Now idea if I'll be able to harvest these guys.

The zucchini also suffered from powdery mildew plus an attack of aphids.  I only got three zucchinis off of it before it went back to making only male flowers.  Then the aphids slowed down and stunted a whole set of new growth.  There were finally two more female flowers last week, but no males to pollinate them, plus the mildew was getting worse and worse.  So I made an executive decision and pulled it out.

The tomatoes also reached their end.  The broad ripple never really gave up, as you can see here it was still ripening fruit even when branches were dead!

But the plants were really struggling, probably something fungal.  Although the one irony is that the Oregon spring, which hadn't developed a single flower since the first flush, put out a whole new set of growth and flowers!  But there was no way they would have developed into fruit in time to eat, so they all came out too.

The figs aren't doing very well this year either.  I got some good ones early, but now they're already bloated and messy.  At one point all the ripe figs, literally, exploded.  They looked quite beautiful, in a way, but inedible.

Not everything has been a loss though.  The cherrytime capsicum made about 8 or 10 little fruit.  They're a bit strong and sharp in flavour, though, I expected them to be sweeter.  The basil and parsley in the bed along the front of the house are going great guns too.

A real winner has been the firecracker chilies.  After the slow start when they were starved of nitrogen, they took off and haven't quit since.  I've started bringing them in to work to give away. They've got a decent heat to them, not quite as hot as a birdseye.

That's about it for the summer season.  I'll keep the chilies going as long as I can, and the herbs are all still happy, but I'm not optimistic about the cantaloupe.  I've started the first of my winter veggies - a Tuscan kale.  I'm also planning on growing snow peas and gai lan, since I know they produce well.

another bountiful harvest

Last week I had another great harvest; my third zucchini, more tomatoes and my first two chilies. 

There are plenty more chilies where that came from but most of them are still green.  This lot got thrown together into a prawn fettuccine.  Looks great but it was actually a bit bland.  Needed more oomph, maybe more garlic.

Still, it's great being able to eat from your own garden.  This is the last big harvest though; the tomatoes are slowing down and there's no sign of another zucchini.  The growing tips got hit hard by aphids, it's amazing how fast they can suck the life out of new growth.  It'll be a while before it recovers and by then it might be too cold. It's still February but I feel like the real warmth of the summer has well and truly passed.

february harvest

This is one of the bigger harvest for this year.  I've got another zucchini ripe, the tomatoes are going crazy, and of course some herbs.  The broad ripple yellow currants are producing like crazy, but to be honest I find them annoying because the tomatoes are so tiny.  You can't even cut them in half, they just splatter.  Next time I think I'll go with a slightly larger cherry tomato.

In any case, I turned this harvest into a dinner that came almost entirely from the garden!  The zucchini was sliced and dusted with cumin and smoked paprika before grilling.  The tomatoes were cut up and tossed with parsley and chickpeas.  The mint went into the yogurt with some garlic and lemon.  And on top, some fried haloumi cheese.  Seriously tasty.

It's not often I harvest enough to really plan a meal around it, so I'm pretty proud of this one!

qarabali zucchini

I was sent some seeds of a Maltese zucchini called qarabali.  I've never grown zucchini before, but with free seed I thought I'd give it a shot.  On Friday it made its first female flower, which I hand fertilized with a male flower, and by Sunday this was here to greet me!

By Wednesday it was time to pick it.  Pretty fast turnaround.

As you can see, qarabali is a round zucchini made for stuffing.  So that's what I did!  After reading a few recipes for inspiration I had a go without a recipe.  Shallots, pumpkin, the insides of the zucchini and some raisins along with couscous and Moroccan spices.  Not all the stuffing fit so I ate the rest as a side dish.

It was pretty tasty if I do say so myself.  The zucchini itself is very mild, almost like a cucumber, so it's better with the stuffing.  Now if I'm lucky, I'll have a massive glut of them before long, zucchini is notorious for either never setting fruit or setting more than you could possibly eat.

december update

I've been a bit slack updating what's new in the garden recently.  First up, my little vitex shrub is steadily powering along.  It used to be this small!

Speaking of small, it has a little visitor.  I just love finding praying mantises in the garden!

Not so welcome a visitor was the locust I found in the lawn.  There's a really bad plague of them this year up north in country Victoria, with sporadic sightings throughout the city.  So far I've only seen the one, who tried to escape in the rosemary.

The sunflowers are also powering along, and one of them's forming a flower head.  Unfortunately the new leaves are coming in a bit warped which is worrying.  But on the up side, as you can see, the geraniums are recovering from their combined ordeal of rust and getting the soil under them replaced.

My melons are only coming along slowly, which is disappointing.  The weather's been a bit cool for their liking.  But I also think I had unrealistic expectations for how quickly they'd grow, since last year they were around this size in December too and I was harvesting them in March.

I planted some African blue basil in the bed below them.  Last year I had some near the bird bath and the bees went absolutely nuts for it.  This year I decided it was better to put it next to the melons for pollination.  It's already got some flowers on it, yay!

Speaking of flowers, my qarabali zucchini has already put out a few male flowers even though the plant is still pretty small.  The leaves are going a bit funny as they age, though, I don't know what's going on there.

And finally, I snapped a photo of some of the neighbourhood lorikeets who were having a look into the garden.  I think they periodically stop by to see if the figs are ripe yet.  The breba (early) crop is just starting to look like it's thinking of ripening, the main crop won't be ready until autumn.  This year I put a few cheap mesh bags over some of the fruits to see if I could save a few for myself, we'll see how it goes!