So far I can count as a success pretty much anything that was planted in decent potting mix!
Except the little celery plants that I didn't water enough when I went to work on a hot day. I'll just pretend those never existed.
Ours looks like this, only better!In terms of stuff that we've gotten to eat so far- admittedly it's mostly stuff I've gotten to eat so far, given that Gam hates and detests most vegetables, and has a huge mistrust of others- the successes are:
- Pak choy. Oh my god this is good- I never want to buy it from a supermarket again, and it's so easy to grow I don't think I'll ever have to. It hasn't been at all affected by insects, touch wood, and its beautiful, bright green leaves are not only tasty but grow so fast that I can just pick it day after day, harvesting as many individual leaves as I need in order to allow the plants to continue growing.
- Lettuce. It's hyper-sensitive to wind and sun, particularly when the plants are small, but it too grows fast enough to eat some almost every day. We don't have enough to share with Keith Richards, but enough for sandwiches and salad. Beats paying $2 per lettuce and having to feed half of it to KR because the outer leaves are all nasty.
- Beans. Purple king beans, my favourite variety. Despite being attacked by slugs in their infancy, the vines raced to success up the plastic trellis harnessed to the back wall. It got to the point where they reached the top and were still growing 20-30cm per day, meaning I had to train the tips of the vines back onto the trellis every day in order to stop them invading our neighbours' place, but shortly after that they started flowering, and only a week or two later I was eating beans. I only get a handful a day from the 3 vines, but it's enough to keep me happy. They've grown successfully despite the lower leaves being infested with spider mites; I've been picking off the dodgy leaves and feeding them to Keith Richards, and he absolutely loves them. I think Keith Richards is probably benefiting more from all my hard work in the garden than Gam is, come to think of it. Hell, I think even Feifei eats more vegetables than Gam... if grass counts as a vegetable.
The eggplants, despite the best specimens having been gruesomely murdered by (presumably) curl grubs, I will count as a success, because not only have the scrawnier specimens in the pot full of old (and presumably somewhat depleted) soil picked up and started to look quite good, I successfully rehabilitated one of the 'victims' in the plant hospital I set up in the kitchen (i.e. putting the rootless seedling in a tiny lid full of water for a couple of days, then adding a bit of potting mix to the lid and keeping it nice and moist for a week until new roots sprouted). If the curl grubs hadn't been so thorough and chewed off the stem right up to the leaves on the bigger, healthier plants, I would have rehabilitated them too. I guess the curl grubs found the biggest eggplant seedlings even tastier... In short, I haven't actually got to even see an eggplant flower yet, let alone an eggplant, but the fact a few of them are still alive and kicking is enough to make me pretty happy.
The failures?
Well, apart from certain baby eggplants, lettuces and rocket plants getting eaten off at the roots by white curl grubs, I would say I'm going to have to count peas as a failure.
The first lot were decimated by slugs, the two that survived were dug up by the bush turkey, and the six or so plants that I planted afterward and were growing strongly in the back garden with the aid of some slow-release fertiliser... well, they've been struck down by powdery mildew. That happened the last time I planted pea plants a couple of years ago- I'd just started harvesting and eating delicious snow peas when the plants were afflicted with this horrid fungus, and within a week they were dessicated pea-plant-corpses. Hmph.
I'm not having much luck with continental parsley, either. Most of the ones that sprouted are still alive, they just don't seem to be doing anything. I have some out the back in the garden, with dodgy potting mix, and some on the front balcony with good potting mix, and all seem to be (not) growing at the same rate. I'm watering them once a day- sometimes twice for the ones out the back because they get more sun, so I can't help but wonder where I could be going wrong? Most of the basil plants (the ones that weren't eaten off at the roots... grrrr) are going gangbusters. What's the parsley's problem?
Come to think of it, the same thing is happening with what I presume to be a chilli plant- only I'm unable to identify it because it has only just started to put out its first proper leaf after the cotyledons. Meanwhile, our gorgeous little chilli that spontaneously grew in a descina pot one day, struggling along for years, undernourished and strangled, producing a single chilli before we took pity on it and put it in a pot of its own, currently has four or five chillis growing on it, plus more flowers. When we transplanted it into a pot of its own, its leaves turned from yellow to green almost overnight, and it started producing flowers. It's now more than triple the size it was when we took it out of the drescina pot at the beginning of the year. So why would it be so hard, with all the nurturing I've put into it, to deliberately raise a chilli plant from seed when the one we raised accidentally has been doing all the hard yards on its own?
With the strawberry plants, I'm not sure if it's my poor gardening skills or just the nature of strawberry plants. They're alive- they took so long to sprout I'd assumed they were never going to, but they're growing ever so slowly. They're absolutely miniscule- they have got as far as putting out two or three tiny, strawberry-shaped leaves (i.e. the appropriate shape for the leaves on a strawberry plant, not the shape of the fruit!), but don't seem to be in a particular hurry to grow up into nice, big strawberry-producing plants.
Mint I won't count as a failure, because that thing keeps growing and growing. But... it has been a total caterpillar-magnet. It's currently on its second infestation- after a week of twice-daily visits armed with my best squashing-fingers I conquered the first. Still, the mint plant grows so fast you would never know that the first infestation even occurred. It also seems to be attracting green aphids, which I haven't been so zealous about squashing because they don't really appear to be doing much damage.
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The bush turkey is still visiting and happily making an absolute mess of the middle 'compost' section of the garden, between Keith Richards' side and the side where vegetables are growing, where the compost bin is located. While I stick some stuff in the compost bin, I toss things like orange peel, onion offcuts and eggshells into the dirt below the compost bin- I know the surinam cockroaches will eat those when there's nothing else, whereas worms tend not to like them too much. There are plenty of worms in that section of garden, still, but I'm fairly sure the turkey is there primarily for the hordes of surinam cockroaches. I'm sure it would rather have the entire garden to dig up every day, but this way we're both happy! I had a look at these photos the other day, and I'm pretty sure it's the same turkey that was visiting last year- for some reason I had it in my head that last year's turkey was a male, but it was female- as is the one that visits now- so I'm assuming they're one and the same.
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