We have removed most of the summer veggie garden now, and have started on the winter one. We had more success this past summer than the previous one, but we can certainly improve. We did manage to produce some carrots, corn, green beans, yellow beans, golden nugget pumpkins, cherry and black russian tomatoes, garlic and lettuce. The big producers for the summer were our purple beans and a variety of small tomato called Tommy Toe. Both of these needed to be staked higher, but regardless they managed to do well. Andrew has a pole attached to the back fence, and some of the purple beans climbed at least 3 metres up the pole. The complete failures of the summer were our apples (which had coddling moth and some splotchy skin issue), the cucumber plants which died as soon as we planted them and the chives (which were decimated by aphids). the purple beans are still producing a few beans, but I am allowing the ones left to dry out. We will have quite a few seeds when they are all dried.
The kids and I podded some dried beans today, and they were quite interested in the different colored seeds. The green beans had dark brown seeds, the yellow beans had beautiful glossy black seeds, and the purple beans had pale seeds.
The winter garden currently consists of garlic, leeks, silver beet, dwarf peas and snow peas (they might have been planted a little early), and a small number of celery and cauliflower seedlings. We plan to put in some carrot seeds, but we will leave that until after Easter. It will be interesting to see how the winter garden goes.
