No more caterpillars

After losing four toms to caterpillars I went and brought some derris dust. So for now we are pest free again. For a while at least.

The toms are growing so well, no redness yet, but I am hoping that will happen soon.

I took these photos today:

Saturday Garden Makeover

So Greg and I decided to get stuck into the garden on Saturday. I started out feeling a tad discouraged when I was watering my tomatoes and one of the toms fell off :( and then I felt even more disturbed when a big green caterpillar came crawling out of a hole in the tom. I've had a bit of a look at the other ones and I can't see any other sign of bugs. Might have to make a trip to Mitre 10 to see if there's some kind of repellent we can use to keep my toms safe. But they are still growing very nicely on the whole.

We decided to redig the main part of the garden and put in some seedlings. So now we have cabbage, cauli, and brocolli,

Spinach,

Rainbow silverbeet

And I figured we needed some parsley.

We also planted a couple of rows of carrots but you can't see them yet :)

Here's an overall look at our main patch:

Meanwhile, Emmy did her own little bit of gardening... she took the pot that my parsley was in and filled it with grass and dirt. I don't exactly know what she's hoping to grow, but she's being a good Mum towards it!

New Stakes and introducing a few new friends

Over the past few days we've been really busy out in the garden. We've dug over our larger parts of the garden. Haven't got anything in there yet, but we are getting the soil well prepared.

We have re-staked our tomatoes and continued to prune them back.

The fruits are on their way. Can't wait for them to ripen!

Yesterday I planted out some of my bell pepper capsicum seedlings. I know nothing about growing them so it'll be interesting to see if they survive.

And my sugarpeas are coming along nicely. I need to put up some netting to give them something to grow onto.

This is my planter bag which hangs in the conservatory. Coming out the bottom of the bag is a tomato plant.

Little Green Toms

I pruned back my tomato plants this week and look what I found :)

I've got six plants, and all of them have at least 3 or 4 tomatoes on them with more flowers on each plant. So hopefully should get a decent crop.

This is a photo of the plants when I first put them in:

And this is them today:

Yep... need to weed and re-stake them :)

Potatoes!

My first couple of posts on this blog will be about plants that were already here when we moved into our new house. I was excited to see that there were some potato plants in the garden. Not knowing much about growing taters (well, knowing nothing about it actually!) I've kinda been ignoring them until a couple of weeks ago. My friend Bron's father in law told me that I have to wait until the plants flower, and then after they have flowered the plant will begin to wilt. That's when you harvest them. Some of the plants started to wilt a few weeks ago which is when I made our first harvest. I was surprised to see a mixture of red and whites, big and small. So a bit of a mixed bag really. But delicious all the same. The smaller tatos were made into potato salad, the medium tatos were boiled and eaten whole as gourmet potatoes, and the large ones I mashed up.

Harvest One:
Harvest Two (They are currently soaking in our sink while I'm typing this up):
Again, just like the first harvest, it was a mixed bag. The first harvest was over 5kg, and the second one was more than that although I haven't weighed them yet.

There are a few green ones among the group. That's caused by not mounding up the potatoes properly to stop the sun going on the potato. I wanted to make sure i wasn't about to poison the family by feeding them green potatoes. I found out that although the green isn't a good thing and is toxic, you'd have to eat over 2kg of green tatos in one sitting to get sick. And mostly the green is only in the skin so if you're peeling them you also don't need to worry too much. Apparently there hasn't been a case of food poisoning from potatoes for over 50 years in the states. So I'm going to toss out the ones that are very green, or chop off the green bits if it's just a small patch. So hopefully we'll survive!