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.

Painting with Sunflowers

Apart from the few baby sunflowers we had planted in our vegetable beds, we still had a small army of ready-to-plant ones waiting in trays. After scanning the unused sunny areas in our garden, it was clear that they would find their new home behind the wall that runs along our watermelon patch. Although the soil was - again - rich in clay, this spot gets a nice amount of sun throughout the day. After the tedious task of digging six holes, each about 30 cm's deep, we started mixing in the Gold Dust and compost. 

Saya getting in there with her fashionable-lady-
gardening-gloves.

Once the soil seemed like something could actually grow in it, we deemed it ready and started removing the babies from the trays. Saya carefully planted them, two in each hole. Once everyone had settled in, we watered the bed and rounded the bed off with some bamboo.

Mimilu added the final touches, which were Teddy-bear sunflower seeds being planted in the remaining open areas of the beds. We were told these don't need to be tray-planted first, and can be planted directly into the soil. So now, all that remains is to wait until we have our own row of sunflowers colouring in the old, blank wall behind the watermelon-patch.

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.

Seeds

Seeds are life. It has always amazed me, this miracle of growth, transformation and manifestation. Seeds represent new life, birth. Without seeds, nothing would exist. From such a tiny object, something as majestic and massive as the Giant Redwoods of California, are born. Each with a purpose and a link to every ecosystem on earth. Seeds are to be treasured, they are more special than we realize. Already seeds have been patented. Huge corporations are capitalizing on- and monopolizing those precious gifts from nature.

Already there is too much mass control of which seeds to buy, how to grow them, quantities thereof and how much they yield. Many seed-banks offer seeds - especially for commercial farming - that produce fruits and flowers whose seeds are sterile. Just so you can go and buy more! If you have plants that produce usable seeds, keep them and look after them. Treasure them! Watch this space and follow the birth, growth and flowering of our beautiful sunflowers.

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.