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.

The Zucchini bed.

We had planted some baby-marrow (zucchini) seeds about a week and a half ago into a tray of six. Finally, one breaks through. A day or two passes without any others breaking through the soil. Eventually it became apparent that the others were duds and we were going to have to make due with just one for now and plant some more later.

Building the bed.

The spot we chose for the lone baby-would get great sun, but was neighboured by lots of bamboo, whose roots are very strong and hard to remove. We therefore decided to make a raised bed using a string of small logs, that we got from the nursery (seeing as we couldn't find something in our backyard to do this!). We dug into the ground to mix up some of the clay-ish soil - the soil here was a bit better than that of our first two beds. Then we started mixing in compost and a bit of our garden soil.

Once the empty shape had been filled, we planted one lonely-zucchini into it's new massive bed - although we had been told they do go crazy and cover a lot of ground. We watered the bed and let if settle in.

Trekker and the Zucchini.