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.

Our veggie garden hasn’t been a complete success this year, but it is certainly doing better than last year. So far we have harvested tomatoes and purple beans, with more beans (green and yellow) on the way. So far we haven’t eaten any of our ripe strawberries….we never beat the birds to them. The apples are looking quite poorly again too.

A few weeks ago I had a visit from a local gardener who prunes trees and takes the cuttings for use by a florist. I’m not sure exactly how it all works, but I have had visits from someone like him before, years ago when I used to live here before Sydney. They usually give you a token amount of money for allowing them to take the branches. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just happy for someone other than myself to prune the camelia trees, since they are so large.

So, the guy visited a few weeks ago, but when he got a closer look at the trees he said they weren’t in good condition, with hail and other damage, and he didn’t end up wanting to prune them since he wouldn’t be able to use the cuttings. He recommended cutting about 3 feet off the top and 2 feet off the sides of the trees.

I decided to take his advice and give them a big prune. In the end I only did one tree last week, and Andrew did the other three on the weekend. We had a deadline of yesterday if we wanted the bits we chopped off to be collected in the council hard rubbish collection that we have happening this week. We got it all done, though we really didn’t have a lot of idea how to prune camellia trees. To me it looks good….the trees are thinned out, our front lawn now gets more light (it was rather dark and damp before), and I have faith that the bare patches will be filled in in time. I hope we haven’t done any lasting damage to the 50-year-old trees, but I do believe that camellia trees like being cut back. Unfortunately we did also cut down an old birds nest that was being used by a cute ring-tail possum. Hopefully he will find another home that isn’t our roof.

This was pretty much our carrot haul from our raised garden bed. Admittedly, not much to show for 6 months of growing, but it was great for the kids to see how carrots grow. Maybe we’ll do better next time.