Luscombe Street Update - Week 18

I hadn't been out to the plot for two weeks, and as the weather has warmed up over that time, I was faced with a massive amount of new growth when I arrived!  The plot has just gone ape!

Purple sprouting broccoli everywhere, the carrots and rashes have grown about two inches, the broad beans are beginning to flower, and the spinach is going crazy!  Its so great to see that just a little bit of warmth and the plants just love it :)

I harvested so many veggies today - spinach, lettuce, coriander and radishes.  I will leave the broccoli until next weekend I think as it could do with a little bit more growth before I pick the first lot. 

Root / Fruit bed

Legume Bed

Brassica Bed

Allium Bed (see the Coriander at the bottom!)

First flowers on the Broad Beans

Purple Sprouting Broccoli!

Spinach, coriander, garlic, spring onion...

Nasturtium, radish, carrot and coriander...

Luscombe Street Update - Week 16-17

A quick update for Luscombe Street - it was a quick visit this fortnight.  A quick watering with seaweed solution and picking of spinach, radish and lettuce and I was off!

Allium Bed

Root / Fruit bed

Legume Bed

Brassica Bed

Hawthorn Week 12 / Luscombe Street Week 11 Update

Sorry - I forgot to post photos of Hawthorn from Week 12!  Trying to catch up I'm afraid :)

This week brought on the first harvest of radish from the Luscombe Street garden!  I was incredibly excited, and just couldn't help myself.  I ate the radish straight out of the patch!  Delicious :)

We're in the depths of winter, so things are going at a bit of a slow pace, but all is going well and everything is looking very healthy.

Legume Bed

Brassica Bed

Allium Bed

Root / Fruit Bed

Radish!!!

Radish and Carrots growing along...

Butter lettuce seedlings that have sprouted

Sprouting broccoli, spinach and kale

Spinach, butter lettuce and spring onion

Garlic, spinach, spring onion and lettuce

The Hawthorn Planters - Broccoli, snow peas, nasturtium and various seedlings

The Hawthorn Planters - Beetroot

Luscombe Street - Week 10 & 11 Update

Two weeks away from the garden and the blog has flown by so fast!  We were busy with my Mum and Dad last weekend, who had come down for the weekend for Dad's birthday.  It was lovely but it meant that I didn't have time to check in on the plot, or potter away at home in the garden.

Things are going incredibly well in the Luscombe Street patch.  I pulled my first baby radish on the weekend and it tasted just delicious!  Not too zingy which was great, just very fresh and delicious.

The Legume Plot

The broadbeans continue to grow, and the lettuce has picked up as well which is great.

The Brassica Plot

The Broccoli is going really well, and continues to grow.  There are also little clusters of Coriander that have sprouted and growing really quickly which is great - hopefully we'll have all of the ingredients for an asian feast once the bok choi, spinach and broccoli are ready!

The Allium Plot

Its amazing how much has happened with this section of the plot over the past few weeks.  Coriander is growing wild, there's heaps of butter lettuces that have sprouted and are growing well.  And who would have known, but the garlic has also sprouted!   I was so worried about it because the bulbs at home sprouted after only a week or two.  The plot has taken ages! The spring onions are also growing, along with the spinach!

The Root / Fruit Plot

 Soooo exciting - I pulled my first radish on the weekend!  It was amazingly delicious - I can't wait for the rest to be ready :)  The carrots are beginning to develop their mature leaves now as well which is incredibly exciting!

 Radish, carrots and coriander

 Buttler lettuce seedlings

 Broccoli and Bok Choi

 

 Spinach doing well, along with butter lettuce seedlings :)

 Spinach, butter lettuce, spring onion and garlic shoots!

 A baby radish!  Soooo cute!

Luscombe Street - Week 7 Update

A very quick update this week!  The broad beans are going very strong - its amazing how quickly the plants grow once they have germinated.  Everything else is doing really well, continuing to grow.  It will be great once the weather warms up, and the days start getting longer.  The garden will go wild!

The Plot

Fruit / Root Bed

The carrots and radishes continue to grow away!

Legume Bed

The broad beans are doing really, really well.  Fifteen plants have germinated!

Brassica Bed

Allium Bed

The spinach is doing really well in this bed.  It won't be long until it can start to be harvested!  There are lots of little seedlings coming up - I think they may be clumps of coriander and parsley, and the odd lettuce.   Lets wait and see!

Luscombe Street - Week 5 Update

The first Sunday of every month is Working Bee day at Luscombe Street, so there was a lot happening in and around the plot this weekend.  We're installing a second water tank down near the front of the block which will make watering the apple crates a lot easier!  Not that we have needed to the past five weeks - it has been raining an awful lot.  It makes life much easier only having to head out to the plot once a week to check up on things!

Very exciting news - the broad bean seeds have germinated!  In fact all of them have germinated so there may be a glut of broadbeans over the next couple of months!  Doesn't worry me - you can easily freeze or dry excess beans for use later on in the year.  The other plant that is going really well is the rhubarb.  It was only when I had returned home and took a look at the photos that I realised how green and healthy the plant is.  If you compare it with the photos, even from just last week, the plant has just grown from strength to strength.

There are little sprouts making their way up across the plot, having spread the heap of lettuce, rocket and herb seeds last week.  It will be great so see such a variety of foliage over the next couple of months taking over the plot.

Root / Fruit Bed

I thinned out the radish seeds a little this week, just relocated the sprouts to other parts of the bed.  The carrots continue to sprout and the nasturtium plant is growing well.

Legume Bed

 The broad beans have sprouted!  You might be able to see them surrounding the bottom edge of the photo, and also towards the centre.  There's probably 10 or so that have sprouted.

Brassica Bed

 The rhubarb plant is going really well, and the bok choy continues to sprout.  The purple sprouting broccoli is changing colour and looking really beautiful.

Allium Bed

I planted out some of the spring onions this weekend so this bed will be chock full of onions come spring.

I stocked up on bulk Seaweed Solution at CERES on the weekend and noticed that they also stock a product called Fish Emulsion, which I had heard of, but knew nothing about.  It is a great liquid fertiliser for the garden, particularly for fruiting and leafy vegetables.  It contains all essential nutrients your plants need to thrive.  The helpful person at CERES said to think about Seaweed Solution as more of a tonic for your plants, where Fish Emulsion provides a balanced and comprehensive fertiliser for your plants.

So all of the plants received a generous dousing of both Fish Emulsion and the Seaweed Solution this weekend.

Luscombe Street Update - Week 3

After a morning spent at CERES shopping for our fruit and veg, and helping a lovely friend of mine plant out her own little potted garden for her balcony, we headed up to the plot to have a look at how things were going and plant some seeds!

Everything is doing great.  The lettuce is going well in the Legume bed - the broadbeans haven't come up yet but I'm sure they will do in the next couple of weeks.  Radishes are sprouting in the Root / Fruit bed, and the bok choy seeds are also beginning to sprout in the Brassica bed.  We spread some parsley seeds across the plot along with coriander seeds in a few of the beds.  Apparently they are a great companion plant for peas and beans so I made sure we put plenty into that bed!

Our neighbour Jill kindly gave us some horse manure that she had picked up from a farm closeby so I spread a fair amount of that around the beds as well.  I'm sure the plants will appreciate that!  The spring onions are still to be planted but that will be a job for next week :)  Everything got a good water with Seasol as well.

The other cute thing that I put up were my homemade mobiles that made use of the offcuts from the plastic cup coloshes on the plants - you can see them dangling in the photos below.  Hopefully they will keep the birds and things away!

 Lettuce doing well in the Legume bed

 Radish seeds sprouting in the Root / Fruit bed

Planting some Coriander seeds in the Legume bed

 Bok Choy sprouts in the Brassica bed

The Plot - Looking North East

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!