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.

Reaching the end - The Butternut-bed..

After a long absence due to work and academics, we are back! Regardless of how long it's been since we've posted an update, the garden has still been running it's course.

Seeing as this was our first, and very experimental attempt at a home-grown-organic-veggie-patch, a lot of lessons were learnt through the ups and downs of the garden. In the end, a lot of rewards came from the experience, along with the frustrations of pests and diseases that we also had to endure.

Two of our butternuts - The other fruits
are not from our garden ;)

We had five butternut-plants in our bottom bed. These guys started slowly but were soon growing at an amazing pace and soon crawled well beyond their own bed - and then came the powdery-mildew. Many plants appear to be succeptable to this fungal disease that appears as a white or grayish powdery growth on leaves, stems and buds. It started off slowly on one or too leaves, and then it spread quickly onto all five plants. Once a leaf was covered in it, it soon wilted and died.

This process goes quite quickly and pretty soon our first casualty came. The butternut-plant was left without a single leaf, it's stem drying out and it's one butternut at the end. Luckily, the mildew did not harm the fruit. We harvested it and pulled the dead plant out. This pattern surged through the bed, killing off all five the plants and leaving us with 3 butternuts - quite a tiny harvest! Nonetheless, we ate one of the butternuts recently and it was heavenly.. Dare I say, it was definitely the most tasty, scrumptious butternut I had had in a long time.

There are apparently a few ways one can treat this problem.. One we used, although we started it up a bit late, was actually quite effective:

Get your hands on some Ascorbic-Acid (Vitamin C) from any pharmacy or co-op. You can even just buy cheap and simple generic Vitamin C pills and crush them up. Mix a teaspoon or two into about a litre of water and spray this on the effected areas. Remember to spray under the leaves as well. This worked well to dry out the mildew and it made most of it die away - but you have to do this daily for as long as possible. It helped once we started but the damage was already done.

Apparently, something that works even faster, which can be used together with the Ascorbic acid, is Plant/Food grade hydrogen-peroxide. Here's a great link to the uses of it. Spray it on the same way you would the Vitamin C - dosage I'm not sure of.

Here's another link to some other approaches to countering this disease. If you have any tips/ideas on this topic, feel free to share them!

Next time we'll definitely be better prepared to preventing this disease from claiming our plants!

Progress Report - How everyone's doing

Since our last update, the garden has seemingly gone through some ups and downs - but everybody seems to be doing well for the most part (I'll mention the downs in my next update). Since our first harvest of Bok Choy and Spinach, we've enjoyed quite a few delicious salads courtesy of these plants. Our cucumber plants lost some leaves close to where the stem enters the soil, but the plant seems to be doing well regardless.. Despite the few leaves that seemingly shrivelled up and died, which has stopped happening, we have enjoyed quite alot of delicious cucumbers from them! We only realised once we started getting our first cucumbers that these aren't the English Cucumber, that we get in the stores here, but of the pickling cucumber variety. These are shorter with a prickly skin but taste just as good, although we've had one bitter one.

For our first attempt, the cucumbers have definitely been the most rewarding harvest-wise.

On the melon side of things, here's two photo's showing how our butternuts and our watermelons are doing:

One of our butternuts

A baby-watermelon

Britney and Pepe, our spearmint- and pepino-melon plants, respectively, have grown so much and are doing really well:

Our spearment is very happy here.

Our Pepino melon flourishing in his pot.

I'll do another post soon regarding some of the dips the garden has taken. Peace

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 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.

The Nutty Butts

On our last trip to the nursery we brought along some watermelon and butternut squash starts that were looking for a new home, along with more compost and bark. We decided to create a bed below the first two beds, where the butternuts are sure to get good sun. We wanted to make this bed different so we decided to make a circle shaped bed to create some visual differentiation.

Mimilu and myself began to clear the  ground after it was picked of stones and unnecessary roots (per usual), however  this time round the roots took  exeptionally long because we discovered thick, tough roots that poised a fight of note. But alas, after tugging, pulling, cutting and chopping we eventually managed to complete and  prepare the ground.

This area of the garden has a slight slope and there where the butternut bed is, the slope sightly steepens, therefore when we mixed the ground together with our compost and levelled out the bed to

prevent any unnecessary run-off. Yay, our butternut patch is ready! We
placed the starts in the circle formation and surrounded the bed with pieces of cut bamboo. We then began to finish off that area by making it a united patch. We completed the stone formation by linking it to the other two beds and placed the other bark pieces onto the path.

Tomatie Party

So the time had come to plant our little tomato starts that have been waiting so patiently to be planted. We once again began to pick away at the oh-so-barren clay ground that we are faced with. But after some vicious picking, we managed to mix in our bags of compost and introduced the tomatoes to their new home. 

Before planting the starts, Yakattack first cut some bamboo poles which we rooted into the ground to act as support posts for when the starts get to the right height. On completion of the bamboo supports and settling the starts we surrounded the new bed with stones and spread some bark as a garnish. As tomatoes grow upward, we decided to put a butternut squash and cucumber in the same bed as they grow along the ground thus making the

tomatie party so much more fun...

Too much sun!

Saya and Mimilu went to the nursery again today. Despite the fact that all of us were excited to expand a bit more on our newly-found project, the South African sun beating down with all its might left us all rather silent and irritable.

Nonetheless, we arrived home and we started unpacking the new goodies. They had bought a variety of seeds (sunflower, Californian Wonder peppers and a chilli mix-pack), some butternut starts, melon starts, more compost and a two bags of tree bark! Quite a range!

We went straight to our beds to see how the young plants were doing. All of them were looking like they were doing well.. except for one - the lettuce! It was as though the sun had melted it flat onto the ground. The leaves were entirely limp and it was clear that the plant was in need of some serious TLC. Mimilu dug the poor thing out and replanted what was left of it into a small pot. We placed it in the shade and gave it a lot of water and about 20 minutes later it was back to it's perky self. We would definitely have to plant it in a spot that didn't get that much sun. It would stay in the pot for now.

The bags of bark came in handy in adding a bit of a decorative touch. We filled the spot between the two beds with some tree bark and the result was quite pleasing. The rest of the afternoon was spent planting seeds into trays using a mixture of soil and compost.