Hawthorn Garden Update - Week 10 & 11

Wow, oops I forgot to put an update up the week before, the fornight before, last...eek!  Oh well there's a huge amount to update you all on which is very exciting!

The snow peas are going mental, and flowering like crazy, and the broccoli has also started flowering which is great!  I have had to keep a watchful eye on the broccoli though as the grey wooly aphids have made a comeback and like munching in the new growth.  I have given them a good spray of EcoOil, and will continue to keep an eye on them to see whether they need another dose by next weekend.

The beetroots are also growing well.  The seedlings in the planter are growing and I have also taken the seedlings that have sprouted out of the hothouse to continue growing in a more natural environment.

And we have baby mushrooms!  It has taken, what, almost a month and a half, but we have the first signs of little white funghi in our shed!  So exciting :)
 

 All looking very green :)

 Almost ready to pick!

 Snow peas continue to grow and flower like mad.

 The first of the Broccoli!

 Beetroot are going well.  I have also planted the last three Kale seedlings to see how they go.  The companion planting herb containers are to be made this coming weekend - how cute are they!  Dan has made one as a test and I think it looks great!  It's just made from little offcuts that we had after making the timber containers.

 The worms are almost ready to be transported to another section of their Worm Cafe.  I'll leave them another week or two to demolish the last of the food in the bottom tray and then attempt to lure them into a new upper section.

 The baby mushrooms!  It looks like the plain button mushrooms have started growing which is very exciting :)

Worm Farm Update

The wormies are going very, very well in their new home and munching away on all sorts of goodies that we have put in there.  Lots of raw veggie scraps, old bananas, lint from the clothes dryer and the egg carton that had the catnip seeds that didn't sprout.  The worms are less active in winter so I'm going to leave the amount of food in there (about 2cm worth) and wait until they have eaten it all up before I add any more.

Happy wormies!

The Worm Cafe

I had a very busy weekend this weekend - I'm still trying to recover from it!  An early night tonight for me I think :)

I spent an exciting day all day Saturday at CERES undertaking the second part of the Permaculture workshop.  Having set up the Luscombe Street plot last weekend, I had spent some time during the week thinking about crop rotation and what I was going to plant in the garden for the late Autumn / Winter crop.  I had a few sketches to show Digga (our workshop guru) and we had a really great chat about how I can incorporate permaculture principles into the garden.  Its amazing how transferrable some of the concepts are from large scale properties down to a small one square metre plot.  I really encourage people to have a read up about permaculture as before this course I really had no idea what it was all about.  A lot of the principles are so common sense but are things that we would normally overlook!  I'm going to try and incorporate as much as I can, and will hopefully share with you a bit as I go :)

After the workshop I headed up to the CERES nursery to buy some seeds and seedlings for the plot, along with a ready made worm farm for home!  I was very excited about this because we are currently throwing away so much green waste from the kitchen that could be used as compost or fed to worms to produce wonderful worm tea or worm castings for both the garden at home and the Luscombe Street plot.

I bought a ready made kit, known as the 'Worm Cafe' made by Tumbleweed that comes with its own stand, bedding material, additional trays and a tap on the side to collect your worm juice.  Its quite an expensive option - you can build your own with polystyrene boxes as well - but with the concern of smelliness and rodents potentially getting in I thought it best to have a well constructed container for our wormies!  There's a great review with a video here.  For those of you who watch Gardening Australia, Costa met a worm expert in Sydney last week on the program (12 May 2012) who explained the process of setting up a worm farm really well!  Check it out here.

The process began with the reconstitution of the dried bedding material.  This meant submerging the 'brick' into a container of water for about 15 to 20 minutes prior to transferring into the first tray of the worm farm.  The bottom tray, connected to the tap, should be left empty for any juice to flow through down to the tap on the bottom.  Then it was time to add the worms!  I purchased a starter pack from CERES containing 1000-1200 worms.  These worms are wonderful feeders (they apparently eat up to twice their body weight each day!) and multiply very readily!  It will be interesting to see how they go!