First Zucchini :)

Yay! I picked my first zucchini of the season this evening :) A nice big fat one...


AND... then I made dinner using only (OK, almost only, my onions aren't ready yet so I used a shop onion) vegies from the garden! I used the zucchini, carrots, silverbeet, and sugarsnap peas frozen from last year's harvest to make stir-fried vegies and rice.
Here's the recipe... a bit vague cos I made it up and didn't bother measuring anything.

Stir-Fried Vegies and Rice

Rice
Onion
Carrots
Silverbeet
Zucchini
NotBacon
Slivered Almonds
Soy Sauce
Vinegar

Get rice cooking.
Heat oil in a frypan. Chop onion and chuck it in. Chop other vegies and chuck them in. Add almonds. Chop NotBacon and stick that in too. Add some soy sauce and vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar). Cook for a while.
Serve vegies on top of rice.

And yep, that's how most of my recipes go, LOL. I only measure stuff when it's something like bread.

ETA: I just remembered, I put chilli sauce in too :)

Who's Eating My Strawberries?

So I thought it was slugs, or maybe slaters... I put yeast traps in, didn't seem to catch anything, and the nearly-ripe strawberries were still disappearing by the next time I came to check them.
But what did I see today?
The dog, in the vegie garden, in the strawberries, MUNCHING ON SOMETHING!!!! Do dogs usually eat strawberries? The evidence is weighing up against her! She often breaks into the vegie garden, I thought she was just digging in the lovely organic mushroom-compost-enriched dirt... but thinking about it, there's not much evidence of her digging in there, but the strawberries are disappearing...
Now how to keep her OUT?!

New Books, Woohoo!!

We got home from playgroup today to find some books I'd ordered had turned up- 'Backyard Self-Sufficiency', 'Chook Wisdom', 'The Earth Garden Water Book' and 'Strawbale Building'. They're from The Good Life Book Club which has soooo many books I want!
The last three books are publications from Earth Garden magazine, and 'Backyard Self-Sufficiency' is by Jackie French. I've finished the chook one, and just started the Jackie French one.
I just wanted to share this quote from the end of the introduction.

I have two images of suburban life today.
The first is of a neat house set in a mown lawn with trimmed shrubs and a sandpit; a clean kitchen with yesterday's take-away containers on the sink; and the latest videos to fill your life after dinner.
The second is of a suburban jungle: a maze of tangled apple trees and grape vines, carpets of strawberries, and kids with mulberry-stained faces who don't come inside till dark. You trip over a box of apples in the laundry, and the kitchen smells of summer tomatoes and of the basil on the window sill.
The kitchen shelves are full, and so are the lives of the inhabitants.
The richness of our lives depends on our surroundings and what we fill them with.

Carrots!

We pulled four carrots out for dinner this afternoon.


Malachi decided that the second one along was a 'person with two legs to go walking' :)

The carrot were from bought seedlings... I did plant some carrot seeds, but I think my seed-planting-enthusiasm mood came a bit early this year, as everything that came up from that batch of seeds died from the frost, except the dill.

Anyway, I planted 83 tiny carrot seedlings and they've done beautifully! I love the funky shapes, so much more interesting (and much yummier) than shop ones.

We had a carrot and silverbeet quiche for dinner. The silverbeet was also from our garden... I can't wait to have some land and a huuuuge vegie garden!

Potatoes and Ladybirds

I'm fighting a battle at the moment. With ladybirds. 28 Spot Ladybirds, to be precise.

All the gardening books say that ladybirds are a gardener's best friend. Many kinds are. These bloody ones aren't! But I'll get to them later.

First, the potatoes.

This is the first season I've grown potatoes. I found an article in the paper, about 4 months ago, about growing potatoes in bins.

Make sure there are holes in the bottom of the garbage bins and sit them on bricks or stones so that drainage is not hindered.
Place the bin in a warm, sunny position and put about 15-20cm of compost mixed with old cow manure and some controlled-release fertiliser in the bottom. Place six seed potatoes (available from nurseries) on top of the mix and cover them with about 10cm of the compost-manure, plus a 2.5cm layer of straw mulch. Water regularly and, when the leafy stems rise about 20cm above the straw, add more of the compost-manure mix, leaving the tops of the leaves exposed.
This method ensures the plants keep making tubers up the stem. Continue until the container is full. New potatoes may be harvested about a month after the flowers have finished. For 'old' potatoes, wait until the leaves have dies completely. You will be surprised how many potatoes you can harvest from an old dustbin.

Here are mine:
I've got three bins going so far, as you can see, and they've all been going really well... until I saw on of these:Argh! They're eating the leaves, not too badly so far, but after checking up about them on ALS, they can do a fair bit of damage, not only to potatoes and related plants, but also to curcurbits. The potato bins aren't that far from my zucchinis, which are just getting their first flowers and little tiny zucchinis!

So the battle begins... they are NOT going to hurt my potatoes or my zucchinis!
I picked four off the potatoes today, but I can't bear to kill them, and if I let them go they'll just come back At the moment they're in a container on my kitchen bench... I'll taken them somewhere else and let them go tomorrow, I think.

So I Suddenly Felt The Need...

... to start a blog.

So here's the plan- to be as self sufficient as possible. This might take a while! The first step in the plan is to get some land (25 acres or so), which will hopefully happen sometime next year. Then to build a house-shed to live in until we can afford to build a strawbale house. In the meantime, I'll be growing vegies and fruit to my heart's content. And getting chickens. And goats.

So where are we starting from? We're renting a unit in town. I'm growing as many vegies as I can, but really, there's not much room! Especially seeing as the vegie garden has to be fenced to keep the silly dog out... but lately she's getting in anyway! That's the back vegie garden, in which I have onions, strawberries, sugar snap peas, and a few cauliflowers, cabbages and broccoli. And one little self seeded tomato plant, who has popped up in the middle of the strawberries.

There's also the front vegie garden. I dug out all the agapanthus (noxious weeds!) and I've got cauliflowers, zucchini, lettuces, silverbeet, spinach, carrots, and beetroot. In bins I have potatoes, and in pots I have more strawberries, garlic and dill. There are parsnip seedlings coming, and a few roma tomatoes. Today I planted basil seeds (funky looking 'limelight basil'!) and tamarillo seeds. Yum!

It doesn't sound like we're doing too badly on the vegie front, does it? But there's not enough space to have decent quantities of everything... and I want a fruit orchard! And chickens!

Anyway, that's a basic rundown... and now I'm off to figure out how this blogging thing works.