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!