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 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