Week 3 - Burgundy

Burgundy.

Where appellations have gone nuts. Where vineyards may be smaller than an acre, or large and owned by many people.

But this is pinot country, and the country is good!

I tasted about 100 barrels on my journey through the promised land, and I now have a huge appreciation of what makes Burgundy tick. I understand how important soil, slope and site are in making wine. I understand that the important thing for Burgundy is grow balanced, disease free grapes in the vineyard and not stuff it up in the winemaking.

Thanks Burgundy, you were great. Stay you.

Pulling Garlic

I love growing garlic. There is something holistic about growing it. It feels like it is the right thing to do. But a few people have asked me what is the point when it is so cheap to buy?

It is so easy.
It taste better than store bought, China grown.
And, it help improves your soil.
In the long run it is free.

Last autumn I planted out several hands of organic purple garlic that I bought from Hill Street.  And this is the result.

The size this year is massive.  And we tried some fresh garlic a few weeks back and it was magical.

The haul was quite big too.  About 100 hands in total.  I left the bulbs in this giant pot for one week to dry off the soil.  Then I sat down with a nail brush and clean off the soil and trimmed the roots.

I plat my garlic into dozens and half dozens.  This year we are also going to try storing some garlic under oil as the last of last years crop did not last us 12 months.  Tips for plating, on each cross over, add one bulb, very close to the crossover.  Make it tight.

This should last us 12 months easy, and some left over for planting next year.  The aim is to be self sufficient in garlic.

First Weekend Garden Club - December

It is the first weekend of the month and the garden is bursting forth with vigour.  The recent rains and warmth has made everything go nuts.  This weekend will see the tomatoes go in and most of the summer vegies.  Need to keep the disease and pests in control (powdery mildew, coddling moth, cabbage moth, pair slug, etc).  I am sick of mowing, need to make more garden.

 New season apples growing

Peas. Start harvesting soon

Tomatoes are going in this weekend.  This bed will be full, 20 plants, all different varieties.

Corn part 1.  Staging the plantings this year to avoid a corn-nami.

Red Nasturtium

Want to participate in the First Weekend Garden Club? Here is how. #firstweekendgardenclub

Apple Tree Pruning - Fail

I have now owned apple trees for 2 seasons worth.  I have no experience with them and have only ever dealt with pruning grapes and a few roses.  So I thought, yep, no problem I can cut, shape, saw, hack.  It should be fine.

Year 1

I successfully cut off all the fruitful buds.  I tried to spur prune it like a vine.

Fail

Year 2

This past winter I tried to cane prune it, like a vine (well, it is my area of expertise).  Flowering is now pretty well under way, you can look at the result for yourself.

Not many flowers. Hmmm

Fail.

Here is close up of one of the branches and the reason for my gross incompetence.

You can see that all the flowers are coming off 2 year old wood.  I never knew.  For grapevines all the fruit is off one year old wood.  Cool, learnt something.

And what happens if you don't prune at all?  This is one of our transplanted youngsters.  

Just full of flowers.

Lesson (well, trial for next winter)

• Prune nothing
• At flower prune off all non flowering shoots

That should fix em.

First Weekend Garden Club - November

It is the first weekend of the month and we are spending a lot of time in the garden.  The warmer weather is finally here and everything has taken off and is going nuts.  There is a massive amount of work on, and spending 2 weeks away on a holiday has not helped.  Here are my favourite photos for this month.  #firstweekendgardenclub

Herbs going nuts. Oregano, Sage (flowering) and Rosemary

Seedlings in the hot house reading for planting or updating to larger pots

Speckled lettuce. Great flavour, bolts least

The Peas marching on

Californian Poppies

May the Peas be With You

Now is a great time to be planting peas.  We are planting ours in the "legume" section of our rotating vegie garden.  We grow our seeds up in paper pots.

The trellising we use is galvanised square mesh with star pickets holding it up.  Each one is about 1.8m tall and 1.2m wide, stacked about 30cm apart.  I hope enough sunlight gets in between.  We used these trellises for tomatoes last year and they are awesome.

The paper pots make transplanting obsolete.  You can plant the whole pot and plant straight in the ground.

The variety of pea is Greenfeast.  We are definitely hoping for a feast of green peas from this lot, 30 odd plants.

These peas lined up for battle remind me of the theme song to the Imperial Stormtroopers.

And here for fun is some floppy disk drives playing that theme.

First Weekend Garden Club - October

Spring is truly here today. We spent an awesome day gardening and I thought a great way to share it would be to upload photos from the garden.  Hey that's new, nobody has done that before.

Well lets do something different.  Lets start up the "First Weekend Garden Club".  Write a post and put up your favourite 5 garden photos taken on the first weekend of every month.  A great way to document your garden, and see what everyone else is up to.  We can link it with twitter hash tag #1stWeekendGardenClub.

My Post

October

Fat Bastard Asparagus

Garlic Grove

Tomato Bed, pre planting, post cover crop

Apple Blossom

Pear Blossom

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