Hello,
It has been a fair while since i have updated this blog but since it has relatively little or no readers, i thought no-one would be horribly annoyed or anything. Many things have happened in our garden since, well the start fo spring and lets begin shall we? First of all our sunflowers and grown and flowered and they are MASSIVE. We are planning on getting seeds from them this time around.
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Our bean by the trellis has grown rampant and nearly killed everything growing in the pot on the trellis.
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How many beans can you see in this picture below.
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The crystal apple cucumber is starting to fruit and they should be ready in a week, sadly i wont be there to harvest them so my brother will have to.
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The berries have gone wild although their fruit just seems to dissapear (birds i believe)
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Our citrus tree are mostly doing well and this orange/lime (we are not quite sure) tree has hundreds of fruits coming up and they are about 2-3 cm in diameter (or about an inch).
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Sadly our blood orange, pepino and pomegranate tree don't seem to be looking the best.
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We recently planted one of our apples in the ground to see what would happen. It seems to be doing alright. Our onions are rather small but they are still pretty well formed, we are considering just letting them grow until they seed.
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Recently our garlic has died off telling us that it needs to be harvested although sadly they are all fairly small bulbs but they taste fine. We are planning on replanting around 100 of them next year including some 'seeds' which will produce wild garlic.
Remember those carrots we had last year which we didn't quite harvest.... well they have flowered and gone to seed.
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Our beans along the back trellis are looking rather pale and arent doing so well along with most things in our big garden... We think the soil is deficient a couple nutrients. They all sport a couple really small beans though.
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The single pea isnt looking too great either although it has a large pea on it almost ready to eat.
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The corn is doing fantastic all around.
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We recently bought some black russian tomatoes and they have just started to flower which is great.
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The Rhubarb is looking edible.
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The potatoes are heavily stunted
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The nasturtium has had a couple of flowers but hasn't really grown all that much like i have seen it do in other places. Any idea what is wrong with our soil at all guys?
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The strawberries are going well although they always get eaten. i sometimes get to them in time and they usually are great tasting, better than most store bought ones.
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all of our apples are doing fine other than the minor leaf bruises and things like that.
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our pumpkins havent really grown and it is concerning that they are flowering when they are so small as it is a sure sign they are not healthy
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our watermelons frow ever so slowly although the yellow seedless is doing a lot better than the sugar baby which is just finally starting to grow (hope there is enough of a season left for them)
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The mustard has gone to seed
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The only things growing at the trellis on the right side is a tomato plant and a melon plant. They are doing alright.
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Finally we have a chilli or two growing in this little section in front of our trellis.
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If any of you are reading this could you please try identify what might be wrong with our soil as it is fairly concerning and it does stop our progress. I was planning on, next year digging in the mulch and sprinkling a whole lot of dolomite and blood & bone. Any ideas or comments are always welcome!

Last night was one of the biggest storms we have had in a while with hailstorms, lightning and lots of wind and rain. Our recent attempts to plant a large amount of young plants over our garden with newspaper and bought soil has been mostly swept away by the horrendous wind and rain and some of the plants have been covered by soil, ripped up by the wind or hit with hail. Here is what it looked like before hand..
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and
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And this morning we checked it and it looks like this...

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This week, our berries our doing very well, expecially the silvan berry and strawberries and they should be ready soon. Our seedling tray has also almost entirely sprouted and is pretty much ready to be transplanted soon.
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That is about it for this week although storms aside, it is certainly heating up here and it is starting to feel like summer. We will leave you with this image of our pomegranate tree with a flower.
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This week it has been very busy with life and all but we still managed to do a lot with plants. I went for a bike-ride and i couldn't resist stopping by a nursery so i took a look and there are so many cool fruit and veggies that i want to grow its not funny as so much is in season and recently, bunnings, the big warehouse company has started supporting a lot more organic and heritage plants. I only picked up one thing but that was a seedless yellow watermelon with a pollinating watermelon plant.  I have done this because i wanted to test heritage verse hybrid and recently along with most of our plants, one of my two watermelons was eaten. 👁 Image

This is how we found the dead watermelon in the morning.
Along with that all our pumpkins are suffering pest damage and their leaves are slowly disappearing but they are fast enough to survive.
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We have also finished our plans for the pizza plot which involved putting everything in the seedling tray into the potting soil that is ontop on newspaper ontop of the ground where it originally was supposed to be. We also did this with a row of tomatos in the other seedling tray. This emptied both seedling trays. After this we covered the border of our garden, where the chillis capsicums and eggplants were meant to sprout, with newspaper to kill off all the weeds and we plant to just put soil ontop and plant stuff later. Since our seedling trays were empty we decided to fill them up and plant 30 chilli, capsicum and eggplants in one along with 4 tomatos, rockmelon and cucumber for the border and trellis. In the other seedling tray we planted 15 corn, 10 beans and 2 backup watermelon and this was just to replace what was eaten. As you could imagine our garden is a mess but it is slowly getting there. We also put newspaper under the strawberries to protect the berries. Our silvan berries are getting quite large as are some of the 60 or so strawberries we have on one plant.
In our parts of our garden, the pomegranate tree is covered with a rich red flower.
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finally for this week, our orange tree with hundreds of flowers has finally bloomed a couple.

Hey our many, many (non-existant) readers,
Sorry we havent updated in a couple weeks but it has been a really busy 2 weeks. In our wall garden, all the plants in the ground our growing and i also added a 7 year bean to the mix to treat as an annual and a couple of shelling peas for the garden. We still need to add the hanging pots and plant stuff in them but that seems to be moving along well. Only 4 of our sunflowers survived which i suppose is enough for this year, i can't honestly be bothered with planting more. Our silvanberry has an insanely large number of flowers appearing everywhere and some of the first ones are starting to look like small berries. This photo is a slight bit old and doesn't show flowers but each one of those buds turned into a flower and htere were many on every branch.
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In more sad news, almost all of our beans have been eated by something along with a nasturtium i planted and the seven year bean in the corner. After this i delevoped a slugproof defence which has so far proven its worth. I cut a toilet roll down to its last centermetre many times so it peels like a banana and then i cut an opening and i put it around the stem of vulnerable plants and slugs and snails just can't climb it. Then i mulched the whole area where nasturtium is growing along with potatos and rhubard and i put a nasturtium seedling in with this defence on it.  I then thought, wow this could work for the area where none of the pumpkins sprouted and all the weeds and grass seedlings are, so i put down a thick layer of mulch to suppress weeds and them put in 3 pumpkin seedlings surround by this toilet roll. I just today put in 3 more seven year beans by our fence trellis after our last one was eated and they are all protected aswell although no mulch is down yet. I am yet to try this with the watermelon seedlings once they are fully ready i will put them in aswell. This method may also save our beans by the trellis so that our garden isn't bare this year. On a final note, in our seedling tray, everything has sprouted except our capsicums, eggplants and chillis although they are always incredibly slow to get started i find. I hope to make them perrenial in Australia as i have seen others do elsewhere because they would make a great border.

Well some good news is here today as a change from all the bad news. Our Silvanberry is flowering on almost every end of it's branches. Well sort of, it has formed buds which will soon be flowers and hopefully soon be berries. So far none of the other berries have flowered although they are all doing great.

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Also whilst taking photos we noticed something great. Finally some of the seeds had started to sprout as we saw a whole assortment of our golden pole wax and dragon tongue beans sprouting.
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Also newly sprouted is our Potatos(below). Out of the four we have planted 3 have sprouted strongly so i am happy.
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Our sunflower seedlings(below) have mostly sprouted although something is munching away slowly at the leaves of all thirteen and i fear that none may make it.
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Also our dragon bean by our wall garden is doing well at 2 inches tall.
Our garlic is apparently 1 month away from harvest and we should harvest it when it starts do die back.

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And finally all of our strawberries are flowering and our 1 year old one has many, many flowers.
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This is our garden (- the garden next to the wall with the blackberries and trellis.) and it is approx. 35m squared. If you can see in this photo, we have all of our pots behind a 7m trellis and between the 3rd and 4th post from the left, there is an opening left as a pathway for us to walk on. The pots contain a few herbs, one or two strawberries, our apples, our garlic and some other random things. They are really just for herbs and experiments. We found some Rhubarb when we came to this house so we made it into a row and we also added our newly bought strawberries in front of the plot as according to plan(see below). We have marked out absolutely everything in our garden with coloured popsticle sticks and it looks quite messy(If you look carefully in the photo, you might see it.). We have one problem. This garden used to be full of weeds and grass and trees and overgrown things. We turn over all the soil, removed hundreds of agapanthas and got rid of all the stuff but there are hundreds of little grass and weed shootlets appearing everywhere and it is hard to tell what is our own plant even with markers. Also only silverbeat, mustard, mizuna, rocket and one rockmelon have sprouted and i am beginning to fear our soil is too clay filled and we planted them too deep. (Btw, a pizza plot consists of companion planting from a book. It contains basil, chives, tomato, chilli, rocket, onion, aubergine and capsicum all planted close and in a certain circular arrangement.)
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This plan has changed a bit since we planted it. So far the circle thing with a line through it, is our pepino in a pot (far middle right) and we have'nt planted garlic as it isn't time to yet. We also removed almost all of the pots area and planted the pumpkin there. We added celery to the Rhubarb row and moved the mustard (but nothing else) to where the pumpkins were. (ps: ignore the silly spelling of words, it was sort of a joke).
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Since i was starting to worry about if the stuff would sprout in time, i rushed ahead and bought these 5 x 8 seedling trays. In the left one we have everything needed for the pizza plot, in order (rows front to back) we have garlic chives, chilli, tomato, basil, capsicum, eggplant, 2 rocket and 3 chive, onion. As for the left one we have fillers anyway. This, in order, 2 rows of tomatos, 2 rows of lettuce, 3 pumpkins and 2 watermelon in a row, 2 nasturtium and 3 marigold, a row of celery and finally a row of 2 unknown peas and 3 unknown legumes of some kind.

Now for our wall garden. It is a 8m by .8m garden next to a brick wall. Each meter we have a bramble plant for the first six meters going left to right. It goes in this order 2 silvan berries (blackberry hybrid apparently very tasty) 2 rasberries given to us by a friend, and 2 blackberries found in our garden (probably a wild variety). From the raspberries onwards, we are growing, on the path and wall side, 2 rows of 6 sunflowers.
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A few of the sunflowers were eaten by snails or birds but the majority have survived and i will replant the eaten ones. Once these and the rasberry shoots get large enough, i will properly mulch it like the silvan berry (below)
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Now for my little pet project, the wall garden.
Here is the wall garden so far. (last week)
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And since then we have put up one of the many hanging pots that are going ot go up there. These will include pots with tomato, chilli and herbs. Growing up the trellis we have dragon beans, Eggplant, tomato, Cucmber, crystal apple cucmbers and even hops. So far only the Eggplant and 1 dragon bean have sprouted. Here is the hanging pot with thyme, tomato and chilli in it.(below)
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And we plan to put a long window pot up with catnip and mint in it.
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This is what an overipe pepino looks like. This was the only survivor of a gradn total of 7 from that plant. It tasted nicish although it is more of a background taste and needs something done to it and we suspect it is overripe. Later this year we will put effort into making sure the fruit forms perfectly and we will find a recipe that works. That is all for this week.

So far it has been a week since we have planted a stackload of different seeds. Only a 2 types have actually sprouted and it does worry me a little as we might have dug the seeds too deep or too shallow or maybe even two early. Also we saw birds pecking at the seeds so that is also an issue.
We went on a trip to the nursery today and since we had already taken photos earlier this weekend, we chose not to photograph them, but we bought 8 strawberry plants to go in our garden. There are 4 varieties and two of each variety. They are heirloom varieties so they should taste pretty good and they do liven up our, so far ungrown garden a bit.
Another issue we have is there is grass popping up everywhere in our garden and it is hard to tell what is a weed and what is purposely planted there, so we aren't removing anything until we are sure they are a weed. We will track there process however for early detection in future.
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This is the final edition of our garden plan and everything has been planted except the garlic which gets planted a lot later. A couple things have been moved around like the pumpkin where the pots were as we had excess space. It includes many different varieties
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And this is what has been done so far. We have marked out the seeds with coloured icypole sticks and we have put up the trellis. By the way, the plan was a little childish with spelling and in-jokes so it might not make much sense. Also a pizza plot is growing almost everything you need for a pizza.(Out of the book one magic square by Lolo Houbin)

This is all we have done so far.

Last tip. Make sure birds can't get freshly sown seeds as we had that problem today.

Hello our (so far none) readers. Today has been the last day of winter so all of our planting was done today. More on that will be unveiled next week. I will try to post weekly this year aswell incase someone does eventually decide to read.
Now to the point of this post, we are posting simply to recap and elaborate on what has transpired since last year and before then. First of all, last year we grew everything in pots and that was a reason for a lot of our failures including low amounts of fruit, stumped fruit, diseases, stumped plants, damaged plants, dryed out plants, overwatered plants and so on. Last year we also only managed a small harvest of the following.
4 crystal apple cucumbers.
1 Pepino
2 Half sized rockmelons (tasted very bland)
12 delicious cherry tomatos.
4 strawberries
and quite a few assorted herbs.
This wasn't much considering how much we were growing and it was our general experience of things, our bad skills with handling plants, our reliance on internet sources, the times we planted things although it led to us gaining vital experience. If you are looking at this considering your first garden listen to these tips (I know, you have heard them all before but listen).
1. Plant always in early or mid spring or autumn with most plants or you will not succeed in a large harvest as plants like to die if it gets too hot or cold.
2. If growing in pots either sow directly into a pot size just larger than what the plant needs along with plenty of organic fertiliser. Or alternatively when growing from seedling trays, as soon as the sprouts form there second leaves, transplant *carefully* into a pot that is more spacious than what it actually needs.
3. As much as it might break your hopes or heart, thinning out is neccessary. So many of our plants were held back by simple facts like two rockmelons planted together in an already too small pot will not go down too well as it held ours back.
4. Try grow stuff you enjoy eating and trust what you grow.
5. Finally, don't try grow plants from fruit and vegies you got from the supermarket, they are genetically bred to fail or they are horrible hybrids that taste disusting. Try source your seeds from sites www.diggers.com.au which are heirloom and are guaranteed to be healthy. If that is too much to ask, you can go to bunnings but I personally recommend if you are at bunnings, picking unusual varieties aswell as varieties that promise to be organic.

That is all i have to say about last years efforts and attempts. This year we have a book that helps us a fair bit. It is called 'One Magic Square by Lolo Houbin' and we have followed two of it's "designs" but it is full of useful tips about companion planting and general gardening tips.

We have recently moved house and we have been alocated around 34m^2 in a garden along with an 8m x 1m stretch next to a wall. We also have scattered around the house a pomegranate tree, a lemon tree, an orange tree, a lime tree, a grapefruit tree, a blood orange tree, a passionfruit vine and a goji-berry plant. In our wall garden we have 2 raspberries, 2 blackberries, 2 silvanberries, 13 sunflowers and finally a 2m section where a trellis in bolted to the wall. With this we plan to grown eggplants, tomatoes, beans, hops and cucumber along with small tomatos, chillis and herbs in hanging pots attached to the trellis.

In our large section of the garden, we have set up a rather large trellis system where the side that connects to the fence. The trellis is 1m out from the fence and is held up by 7 large wooden posts. There is a gap between one of the posts for a walkway and the trellis extends to fence at the side. Behind this trellis we have put all of the square white pots with apples in them. These pots, if you can remember, have garlic and applemint in them along with the occasional shallot. Our green pots have become pots for herbs and also testing out ideas for plants before we put them in the ground. We have left them a space in the middle of our garden next to the path. We recently purchased a large quantity of assorted seeds of many varieties that generally include different shapes sizes and colours of tomatos, chillis, pumpkins and so on. So far in our garden we have peas, beans, corn, pop corn, tomato, onions, spring onions, pumpkins, lettuce, rhubarb, celery, siverbeat, mizuna, cabbage, mustard, carrot, radish, potato, nasturtium, cucumber, chilli, capsicum, aubergine/eggplant, chives, basil, rockmelons, a scarlet runner bean, a pepino, oregano, strawberries, watermelons and parsley. There are many varieties of each of these and they generally are in rows. This may seem like a lot and really it is but once the plants are in, they should thrive. We might need to avoid such large monocultures in future as we planted in rows. We will display some pictures next week. If by chance, you are reading this, please show this to other people to make us less reluctant to post as we would like more views and even the occaisonal link would be nice.
More next week, I promise.

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This week the most exciting thing that happened was that these tomatoes were turning red soon and more tomatoes were popping up everywhere.👁 Image

I have been pruning the dead, dying and unwanted branches off the tomato so it is look a slight bit bare at the moment.
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This was our garden on saturday. It was looking good and Arran and I had just finished moving almost all of the plants in small pots out of them. But since we are moving house we had to move everything except the vegetable tubs, the hanging pot and six of our biggest apples to the new house.(photos next weekalthough might be a bit delayed as I am on holiday and Arran is lazy) So as you could imagine, the garden looks pretty bare at them moment.
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When we were moving some of the soil, we found this red worm/centipede and upon further observation, we noticed many more.
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Our apples are doing just great although i recently discovered that two have been infected with aphids.
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the mizuna and sunflower pot is doing great.
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The tomato is going crazy and has already sported a couple flowers.
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And so has the strawberry called "sweety"
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We killed off the olive tree, rocket and rockmelon as they were all failures/finished.
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The red kidney bean is crazy.
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The capsicum growth is steady.
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The pepino has hundreds of flowers
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The chilli, shallots, green tea and garlic pot are doing almost as well although it is hard to see.
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Finally the depressing news this week to our 11 repeat viewers we have. We had to kill every cucurbit we had, except the watermelon of course, because of a small black bug that infested them in the thousands.
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If you look carefully you can see them in these two pictures.
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We have already started trying to fill up the whoels in the vegetable tubs with things like parsley and peppermint along with other spare plants we have lying around. Well that is about it for this week. If any of our 11 repeat visitors want to show this to more people interested in vegie gardens, please do. Now last question, are ants in our soil a bad thing?

This afternoon, we found this on the ground behind trellis where the rockmelons were growing.
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It smelled delicious.
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the seeds were rather small and the melon was originally grown from supermarket seed but we still decided to kepp them so we left them outside to dry.
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this is just for a size comparison
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we cut it up and diced it like a normal rockmelon.
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all in all, it weighed a nice 350g but it was quite weak in flavour, probably because i overwatered it.
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and here is a picture of the pineapple, we forgot to take a picture last week.

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Now isn't that a lovely site in a garden.
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our seed boxes are looking neat.
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1 out of our seven 'gift' apples have sprouted.
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two of the saved test seeds from the crystal apple cucumbers have sprouted and on the remaining pods from the hanging pot project, we have planted some supermarket lentils. they seem to have sprouted.
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The kidney beans have really taken off, so much so that we had to transplant one of them into the vegetable pot where the crystal apple cucumber used to be.
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here it is.
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we moved a couple cun loving plants out to a full sun area, where we thought they would get more sun.
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first there was the capsicum(with some distinct capsicums already showing.) we also transplanted it into a new pot last week but i forgot to mention that.
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the pepino seems to glow in the sun and thats probably very good. today we found some insects eating the pepino so we broke it off and took it inside. it smelled really strong although it didn't taste like much. the seeds weren't developed properly yet so we decided not to have more than a taste.
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The tomato probably hasn't seen full sun in a long while so we were fairly happy to move it here. We also pruned off alot of the side shoots and dead/ dying branches to focus the growth on new fruit and ripening the fruit. we also decided to fertilise everything today with blood and bone. it went well and we hope it will fix up the growth on the plants.👁 Image
i hope that these fruits ripen soon
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finally we have our watermelon, which at the moment, needs as much sun as it can get. it's female flower has dried up and i hope it got pollinated.
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corns doing well
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apples garlic and applemint are all doing great. if you want to see mroe pictures look at the gallery. that goes for just about anything on this blog.
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the strawberry in the vegetable tub is in full bloom with white flowers.
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the sunflower/mizuna plot is really taking off.
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a chili has appeared on this chilli plant although it probably can't support the weight of a full chilli.
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tomatos are doing great and next week they will probably be in the ground, in our new place.
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the growth on the raspberry, parsely and peppermint is crazy.
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the heirloom strawberry, has pink flowers which is a little odd. We also planted some regular mint in the herb plot with the strawberries.
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our cat was stalking us in the garden in the suddenly long grass.
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the cucumber and the rockmelon were both growing nicely.
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and one of the Rouge de Marmande tomatoes is taking off like crazy. i would appreciate it if anyone could tell me whether these were bush or climbing varieties.
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our compost bin pot is filling nicely.
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the rockmelon on the left looks a bit empty without a melon on it.
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the chili i have been growing on my windowsil is getting ready to be put into the blog and garden out of interest.
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If you have noticed, the pinapple has grown massively. above is a picture of the pineapple now,(covered in dead and alive fruit flies) and below is when we first got it.
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big difference, eh?
oh well, that is it for this week, don't be afraid to comment and give us some advice. according to the counter i added i have atleast 12 repeated visitors.

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Guess what watermelon lovers, its wilting a little now that we moved it to the sun although it has plenty of water. It is really confusing. but thats not all...
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THIS APPEARED ON ITS LOWER BRANCH. i am really excited about the watermelon. I am willing to put in money to keep this thing hot enough to produce melon.
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also this week, in the seed section, we planted a couple pumpkin seeds from a commercial pumpkin just to see if it would grow, it hasn't as of yet..
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although are kidney beens from the supermarket are incredibly fast germinators.
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in our long forgotten strawberry box, something finally hatched.
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its almost impossible to see but it is really incredible if it is a strawberry because it would of had to survive a fair while.
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we also planted the hanging pot recipe. it has 2 tiny tim tomatos, like 5 thyme and 1 unsprouted nasturtium seed and one parsley. the pepermint and chives never took off. the chive seeds are probably duds.
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the apple mint is slowly growing and doing almsot nothing. it seems to be growing one of its branches entirely white. i wonder if this is due to the fact that it is varigated.
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The apple is growing side shoots and we hope to make a cutting of them and give them to friends as a gift.
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the pepino is turning a nice gold colour and is extremely close to being ready. it is also rapidly growing.
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the capsicum has a few flowers in bloom.
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a new sunflower was planted amongst the mizuna.
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This has appeared amongst the normal cucumbers on the vegetable tub.
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The shallots have sprouted since we covered them in soil.
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our raspberry, parsley and peppermint have really started to take off with little runners popping up in the soil around the raspberry everywhere.
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We have planted some californian red onions around each of the tomato plants as they are suppos'ed companion plants, we will see hwo this goes.
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and our big cherry tomato plant is doing well although for some reason it is losing a lot of foilage.
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our herb plots is great and the oregano is flowering aswell as the strawberry
a shallot and a garlic have also sprouted next to the ginger, behind the basil.
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The cucumis vegetable pot is doing fairly well although the crystal apples are really suffereing from the coming autumn weather.
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The cucumbers don't stop coming though and the rockmelon that you saw last week is getting bigger.
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In this pot we have a flowering chili, a new garlic and 2 green tea's, one very small sprout and one unsprouted one.
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The rockmelon to the left has fully developed its webbing and it is only a matter of time now.
That is about it for this week.

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This week the hanging pot 'planting recipe' is almost ready to transplant into the hanging pot. Sadly the nasturtium has died for some reason but when it comes time to planting into the hanging pot, i will put another nasturtium seed in the pot.
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This week another lot of plants were planted into seedling tray. from left to right, there are 3 kidney beans from a supermarket packet, 5 of something that i forgot, 16 chives (the seeds seem like they aren't viable as we have planted them a lot of times and they never germinate) and 8 strawberries.
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we still have two unused watersaving pots and one soil bag left over.
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We had to kill off the remaining two crystal apple cucumbers on the trellis as they were spreading powdery mildew and were heavily infected themselves. The soil was actually an ant hive by the end of it.
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the silvanberry is almost fully covering the pot.
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the olive is most certainly dead although by moving the rocket out into the sun, we hope to get it to grow faster with bigger, more edible leaves.
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Since winter is coming and our plants need as much sun as they can get, we moved them back into full sun. although it was painful to carry, it was worth it. The garlic in the apple pots have almost all germinated, waiting on three or four more. The big apple tree has just sprouted 4 new leaves.
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the pepino is looking good and is almost ready to eat.
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soon the capsicum will move into the water saving pots. It is also flowering.
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the mizuna is looking good although something ate the sunflower. probably a bird.
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This vegetable tub is doing well with 1 dead crystal apple 1 living crystal apple, 1 strawberry, 1 rockmelon and two normal cucumbers. This pot doesn't seem to go through water that fast. The cucumbers all have powdery mildew sadly.
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but that doesn't stop the fruit being edible.
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shallots are biding thier time, we suspected this was to due to the fact they were on top of the soil so after we took this photo i covered them in soil.
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The parsley and peppermint have plenty of new growth although the raspberries only have a small amount of growth.
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This cucurbit/cucumis/melonthingy has popped up in the raspberry tub aswell.
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The other vegetable pot is looking greener than ever and it is probably due to the incredibly hot saturday we had.
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on further inspection, we found many cucumbers and rockmelons had formed.
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the tomato is a bit dreary and lots of dead foliage leads me to beleive we should have pruned it to promote growth in the right areas.
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the herb/ carrot and strawberry plot has never looked so green....
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and red.
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we have made our own little compost pot with weeds growing in it. it is sort of experimental but it is interesting.
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the rockmelons are almost formed.
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every corn has a cob.
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the watermelon has very little growing time left and it is very unlikely that we will get a fruit especially since it is in the shade, but i am still hopeful. the olive tree is dead but the rocket is doing great.
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a short overview of our annual part of the garden.
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and now the whole garden. (afternoon shade ruined the photo)

Continued from part 1, can you please read it first.


Week 19

Week after my bday..

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The final dampener on my plans to take pictures the exact same way each week. My brother moves the plants to spare the grass. (It would only die later on when the rain stops, and the heat increases.)

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A pinapple that will soon become a pineapple plant. (After we remove the pinapple that is, but we took our sweat time, leaving the pineapple un appertising.)

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I got a water saving pot for my bday, little do we know it would change the way we do gardening. We transplated the carrot to the pot, planted some typical everyday cucumber, tomato, and radish in the pot. All but one of the Cucumbers, and a small selection of carrots would be removed.

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This picture represents the Ginger, and Avacardo.. Nothing..

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Capsicum, does that which it seems to be good at. Nothing. But that's our fault. Likewise the chilly:
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Dying Apples go with the Green Tea.


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Ah, we also have corn.. Thanks to the cats digging it up, They aren't in the configuration I planted them, they are now suffering because of that.. But I don't care. :P

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Mustard flowers.

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All these small olives made us think that we were in for a treat, however the plant dies soon.

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Interesting result of the Apples. The ones in traditional pots (and in water) compared with the ones in Plastic cups (with less soil holes in the bottom and sitting in water.) The ones in plastic cups are looking a lot greener and healther. No idea why.

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Lettuce is too big for it's cage.

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Big pot ones are doing very well too..

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Other results vary.

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Garlic is growing, but we don't care about that. It's store bought garlic and probably infected.

Week 20
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We planted the pinapple head.. Just broke it off, removed dead leaves, and put it in some soil.. Worked perfectly... It seems to be the only plant that can live in our bathroom too!

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We tried to grow strawberry from seed in a hanging pot... This doesn't work so we endup buying a strawberry plant. Although we have a self watering tray we continue trying to grow from seed.

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Brother went around labeling everything, didn't last a day. Rain destroyed it.

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Although some carrots are starting to look like carrots.

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Brother Heirloom vareity of watermelon. After starting this we were starting to go all heirloom.

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Only thing NOT dying is the green tea.. Although at this point we should have put it in a larger pot..

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Corn trying to look 1960's cool.

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Aformentioned strawberries from seed in selfwatering container. Now our spending is starting to get expensive as we start valuing water saving pots and various other things.

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Olives are starting to grow.

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Not great, not bad.

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Good pot..

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Home made sushi.

Week 21...

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It's starting to get really hot again.. Things in small pots are dying, regardless what we do.. The green tea takes it like a tea though. Apples take it like a fruit..


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Corn loves it though..

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Mustard adapts by loosing a lot of it's leaves.

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Medium sized pots start to struggle. (Btw, pots are on blue tuppa ware lids so they are easier to move.)

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One of the best weeks yet for Apples that are in survivable containers. This should have been replantation/repotting week.. (Remember that.)

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Root are probably intermingled now.. However they weren't diffiult to separate. Even the pairs were separatable.

Week 23.

Week 22 only contained pictures of someone elses garden.. So it's possibly Week 23 -1.. But there are some other inconsitancies.

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Crazy lettuce. That thing you see on the side is a Chilly plant.

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Radish and Tomato visible.

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Probably the last week of good olives.

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NOT WELL.

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We kill off the extra crystal apple cucumber, and the crazy growth kicks in.

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Evidence of drying out japanese tub apples.

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Second Green Tea grows.

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Still a strange disparity between the growth of apple trees (other than pots) otherwise treated the same.

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Getting a little too big. I don't know what inspired me to keep them in these pots. I guess getting larger pots was always on the adgender.

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It should be obvious by now that the green tea, dispite being a slow starter, should not the THIS slow.

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Crystal Apple Cucumber flower... While at this stage it is rare, at a later stage it is all to common.

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Second generation mustard seed! Yay. Plan is to see how mutated they become over time with a very small set of mustard plants.

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Banana^WWatermelon has started growing.

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More Chilly of inactivity.

Week 24...

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No strawberries.

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We decided to scatter everything in the shade. Unfortunately it was the morning shade, which wasn't very.. Good.

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Keep an eye on this one.

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Olive is bigger.

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A weird carrot emerges.

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Apples new leaves are starting to go red.

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Big pot is doing fine.

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Caterpiller starts eating and killing mustard plants.. We took them off and chucked them into the rainwater tank.. But there was a stackload of them, and they appeared out of no where, consistantly.

Week 24.


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Dryness starting to kill grass. Watermelon is doing fine.


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A sort of album cover of some description? Plus, we started moving pots around, to avoid killing grass. Did more harm than good. We noticed that the grass would grow really well around the pots, probably due to shade.

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Loosing it's old leaves. Still a disparity. Maybe it has something to do with the heat collecting ability of the clay pot?

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Cool looking red apple tree. Not a good sign.. We thought it was just genetic variance.

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Crazy cucumber growth.

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Corn looking a bit dry, but green.

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Olive...

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Something is wrong.. But what.

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Following the heat wave and not keeping the plants hydrated. (The tank water was pretty much gone.) We decied to put the dying apple trees in a larger water saving pot.. They actually do seem to save water, we have found that they contained water for a long time.. Anyway. We got square pots to maximize catchment area when it rains and also to provide space for companion plants. We have also planted Chives next to the apple plants (on the right hand side to the water hole.) We then kept our eyes open for apple mint, and heirloom garlic. Which are also apparently companion plants.

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Tomato and the Rocket are growing well. But still now strawberries.

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Despite the heat wave that burnt the leaves of all the other apple trees, larger then 10cm or so.. The apple trees in the large pot still came out without a problem... We are slowly learning our lesson. Next week I was to do the rest of the apple trees.

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Rockmelon overflow.. We had to constantly move it away from other plants. (Notice the grass.)

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What was left of the Mustard, after the heat and Caterpillers... We started on a program of agressively harvesting seeds and killing the plants as they were a pain to look after and didn't look any good, or provide any food.

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Oddly different. Part of the problem with us recognizing problems..

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We started using organic fertilizers. (Or what we think are) To help things grow.. We have no idea if it affected anything other than the chilly and cucumber.

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Pineapple for the sake of it.

Week 27
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We ended up buying a srawberry plant. But we are still trying to grow some fro seed. I suspect they will sit there until the right time of year.

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My brother bought cat grass......... .... ...

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The rockmelon started showing signs of heat stress so we moved them out of the afternoon sun and started to train them up the trellis.

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We obtained some unused Bazil from the Kitchen and planted them, the rocket at tomato is also doing very well.

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We put the rest of the apple trees in puts this week, and put mulch on top to stop the soil from drying out as we didn't have any water left... As you can see the apple trees that got too much sun have lost of their leaves.. Although only one of them doesn't 'grow' again from the roots. (At least the 10cm or bigger ones, the ones about 2-3cm high, when they die they die.) So not all hope is lost, but it doesn't feel like it at this stage.

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Watermelon.. GROW!

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Corn is growing well.. Other types of grass aren't. (Well expect maybe catgrass.)

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Radish should be just about ready now... We leave them inf or a while.. Most of the plants here don't actually grow all that much.

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Carrot Congestion.

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Smaller apple trees replanted, too. But multiple per pot as I don't suspect they will do anything for a while, and it's fairly easy to separate apple trees. Well expect for a twp pairs (one visible) where I couldn't as they had both grown roots into a peice of bark in the commercial soil.

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Green teas together again.

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Cucumber/Chilly starting to take off. No ginger or the like.

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But wait there is Ginger.

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We planted a silvenberry. Didn't have enough soil, so we just put pots in there to take up space.. Pitty we put Crystal apple cucumber... The plants would forever fight in an endless (until removed) mortal combat....

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We got a Papino, it had 3 papinos on it but we ended up damaging most of them...

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Damage example 1.

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But if you look carefully there is hope..

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All but one survive.. (I am pretty sure that this one was one of the survivors... However we can't really confirm that the one that didn't is really dead.)

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Should trash it.. But it's waseful.. Going to find some use.

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We would get a Blood Orange plant but this area seems to have this damn citrus bug.. If anyone knows what it is and how to deal with it.. Please let us know.

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Order.. (Although expensive.. But prices have come down a lot since then.)

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Growing despite being placed indoors.

Week 28...

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We moved the pineapple outside as it was really hot.. (We will have to move it in again this week or next.. I guess.)

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We liked the containers so much, we got 2 more.

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Green tea got fried... Good thing that now it is regrowing again.. But I wasn't happy back then.

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The one at the far bottom left, is the one that hasn't come back to life yet. We are a little worried.

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Ouch..

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And out of the ashes.

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New leaves.

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Since moving rockmelons are doing really well.

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Watermelon on the other hand...

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But like most things, not all hope is lost.

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Elsewhere things are going too well. (Well there is no too well.. But.. Given everything else.)

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Rocket looks like a weed...

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Tomaoto flowers. Turtel Power...

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Chilly grows..

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Something likes sampling the radish..

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Olives look good. But we aren't fighting off birds yet, so they probably aren't ready.

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Grasses

Week 29...
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Yumm


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We thinned out the carrots.. They were crowded.

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Mainly got rid of the smaller ones.

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Tomato flowers.

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Crystal Apple Cucumber.

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Olives are starting to dry up and shrivel... (The species is a brown olive variety.) The leaves are getting hard.. Something is wrong...

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What we suspect is a Capsicum..

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Ginger

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Bees are at it again.

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Dying grass, more hot days... We have moved things like the Ginger completly under the shade of the apple trees. (The commerical planted ones that are on our rental property, and probably yonks old.

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Apples..


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Second lot of strawberries are almost ready.

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The flowers of this variety are quiet pettiet, and not really noticable.

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Pineapple likes the heat.

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Green tea is completely not doing well.

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A lot of the green is just follage from the tree we put it under. However if you were to look at the base you would see a small speck of green. That is a new truck growing from the roots of the plant. Basically I have large enough root-stock for the plant to grow again.

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Nothing stops it now the heat is gone. :)

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Sometimes they grow a collection of mini-leaves until a new base emerges, then the mini leaves die off. (BONZAI)

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Part of the same plant.. Checked the roots.

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The rockmelon plant gave us a SURPRISE ROCKMELON... Like a lot of times with rockmelon plants, rockmelon just appear out of no where.


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Coming back to life.. But it seems to have lost it's momentium..

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Growing pains.. (Doubled in size over days.)

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Both trying so had to survive, but only one will.

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We got male and female flowers...
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Hidden crystal apple cucumber..

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Lonely flower.

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Silvenberry, growing.. This plant is kind of scary.. It has a decent pace to it and it doesn't slow down for vary many reasons.. Also it's a fast plant to take root...

Week 30

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See what I mean about roots. (We are filling that in.)

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Moving the crystal apple cucmber, rockmelon, and anything else, into one of the vegitable pots, to give them more soil and better water control.

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Suppies were fetched by means of Backpack and pushbike.

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Everything looking nice.

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And the trellis finally looking green and used. :)

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Time to depot.

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They needed it.

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Topped up capsicum..

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Still now strawberry, and green tea still in a vegitive state.

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A smaller apple coming back to life.

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Not as advertised...

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Bets are off.

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Emerge.

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Greener..

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Like before.

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Spota melon.

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Cucumber.. Not doing much..



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Doesn't know which direction it should go.. So it goes every...

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Ready strawberries, but we weren't sure, so we wiated..

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Week 31....


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Going to grow a new 'herb recipe' see one of Zelda's post.

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Crazy rocket, and slow Ginger...

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Pepino has been growing really well in the new pot..

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We put the plastic mulch on, it was hard work.. However the plants in the next 3-4 weeks go crazy, I really don't think that they actually need such a cover.

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Oops...
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Mighty rotting sraweberrys rotting on the vine! Ants!

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Green

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Week 32...

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We have _something_ coming.. I don't know if it's capsicum or chilly.. Better photos can be arranged with the purchase of a good camera.

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No idea where that came from..

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Moved Bazil and rocket.

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Another weed to identify..

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Actual cucumber.

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Bazil Flowers.

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It's a dead..

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Looks like a sort of cross between a rockmelon and a water melon... :S Hoping for a muskmelon... Rather then a pig melon..

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Colour of growth.


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Something is growing that is NOT fail!

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Just finished reading..

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Heirloom garlic arrived.. There is no real way to tell it apart from what we buy from the store it seems.

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Ants! (Now with added soullessness..)


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A strong red.

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Pepermint obtained from a friend.. This plant is fun.. Strong smells all around..

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Also got Rasberry

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Flat leave parsley.

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And finally some shallots. All which helped complete the garden.

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In the final vegitable tub we put:

1. Strawberry
2. Cucumber
3. Rockmelon
4. Crystal Apple Cucumber

As they seem to grow a lot better in a larger pot.

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Then with the remaining soil we planted the other plants.

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Better shot of the pepermint.

Week 33..


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Mizuna and Sunflower has sprouted.

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Spikey...

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Possibly an upcoming chilly.

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Apple mint... Smells like a TYPE of mint... Different in it's own way.

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Some Apples are growing a little crazy.. Wondering if I can break of the shoot and grow it in a glass of water...

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Bees seem to like the collected rain water. (It rained, and we needed it. Fires and all.)

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One a week, really...

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Hidden fruit.

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Another crystal apple cucumber flower.

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Can you identify this weed?

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Held back?

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Planted some herbs... Check what my brother says we planted..

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New pot.. It will be it's pernament pot for a while.
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This here is a Sun flower and Mizuna plot...

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And finally I was so happy, my green tea is coming back to life! :P


If you think this is a long read.. I did this all in one sitting... PAINFUL.

Excuse the length of time I has taken me to post this and the length of the post... Max was bugging me to actually make a post, and he wanted me to do a catch up... I didn't want to do a lot of posts.. So here it is.. All in one, all in one sitting. :P Please give it time for the pictures to load.

Welcome to me and my brothers experiments with gardening...
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What inspired us to start Apple Breeding.. I believe it was the combination of:

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• Liking growing things
• Like of things being unique
• Excuse to take pictures
• This book probably has a lot to do with it too: Modern Heuristics: How to solve it
• Spice and Wolf
• Stronghold
• Stronghold 2
• Stronghold Legends
• The fact I needed something healthier to eat during work than doughnuts. :P

Eitherway I started growing them..

Initially we believed that we could do it on the cheap, simply by going to the Reject shop and buying everything we need from there... At first we though this was cheap, but after buying 3x $7 Seedling trays and a $2 packet of soil, the cost started to become obvious, we stopped going to the Reject shop. It was cheaper to get soil from Safeway and Coles.. Although I do admit the seedling trays were cheap for a one off. However only now they are starting to break due to water and sun exposure. (They have become brittle.)
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Initially I didn't take photos. However my brother was going on a 10 week camp, (with internet) and wanted to keep in touch and see the progress of the apples. So I every Saturday, went outside and took photos. Around about the same time one of my friends scaled up his home brewing scheme and started growing hops, so inorder to convince him to take photos of his hops at the various stages, I sent him pictures of my plants for a couple weeks.

However after my brother had returned we continued to take pictures.. The plan had changed, we were no longer taking pictures to keep each other up to date, but we decided we will plot their growth, and make a blog about it.

For a long time the apples did nothing.

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However one fine day, while by brother was away, none the less:

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It hatched... I mean germinated, and sprouted. We dub this week 1 (and all previous weeks, it seems.)
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We also planted mustard:
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And carrot. (No photo.) In plastic cups.. Good place for germination, bad place to grow pernamently....

Basically our whole setup at this point consisted of:

1. 2x Mustard cups
2. 4x Grean Tea in pots
3. 2x Carrot cups
4. 2.5x Seedling trays of Apples
5. 1.5x Seedling tray of mixed/assorted/partitioned commercially bought capsium seeds and some harvested from a safeway bought capsicum.

(Pictures now from so-called week 2, seems to be a couple of chronological mistakes.)
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If you would kindly ignore the apple seeds in the plastic sushi container, and the olive seeds. Those were designed failures/experiments.

Btw, mustard is a quick starter:
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Although the apples took an what felt like impossibly long time before it shed it's seed and showed off it's leaves.
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At this time I was using a Cannon Powershot A200 to take photos, so I got a lot of smudged photos:

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But those aren't important at this stage. (Yes you see a coffee cup, that would soon be filled with soil. :P )



Week 3...


Apples now have semileaves.

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Quite often the apples would be surprisingly visually appealing. Such as they are here, with the green and the red.

More powershot madness:
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Carrots starting to emerge, Mustard continues to amaze us at this stage:
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Week 4.

Here we get a good picture of the seedling trays and their setup.. The chair is pointing West, and the camera East. This was a really good spot as the plants got the Morning Sun.. From the Land Of the Rising Sun.. New Zealand. :P
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The long pot you see, is actually filled with carrot seed.. Or at least _was_, we put it up on the window ledge, but the cats competed with it for space. Pots, being shamefully inanimate, lost, regardless of the lack of prowness, agility and grace of the cat.

Apples still don't quiet look like apple trees yet:
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But they still have a tendency to look cool:
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Some were getting there though:
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At this stage the Day was starting to become longer, so I could start going outside after work and seeing the progress. (IIRC.)

Week 5.

Apples started to get their first real leaves:
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Although what wasn't obvious then was apple trees seem to have several set of leaves depending what part of their life cycle they are up to.

But they started all emerging now:
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Carrot is SLOW. Mustard is craving the light..


Week 6.

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To maximize light for the new apples, we put them on the ground. (The roof was in the way... I guess.)

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Not all are as developed as the previous picture might suggest:

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(I don't know why my brother didn't rotate the pictures when he uploaded them.)


Oh the capsicum went no where:
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We have many nonexisting and existing shots of the Apples like this.. I just don't know where they are.

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Week 7.


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Need Light, eh?

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Most of the apples had developed at least 1 leaf. This was a picture of the least developed. At this stage I was still taking the pictures in the exact same way, as last week, under the impression that I could produce a slide show of their growth.. That wasn't going to happen....

Once again, sorry for the lack of rotation..
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I discovered that Aldi was selling a Olive tree, (cutting...) Since I liked olives, I decided I would get one.. However I would have probably bought more if I did it again. Regardless of the future. (Dun DUN!)

On and the Capsicum did something:
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Week 8...

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Fallen Carrots grew. (Brother tagged it Lettuce but we didn't have any at the time.)

Apples were ready to replant (at least some of them;)
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My excuse could be that they _all_ weren't ready, or we didn't have the equipment.. But it isn't.. We didn't know.


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Did I mention there is going to be a fund opening for getting me a _real_ camera. (The camera I bought later on is just as 'not good.')

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Those things again, that do.. Stuff.


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The equipment that we would soon use to house Lettuce, and mustard, and apple. Those pots should have never of ever been used... Unfortunately.. But what better way to learn than trial and error! :)


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Not much to see here. But it should have been transplanted now..


Week 9..


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Ummm..


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Notice how some haven't grown yet.. One is capsicum, but the others, will grow but not all at the same time.. Possibly seasonal.


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You can see evidence that they are carrots here.



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Mustard makes the most of the new light shone upon it's growth.


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Loosing it's baby leaves, Probably a good time to eat them..

You could help
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...me get a better camera.

Plus the olives now have flowers.. Aldi chose a good time to sell them I guess.

Week 10.

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Green tea, does NOTHING.


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... "" ""


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Mustard Transplanted. More long pots prepared.

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Most are definitely ready to replant now.


Week 11.......
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That olive camera thing.. (Also about this time I wanted a couple of tripods I could keep pernamently mounted outdoors.)


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Dot dot dot.

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Mustard is crazy... When given some space it will take and do all it can.


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Carrot grows..

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Cramped apples, or at least we think so.. Then again, apples do emerge 6 from a core..


Week 12.

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Automatic focus don't fail me now.. (I am so getting a real SLR camera.....)

Everything looks pretty much the same this week.


Week 13...

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Couldn't see the point in watering the green tea, so just put them in gladwrap. Also as evident by the soil bag, we did more potting work this week.

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We repotted all the apples.. Although they suffered transplantation shock, a lot of them survived although the ones that were hardest hit were the ones in the smaller pots. This would later be discovered to be the inability of the pots to keep water in a hot climate.


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Here comes the planting of Chilly and some Lettuce, it never worked out in the pots. Chilly and Capsicum are surprising plants btw,

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Next to my work place, a psuedo-Japanese store opened. (Although it sold dishes that looked like they come from modern japan rather than the generally highclass japanese resturants, which was fun.) So while I ate there trying each dish systematically, I collected the bowls with the intent of planting apples in them. (To save money on pots as we were cheap at this stage.) We even cut holes in the bottom for water drainage, which we believed would work both ways due to osmosis. And a hole on the top, which we beleived would capture water.

In reality, since the hole on top wasn't sealed, water got out, but it was hard to water the plant, and the water drained out of the put in the whole in the bottom. Making the plastic bowl pots dry almost all the time, but the long pots almost pernamently hydated due to good insulation. -_- BIG mistake. Most of these apple trees are now dead because of this, which saddens me a bit,, but I still have a lot left over.

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Life goes on.

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Since most of the Apples were replanted, the capsicum got two dedicated containers. We re-sealed it to keep water in as they apparently didn't need much light as they weren't growing... It was later revealed they need a 'kick start' of fertilizer to get going, and our plots were way too dense.

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Rest of the apples were placed somewhere close to the existing plants, but out of the way. Unfortunately because of our poor sight of how things were, these were not going to do well in this location, the reason... The morning sun was blocked (the best type of sun) and the afternoon was blocked (ok..) but it got midday. So we effectively shortened the day for it.. However there was another nasty surprise... The small pots, and the fast heating concreate, basically cooked everything dry then to death. We had to quickly move our apples while they were still 'living.' Thankfully not too many would die this way.. (The ones that would would die slowly, but that was because of NOT being replanted into a larger pot..)

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The olive tree looked very promising at this stage.
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Week 14.

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We had too many plants to we got one big pot for the left overs, little would we know that the size was the winning part of the pot.. I put many plants in because I heard (on the internet...) That the pot would get too acidic if you put the plants in a pot too big for it.. However for some reason that didn't count for us, or didn't take how we worked into consideration.

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These were a short term to medium term winning combination. Because these held water, we grew them in some form of hybrid hyrdoponics. (The bottom of those cups have a couple holes.) The problem, with this, is that the cups were transparent and we caused damage to the soil and cups.. However we mistook this for root rot, so inorder to 'cure it' we let the water dry out... This was as the days were getting hotter. That alone would cause this to become a short term solution, however until we did that they were going very well.


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Some more survivors, note again, medium sized pots.

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Mixed bag. (Btw, this wasn't as expensive to do as it looked, a lot of these pots were 50c-$1ish.

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Loosers pot.. In the biodegradable, with a little soil, and the traditional coper pots. These shouldn't have been used. I would argue now that these pots were already too small for our plants given the weather.

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Mixed bag.

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Middle view

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Olive on the other hand, got too much water, being in a pot with few water holes and soil that kept water too well.

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We thought that it would be very promising based on the flowers..

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Cats liked their new toilet location (but avoided the lettuce), and to keep in water and out cats, we coverd it. (Exposed for light.)

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Shit happens.. Also crystal apple cucumber started to grow. Faster than the mustard too! We were amazed.


If you check out Zelda64's gallary for this week you will see more pictures, closeups ects.


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Most the capsicum does for a while.


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Nothing much from the shocked apples.

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Week 15...
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It was bright.. Not just an ordinary photography failure. (Still not, not a failure.)

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Lettuce that we thought was capsicum..

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Nothing much.
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Crazy.

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Silence.

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The camera is well used, but not good enough for closeups.

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Bejesus batmat, flowering olives.

Week 16
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I propose this picture is.. OUT OF ORDER. :P

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Mustard is past it's eating stage.


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Oh, we also grew mustard to protect the apple.. Foolish assumption, the relationship would actually be the other way around.

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A green tea sprots.. They are really hard to get started, and keep going.. Looks a bit what it looks like now.. It got burnt on the hotest days of Melbourne, and just managed to stay alive by the greenness of it's stem.



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Actually started growing again. (There are also flowers, I don't know what they are sorry.)

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Still trying to take the photos from the same position for an animation...

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Everthing is still going green at this stage.

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Took Crystal Apple Cucumber out for a walk.. But it doesn't do anything.

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Weird looking weed. Know what it is?

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This plant is somewhat important later on.

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New leaves coming though, and due to rain the plants soil was hydrated.


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Weird alement of the plants in this area. (Know what it is? No I don't believe it's snails.)

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GREAN TEA SMASH.


Week 17.

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Olives should start producing fruit soon.

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Green tea is starting to grow well. Although I suspect it's pot was way to small (being one of the smallest) stopping growth entirely.


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Lettuce in a cup... This was actually ment to have Chilly in it.. (And it does.) Cats must have put lettuce in the tub when they were kicking lettuce around from their 'toilet,'

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Lettuce..

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Apples and mustard.. Apples in these pots stop growing around about now as the tempature starts to kick in.

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Mustard starts flowering.

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We become concerned at the dying apples, so we move them to the lawn, and isolate the dying mustard. (Grass has never looked as green as this again.)

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Crystal Apple Cucumber seems to be doing nothing..
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We suspect new leaves soon.. But it has kind of slowed down the pace.. We suspected this had to do with transplanting them to a pot.. However it was probably due to crowding and lack of fertilizer. We would soon discover we were very lucky in regards to transplantation shock..

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Some apples were very eccentric in the way they were growing. This one for instance, would pile leaves ontop of each other.


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This one requested a better camera, before it would allow a picture to be taken of it.

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These apples would take off and grow as they had a collection of water.

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Another funny one.. Also notice the leaves, they actually change in the various stages of growth, as I have said before. These are different to the orginal, although that was the least surprising change. Also the stem has started to develop.

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The big pot is clearly doing better than the others. Although at this stage we couldn't make such a conclusion. The one in the corner is not dead, it just looks like that.. Probably was shock.

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Ants seemed to like the pots for some reason.. There wasn't many but they were certainly on the pots.

Week 18...


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Despite not being the climate, we planted some Ginger and some avacardo. The aim was to get us some ginger beer...
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We also planted some Garlic because we feared pests. The idea was we just keep this near our Apples.. Also, 3 of the Grean teas haven't grown.

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Dying small pot Apples. They may look hydrated but it's likely they were fast draining and dry.

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Mustard grown for protection starts taking over, as the apples are starved for water. As previoulsy mentioned.

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Some apples start changing color to red. At first we thought this was natural... And rather cool. However later we discovered it was because they weren't getting enough water.



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We bought some larger containers to capture rain water, and put the apples and crystal apple cucumber/rock melon. Also this lucky lettuce got put in there as well. (Later on we would kill it to find a Chilly growing in it's place.)

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Note the ones sharing a large pot are STILL be best growing ones. Even better then the perma-rainwater-hydated ones. (We tried to make it perma, but it was temporary damn rain.)

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Second best, is better than dead though.


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The speculated second leaves make their appearence.


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First signs of an olive.

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Overwelmed.

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Earily flowing mustard has pods now.

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A pesimistic scene.

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Bees had a strange fondness for the crystal apple cucumber's soil. (And the olive tree.) We don't know why.

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Today we harvested this from our yard.
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it was our biggest crystal apple cucumber and we had let it go to seed.
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we had scouped out the hundreds of ready seeds into a bowl
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We then seperated the seeds from the pulp by filling the bowl with water and using a fork as a seive.
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and voila, we had seperated most of the seeds. it only took 15 minutes. We decided to plant some seeds in the seedling tray to test viability. i also planted 4 lots of strawberry seeds just next to them so thatwe could fill up our water saving windowsill box.
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The other plants that are sprouted in the seedling tray are some mizuna and a sunflower to help each other in the same pot. The mizuna will act as ground cover for the sunflower, and since sunflowers grow in france, i have a strong suspicion ours will survive the winter as our winters are still quite hot.
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Here they are (if you look closely) all planted together in the same pot. This happened the next day when the all 3 mizuna had sprouted and was ready to transplant.
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In the other half of the seedling tray( 4 pods above the sunflower and the 8 to the right of it) i have 2 lots of six plants.(2 of the same type in each row). This is for a planting 'recipe' from this book that i decided to try out. (below)
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The recipe involves a small hanging pot (which we have left over from the transplant of the strawberry) some soil and blood and bone, some thyme, peppermint, chives, nasturtium(edible flowering plant), a small variety of tomato to tumble over the edge(our tiny tim seeds that are left over) and some curled parsley. I grew two of each plant just as a precautionn incase of death/disease of one plant. We will probably plant this next week when everything has a fully developed root system.(right now they are just tiny shoots)
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We have forgotten to take the pineapple in, yet again.
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our unknown plant has developed a flower just like a capsicum or chilli.
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and our newly arrived from diggers, variegated applemint has just started growing and is a companion to the apples.
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The capsicum is doing well in its new position with ( what i hope is) a fruit on its way.
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the powdery mildew on the cucumber is receading slightly which is good.
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The strawberry is still producing.
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And we found this on our new vegetable pot .
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we planted three shallots surrounded by some sugar snap peas in these pots. so far the shallots have roots but nothing else.
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our silvan berry seems to grow 5 full size leaves every day as we have measured and each side increases by about 5cm each day.
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today we also went on a relatively large trip to bunnings, buying 4 bags of soil, 4 40cm cubed watersaving pots, and 3 different types of herbs, one strawberry (temptation variety) and a bag of bamboo stakes. This type of expensive trip probably isnt going to happen for a while becasue we need to cut down on the amount we do in the garden on the weekends and ont eh amount we spend.
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we planted the new palnts we bought in our experimental vege tub. I will explain what is in the tub starting from the top left and working across then move down a row and work across. We have cat grass in the very top left just above our old carrots. then we have a new plant of rosemary that we bought follow by some garlic, shallots and some ginger behind the seeding basil. next to the seeding basil we planted some oregano and coriander. Then we finally added the strawberry in the corner and we rasied the soil level of everything. This pretty much buried the cucumber in the middle but oh well it will survive.
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the parsley we got given last week is starting to grow new leaves and lose its old ones.
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the pepermint did lose a lot of leaves but is growing new leaves so we ar egoing ot take the dried black leaves and crush them and keep them in a jar for tea.
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and new leaf growth on the raspberries is very nice as we thought we had lost them.
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we also decided to transplant this water hungry tomato into a water saving pot. Each of the fruits has doubled in size since last week. This new pot for this tomato means we move the three rouge de marmandes up another size in pot to there new ones.
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we also have transplanted the green tea which had a massive root system and seems to have come back to life.
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sadly today we also lost this almost ready pepino fruit when transplanting it into a larger watersaving pot. nwo we only have one fruit remaining which has brilliant purple stripes.
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we can see a clear cob coming in through the corn here and i hope it grows succesfully
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and finally for this week, we staked up the apples,
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watermelon(to the left),
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and the tomato. That is all for this week although i will leave youw ith some tomato pictures.
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(ps: they might be a bit hard to see. try rotating the picture if you really want to see them. We actually have about 30 or 40 on the tree.)

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This week it seems everything is starting to cool down for autumn so we have decided to take the pineapple indoors again as it dies in the cold.
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we also decided to tie up the mysterious plant (strongly suspect its a chilli)
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Here is the capsicum plant where we moved it into the saucer with the crystal apple cucumber(which has a bad case of powdery mildew) so it could get more water while it was flowering(flowers below)
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Now the once beautiful set of strawberries that lay on this bush had grown old and produced a magnificent odour although ants came and ate them so Arran went and threw away all of the strawberries into the compost. now one flower still remains fruiting.
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These two cucumbers have both contracted powedery mildew. We actually picked a cucumber off the left hand side plant and ate it. It was fairly dry and probably was a lot sweeter when it was in its prime. I could tell it wasn't in its prime because half of the seeds were ready so we are leaving the other two cucumbers that are ont eh right vine to go to seed for collection.
especially from this monster(below)
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The vegetable pot we fixed up last week seems to be greener than ever although ants have climbed up the hanging branches and eaten all the pollen so we are picking them up of the ground and we are planing on training them up wooden stakes.
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We transplanted one of the dying cucmbers into a pot full of compost and some random plant has appeared on the side. We also picked the stunted cucumber on the plant although we didn't trust it because it had brown spots all over it and was tiny.
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If you can identify this plant, we would be grateful as it smells wierd like a vegetable and its not a carrot.
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The watermelon has almost made a  full recovery and i am hoping we actually get a real fruit out of it.
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The rockemlon on the left almost has a fully developed skin and is probably not going to grow any bigger although i am hoping it will taste nice. its not quite ready yet though.
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The cherry red tomato plant seems to have had tomato's pop up everywhere and it probably explains why it has been so water hungry (1 litre a day almost)  recently. They are about half the size of cherry tomatos at the moment but will soon grow bigger.
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This is the basil flowering.
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and this is our bush champion, living up to its name.
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pity our olive tree is dying and the leaves break at a touch. We transplanted it from a pot with no drainage to a pot with plenty of drainage hoping that that will help.
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We also decided to put two diseased crystal apples, 1 rockmelon, 2 bush champion cucumbers and a strawberry in the final vegetable tub, just to try acheive the growth the other vegetable tub has had.
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We started off the same with a layer of soil then organic blood and bone.
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and slowly...
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put them in...
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one by one and filled in the gaps with soil. we then threaded them through the grey plastic mulch that came with the pot.
The next day was a watering day so we filled up the tub with 15L which should last the week. We also added some liquid seaweed for an added boost.
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This sneaky cat was caught whacking some of the crystal cucumbers for fun.
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Since today was the first day of autumn and the cool change was just starting to kick in (disregarding the bushfire weather) we decided it was time to plant our organic heirloom early purple garlic we had just ordered from diggers.
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first we has to carefully remove the skin off each clove.
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and then we were left with these so we decided  to start to break them up.
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then we broke them up into the cloves. There were 25 in total.
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our orange cat naturally came to sniff around the garlic (he loves garlic)
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We planted one garlic in the corner of each apple pot and the remaining 5 in this experimental vegetable tub.
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This week we also got given these peppermint plants, a couple rasberry plants, a straight leaf parsley plant, some snap pea seeds, a type of scarlet runner bean seed, 4 shallots and some heirloom bean seeds that had been passed down by this family for years and i feel really privelaged to have been able to aquire them. This was all generously donated to us by one of Arran's friends.
We have so far planted the shalots in three pots surrounded by two snap peas each.
That is all for this week but here is a final picture of what the garden looked like.
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This week we were walking around the garden when we noticed the massive pepino growth it has had.
pictured above: this week
pictured below: 3 weeks ago
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We are planning on using this tub next week to convert all of the heavy water feeding plants to water holding/saving pots using the last vegetable tub. We just fixed this one using the replacement part for the water meter.
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The corn still has it's flower buds and one of them seems to have developed some stringy mass at its halfway point. The olive tree doesn't seem to be looking so well with its leaves curled and all of its olives are dead and black.
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The ginger is leafing outwards and the rocket has produced hundreds of new leaves although we got rid of the seed pods because we don't want it self seeding everywhere.
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We are pretty sure that this random plant we found growing is chilli.
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And finally one of the rouge de marmande tomatos have taken off.
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This apple tree has three different colour leaves and is 50cm tall when placed upright. It is quite amazing because it was badly damaged in the summer heat although it seems to be doing well now.
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Here is just a breif picture of all our apple trees which seem to be growly steadily but slowly at the moment which is a good thing i suppose.
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Now here is the vegetable side of the garden.
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The capsicum growth is incredible and there are new leaves all the way up the plant. I am still confused whether they are annuals or perennials.
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In this photo there aare actually 4 full sized crystal apple cucumbers and we had one in a salad and it was quite dry because it was on the vine too long but it seemed to be sweet so i can't wait until we get some more. We are letting some of these go to seed as they are our best plants so far.
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These cucumbers seem to be diseased and are going white in the leaves so im not so sure about saving them or eating the fruit on the fully diseased vine as the fruit looks quite bad.
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The silvan berry growth is quite incredible and it is going in every direction still although we are training it to grow like a bush.
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The pot from last week seems to be doing very well.
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and our two rockmelons seem to be developing a skin although the bottom of each vine is turning yellow and dying although it has got everything it needs.
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The tomato seems to be wilting a little this week and some bottom leaves are dying so we are going to keep it in a tupperware so it catches more water as it seems to need a lot at the moment.
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We left the strawberries too long and now the whole garden smells really sweet which is nice although they look quite disgusting.
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the standard cucumber is staring to fruit aswell which sort of scares me because the plant is tiny.
That is all for this week.

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