Garden update

Chatting to my folks last night brought up the topic of what was growing around my place at the moment, specifically my onions and garlic and a strange puckering on a few of my peach leaves. My onions don't seem to be bulbing out at the bottom just yet, maybe they need more time in the ground, and my garlic have yet to form it's scapes, so here are the photos I promised, plus one of our Thanksgiving dinner we had here a couple weeks ago. :)

Thanksgiving dinner Aussie style. Burnt ham and roast chook!

Peach tree #1

Puckered leaf on peach tree

Blackberries!

Apple blossoms

Dog house I intend to transform into a chicken coop.

Allum bed - Onions and garlic

Close up of one garlic plant. No scapes?

CLose up of base of onions. Fat but not bulby.

Front Yard Finishing Touches

Yesterday Dave and I finally got round to finishing off the front yard with the jarrah sawdust we put around all the other beds and lined it all with weed mat. We also got two native fish for our pond to help keep down mosquito larvae and hopefully reduce mosquito numbers around our place.
After what seemed like hours of reweeding the area we needed to put weedmat down on the rest went fairly quickly. It was a lovely day for it, not too hot and not too cold, and now the front yard looks great! Now just to save up for our white picket fence!
We took some photos along the way, enjoy!

Weed mat laid down all along the areas about to be covered

Dave hard ar work shoveling the sawdust

Herb sprial crazyness. The nasturtium has gone viral and now trails all the way up and over the back fence

The pond with our two new residents. Impossible to see through the pond plants.

All finished!

Looking like the hippie I am. :)

Recycled Pallet Workbench

I saw a bench made out of a recycled pallet on a particularly awesome Pintrest board (Thanks Clay!), and after I saw it I knew I had to make one for myself. I had already been looking at getting a workbench to put in my craft room, and after seeing some at IKEA for between $399 to $699 (which is just crazy) I decided to recycle some things we already had lying around the house and make one. Everything aside from the wooden top and screws are recycled. The pallet was what the limestone blocks got delivered on for the pizza oven base, and the legs are out of wood I found lying under the house. Even the paint was already in the shed from the previous owners and got put to good use. It went together pretty quickly, and I'm really happy with the result. Who needs an expensive workbench when you can make something yourself for the grand total of $33 dollars! The wood top was $20 and the screws $13.Take that IKEA!

The sad lonely pallet before inspiration struck. It was going to be broken up and thrown out, and I only took this pic to give to the mover for getting the pizza oven into our backyard.

Base all built and half painted

The finished product! :)

Crop Rotations and Fruit Plantings

With spring rapidly approaching it's time to start getting things ready for planting the new summer crop for 2013/14. With all the raised beds now built and ready to go, this will be the first summer season of full produce production potential. We also finished planting some of the last fruit trees around the back fence that we have room for, that being one dwarf avocado tree and a second dwarf peach to add to the one we already have planted that we received as a wedding present last season. I also stumbled across a very interesting program that lets you map out your garden plot, to keep yourself organized when it comes to crop rotations, plant spacings, etc. I've been having far too much fun playing around with it the last couple days and this is what I've come up with for what I'll be planting for this upcoming spring/summer season. I haven't had enough time to figure out all the cool tricks but so far find it useful just to keep me on track of what I need to plant where and how many for the size of the beds.

So that's what the gardens look like on paper... I thought I'd take a few pictures to show what it looks like in reality.

Bed 1 -Two varieties of lettuce and two rows of carrots
Bed 2 - Snow peas, broad beans and sugar snap peas
Bed 3 - The remaining kohl rabi, broccoli, cabbage and kale. Most of it will be pulled out and used shortly to make way for the new spring crops.
Bed 4 - Just planted zucchini, pickling cucumbers and pumpkin yesterday.
Bed 5 - This bed is still going quite strong from last year, most likely will keep the rainbow chard and fennel in until it stops producing, and plant the remainder of the bed with the new crops.
Bed 6 - Parsley and chives growing well, so again will plant around them with new season crops
Bed 7 - Onions and garlic bed growing well. Will look forward to tasting our first crop of both!
Bed 8 & 9 - Potatoes are growing insanely well. Dave is super excited to try his first home grown crop as he's been involved with these every step of the way. He's so cute when he gardens. :)

Bed 1

Bed 2

Bed 3

Bed 4

Bed 5

Bed 6

Bed 7

Beds 8 & 9

The Handy Girls Can Do It!

After planting some climbing peas and broad beans came the question of what they were going to grow up. I had made some climbing apparatuses in the past for climbing peas, but they didn't really stack up all that well once the peas took off as they usually slumped under the weight of the plants. So it finally came time to make a more sturdy, long lasting device that my plants could grow up and that I could use season after season.
I came across plans online to make an A-frame trellis which seemed simple, sturdy and looked nice, so on Sunday, Dave and I went to Bunnings, picked up all the bits and pieces we needed to build the first test trellis to see if I liked it before building the next two.
Seeing as I'm uni holidays at the moment, I decided why wait for the weekend when Dave could help and build it myself! Dad has always taught me to use power tools with confidence (or at least with a healthy respect for the fact fingers saw off just as easily as timber) so I plucked up the courage and got to it! It took me two afternoons of working on it, and I think it turned out pretty darn well!

Three things I learned from this project:

1. Measure twice and cut once. At the beginning as I was figuring out where to cut the wood that would become the top and bottom pieces. I plugged into the calculator 2.8 meters when it actually was 1.8 meters, it was only as I was about to cut it I thought, 'Hey, wait a minute that doesn't look right!'. I am very thankful I went back again, remeasured and fixed it before cutting or I would have been super annoyed.

 2. When making a square, 'almost square' doesn't quite cut it. I got it pretty close, but then when attaching the hinges noticed they didn't line up quite right. Thankfully you can't notice it when it's standing in the garden but it's something to keep in mind for next time.

3. Listen to your mother when she says to wear work gloves when working with chicken wire. That stuff is evil! Whoever named it 'chicken wire' was way off. They should have called it 'razor sharp metal sheet of death wire'. That would have been more accurate. On day two I wore gloves.

All in all I am very proud of my garden trellis even if it's not perfect, as this is the first wood working project I've completed entirely on my own with no help from either Dave or my dad. Here are some pictures of the building process along the way.

Cutting all the boards so they were all the exact same length

First side of trellis screwed together

First side with aforementioned evil chicken wire.

Second side with the wire adding process in mid staple

The two sides lined up with hinges on

Tah dah!

Placed in the garden!

Tiny little pea seedlings ready to climb!

Winter Garden Updates!

It's been a little quiet on the updating around here this winter, so I thought it was about time to do some garden and hobby recapping. Some of the summer veggies are still going strong, with a lot of the root crops staying in the ground until we need them. The tomatoes are pretty much finished, and the leafy greens are mostly done. Things like the broccoli, cabbage and parsnips are still growing and still not quite ready, so hoping they get a wriggle on and finish up soon! Winter things planted lately include three beds of potatoes, garlic, onions, two types of peas, broad beans, carrots and lettuce. Most of these are still in the seedling stages but are all doing well and seeming to enjoy the cooler days and moister soils than in summer.

Dave and I headed down to the Midland Farmers Market yesterday and found that unlike a lot of other markets, this one had plenty of stallholders selling fruit and veg, and the prices were way cheaper than any supermarket. We went a little crazy as the photo shows, we got a good variety that should last us all week. All of that for well under $50 makes us happy people.

Fruit n Veg haul from the market. Tonight: Pork chops with apple and fennel and roasted veggies.

Winter garden beds. Top left: Two varieties of lettuce and two of carrot. Just starting to sprout now, so we should have lettuce in about 8 weeks and carrots during the spring & summer months Top right: Kohl rabi, broccoli, cabbage and kale which were all planted when my folks were here in December and January. Not sure if cabbage and broccoli should take this long? The cabbage is finally starting to form their inner heads, but still no love from the broccoli.

 The onions and garlic bed. Two types of onion, brown and pickling onion, and garlic that I picked up at Perth City Farm which all sprouted and are now looking quite nice.

This is the garden bed that has the most going on in it still from summer. Rainbow chard that seems to be the veggie that just keeps on giving. We keep taking and it keep growing fast enough to keep up with us. Quite impressive actually. Then we have a large crop of beetroot still, as I thought Dave liked them (which apparently he doesn't), and I sure don't like it, so it's just sitting there until someone comes along and steals it or I can give it away. Then parsnips, spinach, carrot and fennel, all of which seem happy and growing well. Tonight I might pick the first parsnip to add to some roasted veggies. Exciting!

 The two tubs of olives we have picked off our tree brining away. They are both 30L tubs so I think we'll have enough olives to last us for a really long time. Next year we plan on using all the olives to attempt to make our own olive oil, which should be fun!

 Potato beds and closeup of plants. The are still pretty small, but so far looking good. Can't wait til we can dig up and roast some freshly grown potatoes! Nothing better! Yum yum yum.

Dwarf peach tree that we got as a wedding present is now planted and is looking quite happy, although it's leaves are starting to drop off for winter now. It already had peaches on it last year while the poor thing was still only in a little container, so excited to see how many we get off it this year. :)

Patchwork Placemat Tutorial

 So my latest little project has been to use up some of the masses of fabric that have been relegated to my scrap bin. I had started on a table runner, but I need to get some different batting, so decided until I get around to getting the batting I would start on something else in the meantime. Very unlike me I decided to try something a little smaller than a full on quilt, and have been trying my hand at patchwork place mats! I have a new found respect for any person who can actually do proper quilting as I think it is slightly impossible. But we have now gotten one whole place mat completed with only five more to go! 

I used an old towel as batting as I wanted to try and use all recycled items when making these. I think it turned out really well enough padding to kinda give it that 'quilted' look, but still thin enough to put a plate or glass on without it going all topsy turvy on you. 

I started out with my new quilting cutting board that has handy measurements on it, laid out the fabric pieces and pinned them all together at the edges. I went for a size of 12 x 17 inches, and cut off any scraps that didn't fit into that size which left me with these pinned place mats all the same size.

This is the first place mat pinned and ready for basting. I used a loose zigzag stitch along all the of the edges to keep everything in place before I went back around all the edges using a much tighter zigzag stitch which hid the raw edges and gave it an interesting look, plus it was easier than trying to do official style quilting. I still have no idea how you would do that where edges of fabric don't meet up in perfect angles, so for at least these place mats I'll continue using the zigzag stitch, plus I just like the look of it.

 This is the place mat basted but not with the final zigzag stitch, but you can see how all the pieces are a bit more 'together' and easier to work with and not flopping around by just being held together by pins. So far so good!

 

Action shot! I just used a normal foot and set my machine to a zigzag stitch long enough to catch both sides of fabric and voila! Job done. Plus it went pretty quick once you got going. All you had to be careful was you were still getting both sides of the fabric as the zigzag stitch wasn't super wide, so you just had to keep a close eye while sewing. 

 

 This was when I was layering the patchwork top layer, towel and bottom blue polka dot layer, be sure to leave about an inch around the edge of the patchwork with your batting when sewing, and about an inch and a half around for your bottom layer. 

I then did diagonal straight stitching across all three layers to give it a 'quilt' look, and to adhere all the different layers together. I went around after and trimmed the towel batting to fit the size of the patchwork top layer, then folded in the raw edges of the bottom layer, pinned them to the top of the place mat and straight stitched all the way around. That was all!

Tah Dah! Final product. I'm pretty happy with it, hope you enjoy making some awesome place mats and post some photos of your finished projects! Happy crafting!