Reaching the end - Who is left?

The season has definitely started to reach it's end here in our garden. Most of our beds are empty now, with their previous inhabitants either harvested or casualty of some pest. Apart from our butter-nuts mentioned in the previous post, here is a bit of a run through:

Our heart shaped bed raging with ripening
tomatoes and healthy beetroot.

Firstly, our heart-shaped bed is now the only one that has some real activity taking place. As we mentioned before, we planted 6 tomato plants and six beetroot plants in it and I have to say they are all flourishing. After our first attempt at tomatoes failed miserably, we decided to give it another go. 

Our first batch of tomato plants fell victim to what I believe was Gray Leaf Spot disease. Even though the plants got big and many tomatoes started forming, their production soon stopped and the leaves all started going brown. Eventually we lost all of them and didn't get a single tomato from them. I haven't really found much regarding the treatment of this disease, so if anyone has a remedy, please share!

The new plants have been most giving with their fruit and we've had a steady supply of incredibly delicious tomatoes coming from them. 

The cucumber plants have been pulled out - They were probably the most giving in the whole garden. We ended up giving some of them away as we just had too many! Our sunflowers all turned out great.. Some much more than others. They were actually good indicators of where the best sun in the garden is, seeing as we planted them all over. Some got very tall and others stayed short and small.

Some of the taller sunflowers from the garden.

Our little sunflowers on the left - not the sunniest
of spots in the garden.

Our watermelons also took a dive from the same wilt that claimed one of our cucumber plants. Makes sense seeing as watermelon plants are also vines. To avoid it, they say one should rotate crops each year, plant disease-resistant varieties, and sow radishes in your melon patch - which apparently they deter cucumber beetles, which transmit the disease.

The Zucchini plants delivered a few enormous fruits! That's just before the powdery-mildew got them and now they too are over.. 

Currently, our gardening is still continuing though - we've still got our pepino melon plant and the spearmint along with my newly-found interest in making cuttings, which I'll post on soon.

Progress Report

It's been 50 days since we started our gardening venture. With everything in its place, here is a sneak-peek into how far our plants have come. Please feel free to refer back to earlier posts for comparison of progress.

 

Top left - the mixed veggie patch. Top right - the cucumber patch. Above - the butternut patch.

The three beds with Mimilu watering.

Our tomato plants.

The first baby tomato.

The watermelon patch.

One of many baby watermelons.

Myself - busy harvesting our bok choy and spinach.

Our first harvest!

All the bottom beds.

A Heart-Shaped Bed

Whether you see it as a kind-of-homage to Kurt Cobain's Heart Shaped Box, or an attempt to bring more love into our garden, or simply the most suitable shape to fill a space, a heart-shaped bed was our next addition. We needed to plant six more beetroot- and six more tomato starts - this would be their home. It took a good while to dig the bed out. Between breaking up super-hard clay and cutting away old hard roots, it seemed never-ending - but, after a good while of manual labour, we could start preparing the soil.


Once our usual compost and Gold Dust had been mixed with the clay-rich-soil, the new occupants moved in. We would have to put up some bamboo to support the tomatoes at some point - but that can wait for now. We framed the bed with some white stones we got from the nursery in order to make it stand out. Tree bark and some of our stones were used to join the bed into rest of the garden.

Although the sun had already left us, the finished
product still stood out very well.

A Quick Update..

Some time has past since we dug up our first beds. Despite the grub-attacks that have claimed two of our beetroot plants, everyone has been doing well. Casualties aside, all the plants were still there and have been joined by four Bok Choy (Chinese Cabbage), some tiki-torches and tiny sunflower plants. Here's a few photos to show how they're doing.

Beetroot, Spinach, Egg-plant, Cucumber,
Bok Choy, Rocket and Sunflowers.

The cucumber bed.

Three little sunflower plants with butternuts surrounding them.

Invisible hostiles!

Unbeknown to us, creatures lurk in the darkness of the underground! Fat, parasitic grubs that are clearly hungrier than we are! Like the rotting foundation of an old house, these critters slowly munch away at the roots of plants, leading to the mysterious collapse of whole building! Our grubs are after the beet roots - a sad event! Due to our aversion to chemicals, fighting them off will have to become a cosmic task. A dear friend advised us to fill an aluminium pie-tin with fresh cucumber and put it in the garden.

Apparently the reaction between the aluminium and cucumber gives off a scent that sends certain pests like slugs and underground hostiles running. We are awaiting their mass evacuation! Some more advice was given to us.. Plant more!! Sharing is caring, so why not plant some more beetroots, thus there will be plenty for us and nature will get some too!

The First Two Beds

After much of the initial cleaning, raking, hacking and sawing, just to get some sun into our soon-to-be garden, it was time to equip the garden pick and start digging it up. We started digging away with great zest. This was however rather short-lived as we are definitely not very used to manual labour! But we soldiered on. Then the next troubling realisation came to light: The soil was actually very rich in clay!

My sister was the only one who had known this from her previous gardening work in this very spot many years ago. This is where the Gold Dust came into play, which she had luckily bought. Apparently it helps to break down the clay, but there was a lot of hard work ahead before we could actually use it. The next while was spent crushing massive clumps of clay and clearing weeds and arbitrary roots. The rake was actually quite handy for breaking up the clay. Our old hedge-trimmers served in cutting off the fat roots we couldn't pull out. This whole process took quite some time.

Once it started looking like there was some chance of a plant actually growing here, the started mixing in the organic compost we had gotten from the nursery. Planting-time was drawing near!

After much mixing, it was finally time to start planting. My sister and I had gotten quite a few baby-plants from the nursery which included cucumbers, beetroot, rocket, lettuce and eggplant. One by one our two little beds were getting some colour as we started planting them. The beetroot, rocket, eggplant and lettuce were placed in two rows while the cucumbers formed their own single file (apparently they take over and need quite a bit of space!).

Once the planting was done, we sprinkled the Gold Dust around the starts and in the empty areas of the bed. Now all that was left was watering them - and just like that we were on our way. We used our last bit of energy to pull up a few forgotten logs, bricks and stones to make a little rim around the beds.

After all of this, it was quite an amazing feeling just standing back and admiring the finished product. Not a bad first day at all!

Our first two beds