Gardening

Things have been trucking along in the garden department. I've pulled up all the radishes and planted  more (for some reason most of them grew weird and crooked/spindly), planted more carrots (only one is growing?!) and planted my brussels sprouts. On the first day of summer (Dec. 1st) one of my glads bloomed and currently there are three others about to bloom with a few other set to bloom next week. I'm waiting to see if the mess of green in the flower bed is actually flowers or just weeds that I should pull up, I'm starting to think it's mostly weeds! Hopefully they'll start to do something soon!

My tomato plants are starting to get flowers so I'm really looking forward to eventually getting tomatoes and my pumpkin plant has really taken off. Hopefully some of the seeds I planted a few weeks ago actually start growing! I seem to have had the most success with planting things in small pots and then transplanting rather than planting seeds straight into the ground!

Finally, Flowers!

It's been almost three months and I've finally got a few flowers blooming or ready to bloom!

I have a few flowers on a few of my balsam camellia plants and one of my glads is ready to bloom.

The only problem I have right now is I have a total infestation of leafhoppers. There are certain plants they leave alone but they LOVE flowers (they've eaten three of my pumpkin flowers and are working on the balsam camellia now). Now that I've finally ID'd what they are (at first I thought they were slugs/snails and then aphids) I can hopefully figure out how to get rid of them. Unfortunately I haven't seen any beneficial bugs in the garden which is probably why there is such a big infestation.

I can't wait until I have more flowers blooming (and when I can see what of the mass of green in the flower bed is flower and what is weed!).

Randomness

We've had a bit of a busy few days around here. Tuesday was spent at Werribee Zoo and then we had MG on Wednesday, normally Glen has Wednesdays off but this week he had to work so I had to drive him in and then decided to go straight to MG instead of going home since traffic in the mornings can be iffy. I decided since I was going to be early that I'd take Aurora in to the walk-in clinic just to make sure that her lingering cough wasn't anything serious. She got the all-clear from the doctor thankfully and we were in and out quick quickly.

Thursday was another day at Werribee Zoo (our membership has now paid for itself!) with Glen's sister and her youngest (he's 4). Before we went to the zoo we got word from Glen's sister that she was running late so we decided to take Aurora to get her 1 year shots. I had been debating whether or not to take her for that session or wait until tomorrow or Tuesday to take her to a session in our old suburb. Taking her to our old suburb would involve driving Glen to work again so we figured we may as well just go to the closest one. It was also convenient to have Glen be there for these ones too (mostly because she's so mobile now, it's handy to have another pair of eyes! I think we can now say that Aurora is walking, she walks 95% of the time at home now and is walking in public now).

The zoo was great again and 4yo nephew seemed to really enjoy it. I was remarking to Glen at how neat it is that we can go so much and see little changes and see funny animal things that only happen occasionally. A good example of this was while we were on the safari tour, the tour guide was talking about how giraffes are herbivores and we looked over and said "oh, well, they ARE herbivores but sometimes they find a dead bird and chew on it!" we all looked over and there was a giraffe munching away on a dead bird (all you could see where massive white feathers sticking out of it's mouth). The guide said that she's only seen that happen one other time. I didn't think I needed a third post dedicated to Werribee Zoo so soon after the other two so I didn't really take many bloggable pics.

The other exciting thing going on here is that we've harvested three radishes from our garden today!

I ate the smallest one and I'm going to take the other two to the IL's tonight. The small one was SO spicy! I know giving someone two radishes is sort of silly but there's only two of them and they eat a lot of salad so I'm sure they'll use it.

One of glads has a flower spear so we should be getting flowers on at least ONE of my plants soon!

First Harvest

We've had our first mini-harvest from the garden in the form of two snowpeas and then another three today!

So far the snowpeas seem to be the only thing impervious to the pests we have in the garden (I think it's aphids and not slugs/snails like I originally thought) and don't seem to be suffering in the same way my poor pumpkin is. My pumpkin produced a beautiful flower only to have it totally obliterated by the pests. I'll be really sad if things keep getting eaten before they have a chance to grow.
I've planted a few more pumpkin, watermelon and cucumber seedlings to hopefully ensure I get at least one!

The flowers are doing well and hopefully I'll start seeing some blossoms soon!

A Spot of Gardening

Our new house has a small yard with two spots in the back for a bit of a garden. I have been wanting to do something back there since we moved in. Gardening in a different climate was really intimidating to me at first since I had no idea what grew during what season (things were so easy back home, you had from basically May to September to garden and that was it). When we got back home from our trip to Canada I decided that since spring was coming (spring starts September 1st) I was going to take the plunge and plant things.
Unfortunately I put things off too long so I missed buying/planting spring flowering bulbs (next year!) but picked up some summer flowering bulbs (glads) and a bunch of seeds. I decided that the long bed that runs across from our living room window was going to be for flowers and the weird triangular shaped bed by the back door was going to be for veggies.

I was really interested in trying to grow veggies/fruit that might've been difficult to grow back home or ones we've never tried to grow before. One of the main ones I wanted to grow was watermelon. I was having a bit of success with my seedlings and then I put them into the ground... Slowly, one by one, they all got eaten by slugs/snails or whatever else is out there munching on my plants. I went and picked up another packet of seeds to try again so hopefully these new ones survive!

So right now in the veggie bed I have: corn, snow peas, orange pumpkin, cucumber, watermelon, radish, carrots, basil, and tomatoes. I'll be planting brussels sprouts in a few weeks. I also have a little container of jalapenos and strawberries in the kitchen.

In the flower bed I have a huge mix of things. The two biggest things are the glads (they are doing SO well!) and balsam camellia. I also have snap dragons, sweet peas, marigolds, and a bunch of other random things.

Don't let all those tiny green plants fool you, most of that will be flowers!

We also have a plan to put down some grass seed in all those dead patches.