Mid-Summer garden update

It’s the middle of Summer here in central NSW - a good time for a garden update. A few things first -

• we (mrshill, our cat Collie and myself) moved to Orange (large-ish regional town) two years ago for a slower paced lifestyle but also to level up our gardening skills.
• we’re (still) living in the same rental accommodation from when we first moved here so it’s very suburban.
• we’re starting from a very low base - we’ve never been good gardeners but we’re getting better … slowly.
• when we first moved here our idyllic vision for the future was a small farm with room for goats, many fruit trees and all sorts of other things growing. Last year we reassessed and decided we didn’t want this any more - the book ‘Retrosuburbia’ by David Holmgren is our inspiration now, so we’re looking to buy a house on a largish block within walking distance from town.
• our Retrosuburbia vision requires that we grow as much of our food as we can so we still need to be honing our gardening skills.

We went away for about 5 days over Christmas to spend time with family and then 12 days in early January for a little trip in our van. So many times in the past when we’ve gone away over the Christmas / new year period we’ve left with things starting to grow in the garden only to come back a week or two later to find almost everything dead. Unless you have a friendly neighbour to come around every other day to water your only hope is that it rains a lot or … you invest in some sort of irrigation solution - which is what we finally did this time. Our set up was pretty simple - a 15 meter soaker hose attached to the tap via a timer controller. That enabled us to set up scheduled times for the soaker hose to come on and water the soil. A lot of the things we had growing (spinach, pumpkin, tomatoes) were just starting off before Christmas so they were growing in pots, plant boxes or grow bags. Other than that we had a few things growing in a little patch outside our back doorstep and a little strawberry patch along the side fence. What we did was move all the things not growing in the ground so that everything sat in (roughly) a 10 metre line from the start of the soaker hose to where the strawberries were and we just set the hose up to go in and around everything along this line. This was super easy to do and worked a treat! We tested it before we left to make sure everything got a decent soak. This was some of what we came back to mid-January (please ignore the weeds) -

Spinach (almost gone to seed)

Tomatoes coming up nicely - we planted these in the ground in early January

More ginormous greens

Snow peas - they were already on the way out before we went away. Although the plant was dead it still had some snow peas to harvest.

Kale - we’ve become pretty good at growing this all year round.

In this cluster we’ve got lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, pumpkin.

Tomatoes going absolutely gangbusters!

More garden posts to come shortly. Thanks for reading!